A former small town police chief escaped on Sunday from an Arkansas prison where he was serving decades for rape and murder.
Grant Hardin, 56, escaped from the North Central Unit in Calico Rock Sunday afternoon, the Stone County Sheriff’s Office said.
Hardin received a 30-year prison sentence in 2017 for first-degree murder and had been in prison since then. He managed to escape while wearing a uniform similar to those worn by corrections department staff, according to the authorities.
In February 2017, Hardin fatally shot an employee of Gateway water in the head and later pleaded guilty to the crime. Eight months after this incident, in February 2018, Hardin was linked through DNA evidence to a rape case from 1997 involving a teacher at Frank Tillery Elementary School. The assault occurred on a Sunday morning while the teacher was at the school preparing her lesson plan for the upcoming week.
She left her classroom to use the bathroom and encountered Hardin, armed with a gun, who raped her in the bathroom and again back in the classroom.
He pleaded guilty to the rape after the DNA match and was sentenced to 50 years in prison, the Associated Press said.
Prior to these events, Hardin served briefly as the police chief of Gateway for approximately four months at the beginning of 2016. News reports indicate that he had previously worked as a police officer in Eureka Springs during the mid-1990s but resigned from his position after facing allegations of dishonesty in a police report. Additionally, he held roles as a Benton County constable during two separate periods, from 2009 to 2010 and then again from 2013 to 2014. He also worked as a corrections officer in Fayetteville at some point.
