A federal inmate who walked away from the minimum-security satellite camp at FCI McKean in McKean County, Pennsylvania, was caught early Friday morning, October 30, after two men working in a wooded area off Route 321 spotted him, held him and called the Pennsylvania State Police, McKean County District Attorney Stephanie Vettenburg-Shaffer announced. Lashawn L. White, 52, was taken into custody without incident and now faces new state felony charges on top of the 108-month federal sentence he was already serving.
Source: McKean County District Attorney statement, Oct. 30, 2026, via Monarch Media
The Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) says White was discovered missing from the satellite camp adjacent to the Federal Correctional Institution (FCI) McKean in Lewis Run, Pennsylvania, on Thursday, October 29, 2026, at approximately 5:00 p.m. The camp is a minimum-security facility and, as the District Attorney's office noted, the unsecured camp is a different area of the prison grounds from the secured, fenced-in portion of the institution — satellite camps of this kind hold lower-risk inmates and have little or no perimeter fencing.
Source: Federal Bureau of Prisons press release, Oct. 29, 2026
Once the walkaway was discovered, the United States Marshals Service, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other law enforcement agencies were notified, and the Bureau of Prisons opened an internal investigation, the BOP said. On the ground in McKean County, FCI staff and Pennsylvania State Police troopers searched the area with the assistance of a police dog (K9) and a helicopter through Thursday, without locating White, according to the District Attorney.
The search ended early Friday, October 30, not with the helicopter or the dog team but with two workers. State Police were contacted by two men working in a wooded area off Route 321 who identified White and detained him while they waited for law enforcement to arrive, the District Attorney said. White is also accused of breaking the glass of an excavator at the men's job site during the evening — the allegation behind the criminal mischief charge described below.
The man at the centre of the search
The Bureau of Prisons describes White as a 52-year-old man, 5 feet 9 inches tall, weighing approximately 230 pounds, with gray hair and brown eyes. He was sentenced in the Southern District of Ohio to an aggregate 108-month — nine-year — federal sentence for possession with intent to distribute fentanyl and heroin, and for possession of a firearm in furtherance of a drug trafficking crime, the BOP release states. Those are the convictions he was serving at FCI McKean when he left the camp.
The new charges
Corporal Joshua Bauer of the Pennsylvania State Police barracks at Lewis Run has charged White with escape, a third-degree felony; flight to avoid apprehension, also a third-degree felony; and criminal mischief, a second-degree misdemeanor, the District Attorney announced. The charges are allegations: as the District Attorney's statement itself notes, all accused individuals are innocent until proven guilty. The U.S. Marshals Service, contacted by local media on Friday, declined to release information about the case.
White is scheduled for central court — the McKean County preliminary-hearing stage — on the new charges, and he has been returned to the custody of the federal prison, according to the District Attorney's office. A conviction for escape on top of a federal drug-trafficking sentence would add further prison time, and federal prosecutors could also consider their own escape case; neither the BOP nor the U.S. Attorney's office has announced any additional federal charge at this stage.
Background: the prison and its camp
FCI McKean, at 6975 Route 59 in Lewis Run, is a medium-security federal prison for male inmates in Lafayette Township, in the wooded hill country of northwestern Pennsylvania, between Bradford and Kane and about 90 miles south of Buffalo, New York. Its adjacent satellite camp houses minimum-security male offenders. Walkaways from minimum-security camps are the most common form of federal prison escape precisely because the camps rely on counts and routine rather than fences — and they usually end the way this one did, with a capture nearby within a day or two. The same camp saw a similar incident in 2013, when inmate Locksley Milwood walked away and was found hours later in a stopped vehicle; he pleaded guilty to escape and received two additional months.
For residents of McKean County, a walkaway sets off exactly the response seen here: state police, a K9 unit and a helicopter over rural townships, and — in the end — two local workers who recognised the man from the official description and held him for police. The Bureau of Prisons asks anyone with information about a missing inmate to contact the U.S. Marshals Service at (412) 644-3351.
What happens next
Three tracks now run in parallel: White's preliminary court process in McKean County on the escape, flight and criminal-mischief charges; the Bureau of Prisons' internal investigation into how he left the camp; and the remainder of his 108-month federal sentence, which he continues to serve. Watch for the central-court hearing date and for any statement from the Bureau of Prisons on whether the camp's count procedures will change.