Murillo Responds to Escapee Inmates COVID Claims

Michael Faux and Erwin Lanza were the last to be captured from twenty-eight inmates who escaped from the Belize Central Prison in October 2020. The men were caught and returned to jail over the weekend and appeared before Senior Magistrate Aretha Ford on Tuesday where they were charged and sentenced additionally for their escape. In appearing before the court, Faux who is serving a life sentence for murder, told the court that he escaped because Prison Director Virgilio Murillo was planning to expose inmates to the COVID-19 virus.  Today, we got a reaction from C.E.O. Murillo.

Virgilio Murillo

Virgilio Murillo, C.E.O., Kolbe Foundation

“I hate to let it seem as though I am on trial now because of comments made by escaped prisoners.  Escaped prisoners are a serious risk to the public and I think the focus should always be to try and get them back into custody because they were sent to prison in the first place for being a danger to the society and for doing things that they should not have done. I don’t want to really and truly get into a back and forth over what I practice around here or what we practice around here because whatever they mentioned in court is certainly to try and bail themselves out of the jam that they found themselves in.  The prison is a responsible prison and we will not ever do things that go contrary to normal procedures.  Let’s face it, you guys are aware that we has an explosion of COVID-19 in this prison and in very short order we had brought that under control after a twenty-one day lockdown which they never wanted.  You know that we brought it back down to six after the explosion.  So that is what I can say as it relates to that.  I want to remind the public that we need to understand who these last two inmates were.  I am saying to them that even if they were wrongfully convicted escaping from the prison is not the solution because I think all of that they tried to play out.  This is not the first time Faux has escaped from the prison, so that shouldn’t be any surprise to the public, he was in the news before.”