April 1967 Iberia Parish
I remember the day Roy Mejia escaped from the East Baton Rouge Parish jail. Or should I say night. It was an amazing jail break, the sort where you have to grudgingly give him a ‘well done,’ the same way you marvel at an illusion conjured up by a good magician.
Mejia had squeezed through a ventilation duct just 18 inches square in his cell and ferreted his way to freedom. He wasn’t a big man, only five foot something, swarthy, with creases that looked like well-worn leather (looking at his mug shot) – a Cajun swamp rat who knew the below sea level parts of south Louisiana better than anyone.
As I remember, Mejia had murdered a woman and her three children in a trailer in Berwick, St Mary’s Parish, and was first captured and jailed in Baton Rouge.
East Baton Rouge Parish deputies dutifully showed me the square footage of the jail and the opening where he squeezed through. They expressed amazement at how he did it, but stressed he was considered to be dangerous.
But the adventure of the Mejia escape for me came when I got an invitation to go up with the “Flying Sheriff of St Mary’s Parish” Chester Baudoin as part of the aerial manhunt for Mejia.
The Sheriff had his own single engine plane, and knowledge of the wetlands where it was believed Mejia had eloped.
I met the sheriff at the downtown airport in Baton Rouge, a wide expanse of green that even in the Sixties made developers drool, for, at the time, it was right across from a major road with a shopping center and bordered by a residential area on three sides. We exchanged pleasantries, did a short interview about where we were going, and then he cranked the plane’s engine over, revved it, and up we went, floating over the houses, across the Mississippi River, until our speed changed the landscape. In a matter of minutes, we were over swamp.
Sheriff Baudoin was a talker and he liked to use his hands – both hands. As we crept across the wetlands below, the Sheriff would let go of the yoke to make his points about the modus operandi and where he might be hiding, causing nervous reactions from me.
I remember asking how you could get a good fix on a man small enough to get through an 18-inch opening flying at 1000 feet. The sheriff allowed it was a good question, then proceeded to push the yoke forward sending us into a dive toward certain death in the brown brush and wet spots of the scenery below, only to pull up about 50 feet short, levelling off and dipping a wing to give me a better view. I could see very well as my eyes were extended from their sockets to gather all available light in what, I was certain, was a one-way trip to eternal darkness.
“Now ya see them reeds and grasses there?”
Since I was practically being dumped into them, I could, and mumbled a one syllable sound.
“A man can get inside them and never be seen.”
He dipped the other wing, causing me to rearrange my death grips on the plane’s interior.
“You ain’t gonna see no footprints, but there are signs to watch fer. You cain’t cross this swamp without leavin’ some sort of trail.”
This was the sheriff’s way of communicating with the ‘boy’ reporter, who was a Yankee to boot.
Let it be noted that I did not scream. Maybe it was just that my throat was so constricted that it wouldn’t come out, but my body language, the bulging eyes, tight grips on the instrument panel, and high-pitched mumbled agreements, gave away my fear. I’m certain that my fingerprints are still embossed in the cockpit panels that I white-knuckled during my initiation flight.
We came back empty-handed, although how we were going catch him from an airplane I couldn’t explain. Sheriff Baudoin would have handled it.
Ten days later, two Wildlife Enforcements Agents caught up with Mejia near Avery Island. He was sent to Angola Penitentiary to be executed, but the death penalty was later declared unconstitutional.