SOMERVILLE ‐ A five-day, round-the-clock manhunt for a potentially dangerous federal fugitive who made a brazen escape from a Rhode Island detention center ended Thursday with a foot chase in Somerville, where a veteran state trooper snared James W. Morales as he tried to jump a fence in the Ten Hills neighborhood.The 114-hour search, which began when Morales was discovered missing during a New Year's Eve head count at the Donald W. Wyatt Detention Facility, came to a dramatic end around 4 p.m.
Somerville and Cambridge had been on alert all day, attuned to the sound of helicopters overhead and the sight of police searching everywhere from bustling Central Square to the quiet marsh around Alewife Station...
Morales, a former Army Reserve medical logistics specialist, was being held in Rhode Island while awaiting trial for allegedly breaking into a Worcester armory in 2015 and cutting through the ceiling of a weapons vault to steal six assault rifles and 10 semiautomatic pistols. At the time, he was wearing a GPS monitoring bracelet while awaiting trial on child-rape charges that originated in Cambridge.