When Kevin Corkery and his wife left a New Year’s party at Delaney’s pub on Kingsway in 1988, the overcrowding, understaffing and generally crappy conditions at nearby Oakalla prison were probably the last thing on their minds.
But that didn’t save them from being caught in the crosshairs of Burnaby’s ongoing prison problem.
As the couple was leaving the pub, three escaped inmates appeared out of the night, hauled them out of their car, jumped in and took off, according to a story in the Jan. 6, 1988 NOW.
Thirteen prisoners had broken out of the Lower Mainland Regional Correctional Centre (a.k.a. Oakalla) that night and fanned out across the Lower Mainland in the biggest prison break in the province’s history.
Prison officials confirmed the incident had begun when guards in the segregation unit were overpowered by inmates wielding a knife fashioned out of a blade and toothbrush.
The escapees had been doing time for everything from robbery to murder, and some managed to evade police for a time.
Others were less shrewd.
Three of them were picked up at a pub in neighbouring New Westminster; another was arrested at his parent’s place in Chilliwack.
As police searched for the rest, local residents and politicians called on the province to speed up the proposed 1990 closure of the 76-year-old prison.
Less than a month earlier, three inmates had crawled through a hole in the wall, scaled a fence and – still dressed in prison garb – hopped on a SkyTrain.
And less than two months after the New Year’s breakout, two dangerous inmates awaiting trials for murder and armed robbery respectively overpowered their lone guard with knives and scaled the fence.
They too commandeered a car on Kingsway, but that hapless driver was forced to chauffeur the fugitives to Surrey.
Then-alderman and later longtime Burnaby Mayor Derek Corrigan, who had worked at Oakalla as a guard in the 1970s, was quoted saying the facility was “probably the easiest prison to escape from in all of North America.”
It's been decades since escaped inmates routinely ran amok on the streets of Burnaby.
Oakalla, which had loomed from the slope just south of Deer Lake since 1912, was shuttered in June 1991.
Townhouses now stand where the prison used to be, and some of the Oakalla land has been absorbed into an expanded Deer Lake Park.
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