Rikers Island was thrown into lockdown Friday morning when an inmate escaped from his cell and tried to boost a jail staffer’s car, officials and sources told The Post.
Correction officials triggered a “red alert” at the troubled jail around 9:15 a.m., minutes after a supervisor spotted suspect Alioune Thioye in the jail parking lot, according to union officials and Rikers sources.
Thioye, who was being held on an attempted-murder charge from outside New York City, had tried to break into an employee’s car, according to Joseph Russo, president of the Assistant Deputy Wardens Association, and jail records.
“The staff member approached him very assertively, stopped him in his tracks and was able to cuff him right away and take him back in,” Russo said.
Thioye had escaped from his cell and slipped out of the Eric M. Taylor Center through a window around 4:15 a.m., officials said.
The jail was locked down after the emergency alert was issued to make sure no other inmates escaped, according to Russo.
Thioye had been at Rikers since Nov. 2 after being arrested in The Bronx on a fugitive warrant, jail and court records show.
“We take all attempts to escape, even when unsuccessful, very seriously,” said a rep for the city’s Department of Correction. “[T]his incident is under investigation.”
The escape is the latest in a string of troubling incidents in the crisis-wracked New York City jail system, which has struggled with staffing shortages that have led to hellish conditions for inmates.
Last week, inmates started a fire inside the infirmary of the jail.
It took firefighters about an hour to get the blaze under control on the second floor of a seven-story Rikers infirmary building, where nine inmates were housed.
The fire came just days after The Post revealed prisoners were sleeping body-to-body on cell floors littered with urine, feces and blood.
Meanwhile, so far this year, there have been 14 deaths in the city Department of Correction’s facilities.