MONTEVIDEO -- A 55-year-old man, formerly of Montevideo, was among the four sex offenders who attempted to escape Saturday from the Minnesota Sex Offender Program facility at Moose Lake.
According to the Associated Press, Steven Allan Housman was one of the men who tried to break out of the facility around 6:15 p.m. but didn't make it past a secure perimeter. Instead, security officers apprehended them and put the facility on lockdown while they accounted for the offenders.
A Carlton County court administrator told The Associated Press that Housman, Christopher Ivy, Lloyd Hartlieb and Russell Norton appeared in court Wednesday on charges of escaping from custody. They are being held in the county law enforcement center.
The sex offender facility in Moose Lake, 110 miles north of the Twin Cities, confines more than 400 sex offenders who were committed to treatment indefinitely instead of being freed after serving prison time.
Housman was sent to the state sex offender program in January 2009, just hours before he was due to be released from the state prison system into the Chippewa County Jail. He was indefinitely committed in October by a district court ruling that he has a sexually dangerous and psychopathic personality. His commitment was affirmed by the state Court of Appeals last month.
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He had served a 58-month prison sentence for a second-degree criminal sexual conduct conviction for offenses against a 7-year-old female.
The facility houses more than 400 sex offenders, who were committed to treatment indefinitely instead of being freed after serving prison time.
-- Staff reports
