A convict being sought by authorities after escaping from the Clinton Correctional maximum-security prison in northern New York was serving a sentence of life without parole for the 2002 killing of an upstate sheriff's deputy.
David Sweat was one of three men arrested after 36-year-old Deputy Kevin Tarsia of the Broome County Sheriff's Office was fatally shot on the Fourth of July in 2002 in the town of Kirkwood, near the New York-Pennsylvania border outside Binghamton.
Police said the men had stolen rifles and handguns from a fireworks store just across the border in Pennsylvania by ramming a pickup truck into the building.
Tarsia later confronted the men in a park in Kirkwood. Police said Sweat and another man fatally shot the deputy. Sweat and the accomplice pleaded guilty a year after the killing to first-degree murder.
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