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How peanut butter helped Alabama inmates fool guard, escape jail

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JASPER, Ala. -- A dozen prisoners used peanut butter they’d saved from meals to change the numbers over a door and trick a new guard into opening a door that led outside, ABC News reports.

A recent hire supervising 150 prisoners was fooled into allowing the inmates to escape Sunday night after they changed a cell door number to match the outside door number, Walker County Sheriff James Underwood told ABC News.

“They had changed the number over the door with peanut butter, they hollered, ‘Hey, open the door...,' but that door number was the outside door, and unbeknowingly to him, he hit that lock and out the door they went,” Underwood said.

Once outside, the fugitives threw off their orange uniforms and tossed blankets over razor wire to climb the fence and were gone in minutes, the sheriff said. Eleven of the 12 have since been recaptured. Underwood hopes to find the final fugitive, 24-year-old Bradley Andrew Kilpatrick, as soon as possible.

"It may sound crazy, but these people are crazy like a fox,” Underwood said. "You have to stay on your toes. This is one time we slipped up. I'm not going to make any excuses.”