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 had been at the prison since 2017, when he was given a 30 year sentence for first degree murder. He escaped wearing a corrections department type uniform, the office said.
According to KNWA, Hardin shot a Gateway water employee in the back of the head in February 2017 and pleaded guilty eight months later. In February 2018, Hardin’s DNA matched a sample from the unsolved 1997 rape of a teacher at Frank Tillery Elementary School. The rape took place on a Sunday morning as the teacher was at the school preparing her lesson plan for the 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.
Hardin served as Gateway’s police chief for about four months in early 2016. According to NewsNation, he had been a Eureka Springs police officer in the mid-1990s, resigning when he was reportedly told he was going to be fired for lying in a police report. He also served as a Benton County constable from 2009-2010 and 2013-2014 and a corrections officers in Fayetteville.
