Former jail employee and girlfriend of escaped New Orleans inmate arrested in connection with case
NEW ORLEANS (WGNO) — Officials with the U.S. Marshals have announced the arrest of a woman in connection to the May breakout at the Orleans Parish jail in New Orleans.
U.S. Marshals officials said Darriana Burton, 28, was arrested in New Orleans on Monday, June 9. She had been wanted on a warrant for conspiracy to commit simple escape, a felony, from the Louisiana Attorney General's Office.
Burton is a former jail employee and the girlfriend of Derrick Groves, one of two inmates who is still at large after the escape, the Associated Press reported. The other at-large escapee has been identified as Antoine Massey.
Groves, Massey, and eight other inmates escaped from the Orleans Parish Prison on May 16 by yanking open a faulty cell door, removing a toilet, crawling through a hole, and scaling a barbed wire fence in the early morning hours when a lone guard left to get food.
Two days before the escape, Groves made a FaceTime video call to Burton using a jail-issued iPad, authorities said. During that call, she helped him speak with a man whom police did not identify. The conversation was 'intentionally vague' and appeared to coordinate communication on other, unmonitored lines, according to a police affidavit for Burton's arrest.
The exchange showed Burton's direct role in helping with Groves' escape, police said in the arrest affidavit.
Burton and Groves 'were in an on-again, off-again relationship for three years,' dating back to the time when she was still working in the jail, authorities said.
Burton began working at the jail in 2022, but was fired after being 'arrested and charged for bringing contraband into the jail and malfeasance in office in 2023,' the attorney general's office explained. The attorney general's office reported that the Orleans Parish District Attorney's Office refused the charges in 2024.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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