Officials have had all kinds of difficulty keeping inmates in the St. Louis Workhouse locked up. But Lorenzo Pollard didn’t help matters much when he fought off more than a dozen guards with self-made nunchucks.
Escaping from the Workhouse has become somewhat of an art at the medium-security jail on the north waterfront, where the city’s corrections commissioner was suspended literally just a few hours before Pollard debuted nunchucks he made from prison-issue bed sheets and a chair from his cell. While other inmates have proven a bit less dramatic in the multiple escapes in the last few years, Pollard had a tad more flair.
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The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports that Pollard, who was doing time for theft, trespassing, property damage and—get this—resisting arrest, whipped out the contraption when guards tried to lead him to the shower area after 8 p.m. on Friday. He was able to scale to the second level of cells while brandishing the makeshift weapon. Guards called for backup and while about a dozen guards tried to corral him, he smashed through glass blocks, shimmied out of his newly created escape hatch and then got past two razor- and barbed-wire fences while police dogs and helicopters scoured the area.
One of the main reasons that Gene Stubblefied was suspended from his corrections post was because of a slew of recent escapes by prisoners, says Mayor Francis Slay on his city blog. “Keeping the prisoners inside the jails is the barest minimum requirement, and it has not been met,” he wrote.
Of course, Pollard’s freedom via nunchucks was relatively short lived, as he was captured on Sunday. Earlier escapes also included bedsheets, this time used in Rapunzel-like efficiency, as two inmates repelled down the side of a building with the sheets. What will these guys come up with next?
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Tim Newcomb is a contributor for TIME. Find him on Twitter at @tdnewcomb. You can also continue the discussion on TIME’s Facebook page and on Twitter at @TIME.