The second of two escaped killers, David Sweat, has been shot and is in the custody of U.S. law enforcement officials, media reports said Sunday.

Sweat was caught near the Canadian border two days after a federal agent shot and killed Richard Matt, the other escapee from a maximum-security prison in New York.

Hundreds of heavily-armed police officers had been scouring dense forest in a remote part of New York state for the two prisoners who broke out of jail three weeks ago.

The search had its biggest development Friday when a man towing a camper heard a loud noise that he thought was a blown tire.  He stopped a short time later and found a bullet hole in the trailer.  A police team smelled gunpowder inside the trailer and saw evidence that someone had fled out the back door.  

A short time later Matt, who was 49 years old, was found by police and shot when he failed to follow an order to put his hands up. He had been serving a sentence of 25 years to life for kidnapping and dismembering his former boss in 1997.

The prisoners escaped with the help of tools hidden in packages of frozen hamburger meat that they received. Once out of their cells, they traveled through a maze of internal passages and catwalks built for prison maintenance work and eventually emerged from a sewer outside the maximum-security compound.

Two prison employees have been arrested for helping Matt and Sweat escape. Gene Palmer and Joyce Mitchell are accused of helping to smuggle the tools, including hacksaw blades and bits for power drills, to the pair.

Sweat, who is 35, was serving a life sentence without possibility of parole for murdering a sheriff’s deputy in 2002.

New York state had offered a reward of $100,000 for their capture, or half that amount for information leading to the return of one of the men.
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