Helicopter Breakout Fugitives Are Captured Near Crash Site

A convicted child molester and the novice helicopter pilot who whisked him away from a treatment center were captured at gunpoint Tuesday in a canal of waist-deep water a few miles away.

The men, their clothes soggy and muddy, were apprehended a day after a chopper with the student pilot at the controls landed on the grounds of the treatment center and picked up 28-year-old Steven Whitsett.

The helicopter cleared a 15-foot razor-wire fence but crashed near an orange grove 100 yards away. Whitsett and his pilot, Clifford Burkhart, 23, ran off into the surrounding swamp, leaving behind empty gun holsters.

Sheriff’s spokeswoman Jenelle Atlas said deputies captured the two men Tuesday afternoon in a ditch near Interstate 95, four miles from the treatment center. They put up brief resistance but eventually dropped the 9-millimeter handguns they were carrying, Atlas said.

Deputies found $10,098 in cash on the men, Atlas said. Authorities also later located a rental van they believe Whitsett and Burkhart planned to use in their escape. They would not say where the van was found.

They had been spotted by several grove workers on the side of the highway 45 minutes earlier.

Earlier, authorities looking for the men had combed a 5-by-9-mile area of orange groves, forests and mosquito-ridden swamp near the Martin Treatment Center, about 35 miles west of West Palm Beach.

The escape occurred at 1 p.m. Monday after Burkhart, in his second solo flight, took off in a training helicopter from a Fort Lauderdale airport.

Whitsett was convicted in 1994 of child molestation and finished his prison sentence in 1999. He was being held at the center while awaiting a civil trial under a law aimed at keeping dangerous sexual offenders locked up and in psychiatric treatment after their jail terms.