By Adia Miller

In 2021, Danelo Cavalcante was arrested and later sentenced for stabbing his girlfriend to death in front of her two young children, allegedly for threatening to tell the police about an open warrant for his arrest in Brazil for a murder charge.

Released surveillance footage shows the inmate scaling the walls of the prison August 31 during his exercise time before moving along the roof to outside the prison fences.

Cavalcante was spotted on numerous security cameras, but most notably was seen breaking into a Pennsylvania man’s home in order to steal food from the refrigerator, fleeing before the police arrived.

At the time of his escape, police issued a federal warrant for his arrest in case he tried to flee the state as well as infrared drones and search dogs.

Major Lt. George Bivins of the Pennsylvania State Police Department said it was their hope that the pressure applied to Cavalcante would bring him out into the open. “We squeezed him hard over a period of days, and he’s feeling the pressure,” Bivins said in a news conference.

Meanwhile, Cavalcante’s mother recorded a message urging her son to “surrender peacefully” before the situation goes any further. The message was broadcasted via police helicopters and vehicles within a perimeter the police believed the convict must have been in.

On September 12, CNN released photos of Cavalcante stealing a gun from a man’s garage.

September 13, the BBC reported that the Pennsylvania police captured Cavalcante and took him into custody. A police aircraft picked up his heat signature, spurring the police to surround the wooded area in which he was hidden.

Cavalcante received minimal injuries including a bite from a police dog and a laceration to the head. Despite his possession of a stolen gun, no one else was harmed in the capture.

Last May, two Lima, Ohio, inmates tried to make a similar escape,  which resulted in the death of one and the recapture of the other. As a Center for Naval Analysis senior research scientist said during an NPR interview, more than ninety-percent of escaped convicts end up being recaptured and returned to prison.