Life on the run was just the latest twist in an escaped inmate’s saga

When Jason Williams, the district attorney for New Orleans, saw the videos, he instantly recognized one of the escapees: Derrick Groves. He had personally prosecuted Groves for a shooting on Mardi Gras in 2018 that killed two men and injured two others.

At the time of their escape, the 10 men were facing an array of violent charges. Some had lengthy histories of run-ins with the law. One had earned the nickname Houdini for having escaped from detention at least twice before.

Still, Groves stood out. He had already been convicted of four killings, including two unrelated to the Mardi Gras attack. He had been waiting for months for a sentencing hearing to confirm what he already knew: At 27, he would be spending the rest of his life in prison.

As Williams saw it, Groves had not only run from the jail, but from an otherwise certain fate.

“I just see the desperation there,” Williams said.

For some of the men, freedom was fleeting. Three were found that day within a few miles of the jail. One made it a little over a week and 80 miles to Baton Rouge, and two more were picked up together in Huntsville, Texas — roughly 375 miles away.

About a month in, Houdini started posting videos on social media declaring his innocence. He was captured soon after.

By October, just one was still on the run: Derrick Groves.

Before his escape, Groves’ trajectory through the criminal justice system had been punctuated by a tossed conviction, mistrials and personal betrayals.

The Orleans Justice Center, as the jail is officially known, had been a constant through most of it, starting when Groves was a teenager and essentially serving as his home for much of his adult life. Inside, he had found his father after years of separation, getting to know him again while both bided their time as inmates. He also apparently found romance, developing a relationship with a woman who had worked in the jail.

Groves had also been stabbed inside the facility on three separate occasions, his aunt told a local television station after the escape. And he had been charged with assaulting a corrections officer.

Some officials have claimed that if Groves was not the mastermind, then he was certainly a major contributor to pulling off the escape, given his extensive history inside the jail and connections outside of it. He and the others had help inside and outside the jail, including from the former jail employee who was, according to investigators, Groves’ on-again, off-again girlfriend. A maintenance worker has also been criminally charged, accused of shutting off the water so the toilet could be removed from the wall.

But officials have acknowledged that the inmates were arguably abetted by the facility and its substantial shortcomings: unsupervised inmates. Faulty locks. Broken cameras.

“We are operating with outdated surveillance, aging infrastructure, blind spots in supervision and critical staffing shortages,” Susan Hutson, who oversees the jail as sheriff, said at a City Council meeting soon after the escape, arguing the jail had been deprived of appropriate funding. “And now, the consequences are undeniable.”

Groves being out in the world was one of them.

This account is based on interviews with law enforcement officials, lawyers who have represented Groves and watchdogs who monitor jail conditions, among others, as well as a review of court documents going back more than a decade.

Groves had grown up in the Lower Ninth Ward, a neighborhood ravaged by poverty, violence and Hurricane Katrina, where he was known by his nickname, Woo. He dropped out of high school in ninth grade and dealt heroin.

In 2014, he was accused of shooting his godfather during a robbery attempt and booked at the jail on a charge of attempted second-degree murder. He was 17.

Inside the jail, he encountered his father, Derrick Ambo. They had not seen each other since Groves was 9, and even then his father had been a distant figure.

Their shared confinement allowed them to rekindle a connection.

But when Groves went on trial in 2017, he learned that prosecutors had a new witness: Ambo would testify against his son.

Ambo told the jury that Groves had confided in him, admitting his guilt.

The prosecution’s case was anything but solid. Groves’ godfather was killed in another shooting a year later, but before he died, he made a statement declaring that his godson had not been the shooter in 2014.

Ambo’s testimony still had the potential to be damning. Tom Shlosman, a lawyer for Groves, said he had never seen a parent testify against his or her child until then nor since.

Yet Ambo, who is no longer incarcerated and did not respond to messages seeking comment, struggled to answer seemingly simple questions about his son under cross-examination — When was his birthday? Where did he go to school?

Jurors were not convinced. Groves was acquitted.

But not even two years later, he would be back in jail, facing the prospect of spending the rest of his life incarcerated.

A reputed heroin dealer hired Groves and another man to kill the person he believed was responsible for his son’s death, investigators said.

On the night of Feb. 13, 2018, as parades and parties filled New Orleans for Fat Tuesday, the pair unleashed a barrage of semiautomatic gunfire on a celebration in the Lower Ninth Ward. Two men were killed, and two others were critically injured. The target was not one of them.

Later, Groves posted a video of himself rapping about homicide. Police took it as an admission of guilt.

At trial in 2019, two jurors were persuaded by his defense and found him not guilty. But at the time in Louisiana, that was not enough to avoid a conviction.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2020 that convictions based on verdicts that were not unanimous were unconstitutional. A new trial for Groves was ordered.

While the second trial was underway, a juror admitted to reading news coverage of the case. The judge declared a mistrial. Five months later, prosecutors mounted the case again. But this time, jurors deadlocked. Another mistrial.

Williams, the elected district attorney, decided to prosecute the fourth trial himself.

“This wasn’t a shootout between two people who were at odds,” he said, recounting his message to jurors. “This was an ambush of a big family barbecue.”

They voted unanimously to convict.

Groves’ sentencing was originally slated for Dec. 5, 2024. But that was pushed back for various reasons.

Groves waited at the jail.

If Groves’ escape represented one kind of failure of the criminal justice system in New Orleans, his family had long ago been caught up in another. A crooked police officer had ordered the killing of Groves’ grandmother, Kim Groves, in the 1990s — a crime that shocked the city and exposed the depths of corruption within the New Orleans Police Department.

In 1994, Kim Groves, a 32-year-old mother of three, saw police officers beating a teenage boy outside of a convenience store. She recognized one of the officers, Len Davis. She had attended security guard training with him.

She reported the beating to the Police Department’s internal affairs division. Within a few hours, Davis, who was already under federal investigation for corruption, was recorded on a wiretap describing Groves in detail to a drug dealer he was associated with.

The next night, Groves was shot in the head.

The wiretap picked up Davis celebrating her killing.

The experience forever changed the family’s impressions of law enforcement. “The same people I called to help save my mother were the ones who killed my mother,” Jasmine Groves, one of Kim Groves’ daughters, wrote in a recollection published by the American Civil Liberties Union of Louisiana.

Neither Jasmine Groves nor Derrick Groves’ mother, Stephanie Groves, returned messages seeking comment.

Two days before the escape, Derrick Groves was allowed to place calls to Darriana Burton, his girlfriend. In one video call, Burton held another device up to her camera, enabling Groves to speak with a man whose identity was unclear.

They spoke in cryptic terms, aware that the calls were being recorded. But the man implored Groves to not go through with what he had planned.

It would be a “bad move,” the man said, warning that a search was sure to follow.

Groves was not deterred.

The search came as predicted, involving local, state and federal law enforcement. People fearful of retribution from Groves fled their homes, even the city.

The day-to-day existence of a fugitive is a fragile one. One wrong step, or a friend or relative deciding that their loyalty to him was worth less than the $50,000 reward, and Groves would be on his way to the infamous state prison known as Angola. “He’s going to have to do everything right — every day, every minute,” Williams, the prosecutor, said.

Then, after months of tips that went nowhere, investigators received a promising lead.

The house on Honeysuckle Lane looks like many of the others on the block, a spare redbrick ranch with a generous yard and gentle hills. It is in Atlanta, 466 miles from the Orleans Justice Center.

On Oct. 8, local police and federal marshals swarmed the house, fired tear gas canisters into it and deployed trained dogs. There he was, shirtless in a crawl space: Derrick Groves.

Soon, he would be headed back to Louisiana, facing new charges related to the escape in addition to his expected life sentence.

But with his hands cuffed and legs shackled, his fate having caught up with him, Groves looked defiant. Atlanta police recorded video of him being loaded into a vehicle. He glanced at the camera, kissed the air and smiled.

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