Back in 1959, Frank Freshwaters was sentenced to 20 years behind bars for violating his probation stemming from a vehicular manslaughter case.
Just seven months into his sentence, however, Freshwaters would make creative use of a rock hammer and a poster of Rita Hayworth to escape from his cell and bask in some slow-motion rainfall as a free man (after crawling through a mile of sh-t, of course).
Okay, so we may have made some of that up, but Freshwaters’ story is drawing comparisons to a certain beloved cinematic classic due to the fact that he escaped from the big house where The Shawshank Redemption was filmed and somehow managed to evade authorities for an astonishing 56 years.
An ambitious deputy marshal recently dusted off Freshwaters’ file and tracked the wheelchair-bound 79-year-old down in rural Florida.
The marshal says that after being shown his own 56-year-old mug shot, Freshwaters stated that he "hadn’t seen that guy in a long time," which we imagine is exactly what a zen-like Andy Dufresne would say to his arresting officers if they hunted him down in Zihuatenejo.
As we learned from the couple who might serve 15 years for having sex on the beach, Florida authorities are not to be trifled with, and we imagine that they’ll throw the book at Freshwater. We can’t help but wonder how they can be so obtuse.
Hopefully, Morgan Freeman will be briefly detained in the near future so that he and Freshwater can work this thing out together.