Kevin Kot, after watching Evans run by his car and head for the middle of the bridge, immediately dialed 911 from his cell phone. The four marshals, realizing what Evans had done, stood by the side of Kot’s car staring over the side of the bridge.
Holy shit.
“I’m on the Troy-Menands Bridge…,” Kot said hurriedly, “lawmen have an escaped prisoner who went over the side of the bridge.”
“You’re where?” the startled dispatcher asked. “Can you repeat that?”
Looking at the marshals, Kot couldn’t understand why they were so calm. There was a boat heading upriver toward the exact spot where Evans had jumped. The marshals weren’t dashing for the lower part of the bridge or drawing their weapons.
“I thought it was some master plan,” Kot said later. “Your mind does crazy things. I saw the boat, [Evans] had jumped, and I was thinking…‘They’re just going to let him get away?’”
At 11:07 A.M., Jo Rehm was still on the phone with her daughter. During the conversation, Jo heard a commotion going on outside her home and told her daughter to hang on for a moment. “I’ll be right back.”
Jo walked out her front door, which basically overlooked the Troy-Menands Bridge, and heard what sounded to her like “thousands” of sirens blaring and wailing and heading for the bridge.
“I’ll call you back later,” she told her daughter in a whisper. “I have to go.”
A minute later, as Jo stood near her garden, a helicopter came sweeping over her house so close, she remembered later, she felt as if she could have reached up and grabbed hold of it.
Standing, looking toward the bridge, she placed her hands over her mouth and started crying.
Chaos reigned supreme back at the bridge as cops, fire trucks, U.S. Marshals, local and state police, countless other law enforcement, rescue personnel and media rushed to the scene: Gary Evans had escaped. He’s on the loose.
Down below the bridge, near the Troy side of the banks of the Hudson, Evans lay in about twelve inches of water, approximately ten feet from shore.
While Horton was meeting with Nancy Lynn Ferrini, discussing the Tim Rysedorph murder, his pager went off. 911, it said on the screen—which meant big trouble.
“Excuse me one minute, Nancy,” Horton said. At that moment, the phones in the DA’s office began screaming. People started shuffling about, huddling in corners, talking, scrambling around as if the governor had called an air raid.
Horton found an empty room and called Troop G. Within moments, he had administrative Bureau senior investigator John Caulfield on the phone.
“What’s up?”
“As far as I know,” John said, “Gary is…”
I fucking knew it! Horton thought.
“What the hell happened?”
“Well, apparently, he escaped and jumped off the Troy-Menands Bridge.”
Horton dropped the phone and ran toward the door. Nancy Lynn asked if she could go with him.
“Yeah, but let’s go right now!”
Gary Evans, his face bloodied from an incredible sixty-two-foot fall, lay faceup and still as any one of the thousands of stones in the water around him.
He was dead.
Oddly, he had two sets of handcuffs attached to his hands: one connecting both hands around his back; and a second pair connected to one wrist, the other end dangling. His legs were still shackled together.
The first person on the scene was one of the marshals. He had walked over, dragged Evans out of the water and flipped him over. Just then, a local Troy officer appeared from the wooded area near the bank of the river.
“Give me your handcuffs,” the marshal yelled up to the cop.
The cop then tossed his set of cuffs down to the marshal and ran back up to an area directly underneath the bridge to direct the onslaught of vehicles arriving on the scene.
After cuffing Evans, the marshal stood and looked at him. There was blood streaking down the side of his mouth and nose. Several of his teeth had been knocked out from the fall. His eyes were open. There was a large gash on the right side of his head that had been made by a piece of rebar sticking out of the water where he had landed. Quite bizarrely, Evans’s right hand was frozen in a position of “fuck you” his middle finger sticking straight up with his other fingers curled down. In a way, he had done exactly what he had told Horton he would do: go down saying “fuck you” to the world.
By the time Horton arrived on the scene, there must have been, he later said, “fifty to sixty law enforcement vehicles parked near the immediate area.”
“There were Troy, Albany County, Colonie, state police, along with cops I had never seen before, when I got there. It was a circus-type atmosphere. Even sergeants with desk jobs who hadn’t been on the road in years were wandering around. Everyone wanted to touch Gary Evans. I saw troopers assigned to the Police Academy roaming around and I thought, ‘What the hell is this?’”
The area where Evans had landed was near an old oil-refining plant. There were rusted and empty oil tanks and train tracks separating the river from the road. A chain-link fence kept the media far enough back so they couldn’t see anything, or take any photos. A photo of a dead Gary Evans would be priceless.
As Horton walked around the scene, sizing up Evans, he yelled out, “What’s this? Why does he have two sets of handcuffs on him?”
“I know Gary Evans,” one of the local Troy cops said, “I was worried he would escape.”
“He fell sixty feet and landed on a piece of rebar…. You think he was going anywhere?”
Barney fucking Fife, Horton thought, walking away. Jesus Christ.
Horton then reached down and checked the serial numbers on both sets of handcuffs. The cuffs that were attached to both of Evans’s wrists, holding his arms behind his back, were from the Troy Police Department; the cuffs dangling from his right wrist, attached to only one arm, were from the USMS.
What the hell? Horton said to himself. How did he get out of his cuffs?
“Hey, Horton, what’s going on?” somebody yelled from behind the fence as Horton stood up. “Tell us what’s happening…. Come talk to us.”
Media were everywhere, scurrying around on the opposite side of the fence. Word had spread in record time that the infamous Gary Evans had made an escape attempt and failed. News organizations, of course, wanted that exclusive story from the one man who knew Evans best.