Everybody called him "Pint" because of his size. He was 5 feet 6 inches tall and weighed 110 pounds in top form.

A detective once told me that "Pint would steal the pennies off a dead man’s eyes." He was also very clever. Once Pint was being taken from the county jail to the courthouse for arraignment on burglary charges. Because he was such a runt, deputies took off his handcuffs once they were in the courtroom. That turned out to be a mistake. Quick as a flash, Pint was gone.

He ran into the records room in the courthouse, climbed up to the fifth shelf and lay down. The diminutive prisoner could not be seen from floor level. It was only after his foot accidentally knocked a file folder off the shelf that deputies spotted him.

Pint pushed through a ceiling tile and climbed into the maze between the first and second floors. As he scurried along the maze between floors, a tile broke and sent Pint plunging down into a secretary’s office. The woman screamed, but again he vanished.

Pint was wearing a white t-shirt, seersucker trousers and flip-flops. Nobody knew how he got away until he told his story from a jail cell down in Daytona Beach several months later.

"There were red-tip hedges all around the courthouse. I climbed into the middle of one of the bushes and hid there for a couple of hours until the coast was clear. I saw all those deputies running around but they couldn’t see me."

Later, Pint stepped down from his hiding bush, found a sharp-edged lid from a tin can, and cut off his seersucker trousers to resemble jogging shorts. Looking like a neighborhood jogger, he ran out to the Interstate and hitched a ride to Florida.

Pint’s back in prison now, but there's no telling for how long. Who knows-he may leave tomorrow in a laundry basket.