The apparent escape plan was discovered on July 10 when the men were found in a cell with a large hole in the wall, cinderblock debris on the floor, a rope fashioned from bed sheets and a metal tool used to make the hole, according to Warren County Prosecutor David Fornshell.
The hole in the cinder block wall measured 15-by-12-inches, and the bedsheet rope measured about 20 feet.
“The metal we suspect was used to make the hole appeared to be from a bunk bed or a desk,” Fornshell said. “They didn’t get anywhere, but that was the evidence we found that resulted in the charges.”
Bonaparte is serving a life sentence with the possibility of parole after 30 years for a double murder in Springfield in 2018. Millerton-Hart is serving a four-year prison term for felonious assault and having weapons under disability for crimes committed in Montgomery County in 2019, according to the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction.
Fornshell said the last time the office handled a similar escape case from Warren Correctional or LCI, both located in Warren County, was that of Casey Pigge.
Pigge was serving a 30-years-to-life prison term for murder at LCI in February 2016 when he beat to death Luther Wade, of Springfield, with a concrete block from the cell wall while the two were housed together. After the murder, officials found a hole in the wall between two high-security cells so large that Pigge regularly shimmied through it so he could play cards with the prisoners next door.
Fornshell said after the Pigge incident, the prison reinforced the cinder block walls.
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