Correctional Service Canada has confirmed that the inmate who briefly escaped from a New Brunswick prison on the weekend was Jermaine Carvery, a career criminal known for terrorizing robbery victims and attempting to flee custody.
But that information was not released to the public when the federal agency distributed a brief statement early Sunday, saying a man with another name — Jermaine Browne — had left a minimum-security unit at Dorchester Penitentiary on Saturday at 8:35 p.m. and was arrested by police about 90 minutes later.
The agency confirmed Thursday the inmate in question was known as Jermaine Carvery 10 years ago when he was sentenced to 25 years in prison for a series of violent heists across Nova Scotia between 2004 and 2006.
During a 2004 holdup of a Costco, Carvery and his accomplices bound about 40 employees as they arrived for work — in some cases using duct tape to cover their eyes — and held them against their will for more than two hours.
In May 2013, Carvery was convicted of attempted murder, robbery and forcible confinement, and his sentence was added to the 16 years he had remaining on sentences received for several robberies in Ontario from 2006 to 2009.
Carvery attracted national attention in April 2008 when he managed to slip out of double-locked leg irons and flee from the back of a corrections van as he was being escorted to a Halifax hospital. He was captured about two months later near Niagara Falls, Ont.
In June 2010, Carvery tried to escape from the Central Nova Scotia Correctional Facility by breaking through a ceiling in the Halifax-area jail.
And in 1998, he escaped from a minimum-security federal prison after just two days inside, before being recaptured six weeks later.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published April 18, 2024.