Guard: Partner’s killing ‘cold blooded’
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“It was just a cold-blooded, ‘Shoot him.’ And pow,” Larry “Porky” Harris told The Associated Press in a telephone interview from his home in Petros, about 40 miles west of Knoxville.
Harris has been on administrative leave since Tuesday when inmate George Hyatte escaped from the Roane County Courthouse with the help of his wife, a former prison nurse.
Authorities say the corrections officers did everything by the book, except wear their bulletproof vests.
Four or five years ago, the transportation guards at Brushy Mountain Correctional Complex received three large-size vests that were impossibly bulky, Harris said.
They were directed to wear them whenever they felt at risk, but Harris said the vests were so long they cut into his neck when he drives and he can’t buckle his pants across them.
“We tried wearing them. We tried for quite awhile,” he said. “We just couldn’t wear them, so we just got out of wearing them.”
A month ago, Brushy Mountain supervisors put in a procurement order to outfit the guards with personally sized vests. The guards are still waiting to be measured, Harris said.
But Harris said it probably didn’t make any difference Tuesday.
“If he’d had a vest, she could have shot him in the head just as easy,” said Harris, who fired back for the first time in his 29 years as a corrections officer.
Jennifer Hyatte, who was wounded in the exchange, and George Hyatte surrendered without a fight Wednesday at a motel in Columbus, Ohio. They were to face an extradition hearing Friday to return them to Tennessee.
Harris, 53, and Morgan, 56, got to know the prisoners they shuttled from prison to court, and they tried to treat them with respect, Harris said.
“You know the whole time we had hauled him, we had never had a problem out of him,” Harris said of Hyatte. “He had always been polite to us. And that day, especially, Cotton, who was always nice to the inmates, … was extremely nice to him.”
Just before the escape, Hyatte appeared in court to enter a plea deal to a convenience store holdup that added six years to the 35-year sentence he already was serving for a long history of robberies and related crimes.
“His eyes were watering up and Cotton was telling him, ‘Well, George, you’ve done the best you can do under the circumstances. You’ve got the best deal that you could,'” Harris recalled.
Jennifer Hyatte left the courtroom, and the guards didn’t see her again until they walked her shackled and handcuffed husband to the prison van. She approached Morgan from behind with a gun. Her Ford Explorer getaway car was parked nearby.
Harris said he didn’t notice her until George Hyatte shouted, “Shoot! Shoot him!”
“She didn’t say, ‘Hand over your gun, turn him loose and I won’t shoot’ or nothing like that,” Harris said. “I’d say her intention was to shoot both of us and leave. That was her intention.
Harris said she shot at his partner once, and then started shooting at him.
“I can’t say how many (shots), but several,” he said.