A Prince George Regional Correctional Centre inmate has earned 30 months behind bars for becoming the first escapee in the facility's history.
Prince George provincial court judge Michael Gray issued the term to Timothy Shawn Preddy, 45, on Monday for an Aug. 2, 2009 jailbreak, committed on Preddy's birthday.
Preddy was on the lam for nearly six weeks before he was apprehended in Connaught Hill Park.
Authorities have been tightlipped about how he made his getaway, but judging by what a former inmate told The Citizen under condition of anonymity late last year, it took some planning and help.
On the night of the escape, Preddy's bed was stuffed to look like he was sleeping in his cell when in fact he had hid away in a utility room with the makeshift rope made up of bed sheets and blankets just prior to lockdown.
When the coast was clear, he went upstairs to a second level, tied the rope to a railing, broke a window with a piece of porcelain he broke off a toilet, threw the rope out and made his descent.
Once he got down the wall, Preddy made his way to a lower roof from where he was able to take a 15-foot jump and was then reach Highway 16 where a driver was waiting to take him away.
Once caught, Preddy was put in segregation where it's two to a room, they get out for only a half-hour a day and they get their food on paper plates.
It's the first escape from the PGRCC facility since it was built in 1996 although several inmates have walked away from work gangs and in 2000, seven illegal migrants from China bolted while working in the kitchen of the old jail at PGRCC, about a month after, one other scaled a fence in the exercise area that lacked barbed wire at the top.
They were among the 257 who were detained at the jail while awaiting extradition hearings. About 600 illegal migrants had shown up off Vancouver Island on four boats in summer 1999.
Preddy was in PGRCC awaiting trial, now underway in Valemount provincial court, on four charges of forcible confinement and two each of aggravated assault, assault with a weapon and assault causing bodily harm.
The charges stem from a Sept. 2008 incident in which police allege a woman was found running down Fifth Avenue in Valemount with her hands tied behind her back and led them to a motorhome where a second woman, whose hands were also bound by an electrical cord.
Police said at the time the three were known to each other and had been living together in the motorhome for some time prior to the incident.
