Danilo Cavalcante, the escaped Philadelphia prisoner, was finally captured on Sept. 14. Cavalcante was caught after a heat-censoring aircraft discovered him and a law-enforcement dog tracked him down. He escaped prison on Aug. 31 by “crab walking” up two narrow walls. He was originally imprisoned for stabbing his former girlfriend, Deborah Brandāo, to death. He did this in order to stop her from telling the police that he was wanted for a 2017 killing in Brazil.
There was a manhunt underway for 14 days after his jailbreak. During his time on the run, he managed to do a lot of damage towards numerous communities. He broke into homes, stole a truck from a dairy farm, appeared at previous friends’ doors, and took a rifle from an open garage. During this time, two schools in the proximity of the convict on the loose closed down. Officials confirmed that they had seven sightings of him during the manhunt. The tactics he used were very simple but hard for the investigators to figure out. The unbearably hot temperatures during the search did not make it any easier.
Cavalcante drank from the streams and covered up his human waste with leaves and dirt. He would sleep during the day and trudge through the woods at night. Throughout this tough way of living, he mentioned to officials that he thought about surrendering. Towards the end of the search, a recording of Cavalcante’s mother played out of helicopters over the search areas asking him to peacefully surrender in Portuguese.