The desperate search for Danelo Souza Cavalcante, a murderer sentenced to life in prison whose escape has kept the United States in suspense for 14 days, came to an end this Wednesday, shortly after eight in the morning, local time. It turned out to be a happy ending: Cavalcante, a 34-year-old Brazilian sentenced for killing his ex-girlfriend, Déborah Evangelista Brandão, with a knife in April 2021, in the presence of her children, was captured alive and without incident in a wooded area of the South Coventry municipality, about 40 kilometers from the Chester County State Prison, west of Philadelphia, from where he escaped on August 31 in a movie maneuver.
Since then, the authorities, who deployed up to more than 500 agents, had proven impotent in their mission to find the fugitive. The first images released of the arrest show a top-down shot in which Cavalcante is seen handcuffed and bare-chested, who is also wanted by the authorities of the Brazilian state of Tocantins for the shooting death, in 2017, of Valter Júnior Moreira dos Reis. Two officers in camouflage uniforms cut off his shirt with scissors and then put him into a black van, parked next to what looks like the outside of a lawn care machine shop. In another recording, the detainee walks, already dressed in a Philadelphia Eagles sweatshirt, escorted by two heavily armed men. In the third, about 40 smiling companions take a group photo to immortalize the feat, with Cavalcante in the center.
Shortly before 10 a.m. this Wednesday, the Democratic governor of Pennsylvania, Josh Shapiro, appeared before the press to congratulate himself that the operation had come to fruition and to thank his compatriots for the fortitude shown during a “ difficult and worrying time.” Then, with another thank you to agent George Bevins, who has become a spokesperson during the crisis, he gave him the floor to offer details about the fugitive’s last minutes of ephemeral freedom. He spoke of a night operation, in the middle of the storm, in which an aircraft participated and “no weapons were fired.” In the process, the detainee received a bite from a police dog, for which, Bevins said, he is being treated by doctors. “I was always convinced that we would catch him, but I was also clear that it is not easy to capture someone who does not want to be captured in such a large and difficult area,” added the lieutenant colonel of the state police.
The latest news of an escape that the television networks followed up to the minute during these days had come the day before, when Bevins reported that the night before the fugitive had obtained a .22 caliber rifle with scope and flashlight, which he stole from the garage of a single-family house. His owner was about to abort the robbery: the guy discovered it and shot her several times with another of his pistols. Cavalcante was unharmed. That was when the authorities began to consider the escapee as “armed and extremely dangerous.”
The police had warned The residents of the place where they last saw him were told to “lock all doors and windows,” as well as their vehicles, and to stay inside their homes. “Don’t go near him. Call [teléfono de la policía] 911 if you see it.” The reward for any information leading to his trail rose in the last hours of the hunt from 10,000 to 25,000 dollars (23,300 euros).
The area around the prison, whose neighbors have described the situation these weeks as “a nightmare,” is a semi-residential area with large portions of forest, where Cavalcante found a way to hide at night and day. In a country where it is often difficult to distinguish reality from movies, the dramatic situation, broadcast live, transcended local interest to captivate national attention.
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Crab Pass
The fugitive heard the harshness of his sentence in August. A few days before starting to serve life in prison, he escaped on the last day of the month from prison by climbing a wall. There is a security video that captures the moment. In it, the prisoner, just over one and a half meters tall, is seen distractedly approaching a narrow hallway made of exposed brick. He supports one foot and both hands and begins to walk in a horizontal position without taking your eyes off the prison courtyard. He immediately disappears from the plane. One of the penitentiary guards described the impossible trick as “the crab walk.”
He then managed to make his way through the barbed wire, which the warden had installed after another inmate unsuccessfully attempted the same complicated maneuver earlier in the year. He ran across the roof, over a fence, over more barbed wire, and vanished.
In the following days there were fleeting encounters with terrified neighbors. When the police arrived to respond to those emergency calls, Cavalcante had already disappeared. At the end of the week it was learned that the guy had appeared in the video of one of those cameras that cautious homeowners install at the doors of their homes. It was proof that the murderer had crossed the security perimeter of some 35 square kilometers, in which the roads were cut off and the area was combed with hundreds of agents and helicopters flying over.
In the new video, the fugitive also looked different from the photo of his arrest, in which he is seen with long hair and a beard in the middle of a hairless face. The new Cavalcante was shaved and was wearing a baseball visor and a green hooded sweatshirt. He also revealed that he had stolen a delivery van, which he abandoned when it ran out of gas, and that he tried unsuccessfully to contact two old co-workers.
Monday’s incident (the theft of the rifle and the confrontation with the armed neighbor) convinced the authorities, who spent the last few days trying to justify their apparent incompetence, of the need to increase the search and capture device, until they enlisted some 500 agents, recruited from the ranks of the Pennsylvania State Police, the FBI, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and the US Marshalls.
The event has also encouraged a debate about the functioning of the US immigration system, which politicians from both sides of the political spectrum consider “broken” due to the lack of legislative updates. The question that the residents of the prison asked is why Cavalcante was not expelled from the country after the murder of his ex-girlfriend. He entered the United States illegally, it is not known exactly when, except that it had to be after killing Moreira dos Reis in 2017, whom he shot six times because he owed him money for repairing a car.
The deportation of undocumented immigrants (11 million people, according to calculations by the Migration Policy Institute) is executed when they commit minor crimes (studies show that, regardless of the severity, they commit them in a lower percentage than nationals). In a case like this, the law dictates that if he is convicted he has to serve his sentence in the United States.
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