A twenty year old man, a man who believes he has become a victim of the justice system
in the U.S., wants out.
In the psych ward where he's been placed, he bides his time until he sees his chance
to get into a medical cabinet.
This man has no problem picking locks…he’ll pick many locks for many years to come.
Inside that cabinet is a bottle of the extremely potent psychotropic substance called LSD.
He takes a bottle of that, and again, when the time is right, he sneaks into the staffroom
and pours the entire bottle into a pot of boiling coffee.
The ingoing and outgoing staff are all going to get a hit, a hit that you could call “heroic”.
In his own words, the man later said, “The plan was when all these people were freaked
out enough, I was going to pick the locks and go.”
The few aides and staff on the ward between them unwittingly took acid to the amount of
around 100 tabs.
Perhaps you’re not the type of person who knows much about things like LSD, but let
us tell you, 100 tabs between a handful of people would have caused them to hallucinate
wildly.
The plan didn’t exactly go how that guy wanted it to go...far from it.
Not long after after those coffees were drunk, one aide was down in the basement watching
the clothes dryer spin around and around.
His pupils were now large black simmering disks; he stared at that spinning drum and
he just lost his mind.
The machine became his mortal enemy.
The aide screamed at the dryer…he threw punches at it, kicked it, while upstairs on
the ward people were tripping out of their minds.
One of the female psychiatric doctors didn’t seem to know where she was,or who she was.
She was seen madly dancing up and down the ward and in a sexually suggestive way, informing
the shocked inmates about how deliriously hot she was feeling.
The scene was a phantasmagoria of horror and comedy, but during all that utter madness
the plotter and executor of that communal trip could not make his escape.
Security was soon called, and the staff were taken some place to come down from their mega-trip…a
clothes dryer had been ripped apart, and in one man’s eyes, defeated.
Welcome to the life of Mark DeFriest, the “Houdini of Florida”, a masterful escape
artist, a veritable genius who just couldn’t find his way in life.
A life that from the outside might look part-comedy, but in reality his life sentence on this Earth
has been filled mostly with devastating tragedy.
Mark was born in 1960 and grew up with his father and stepmom.
His father had served during the Second World War in the OSS, an organization that would
later evolve into the CIA.
Father and son were close, and the former imparted his vast knowledge to the latter.
This would serve Mark well in his many prison escapes.
But the child was different…some say he was a savant...
most others now say he was a high functioning autistic and still is today.
Mark didn’t understand much about the world and didn’t socialize much with other kids.
He spent most of his time by himself and he despised school.
They moved him to a disciplinary boy’s school to temper the child's waywardness, but he
ran away…something he would keep doing his entire life.
All he really wanted to do was take things apart and put them back together again.
At the back of the house there was a workshop, something Mark would later call his Frankenstein’s
lab.
There he would mess around with chemicals... blowing himself up on two occasions.
He would rewire appliances, take apart clocks, all with the skill and dexterity of a seasoned
expert.
His life fell apart when he was 19.
His father died, and knowing what Mark loved the most, he bequeathed all his tools to him.
This was the start of the beginning of tragedy, because Mark, not really knowing how wills
worked, took the tools before that will had been probated...that just means made valid.
His cold and stony stepmother, a woman who had never cared for Mark, called the cops.
Those cops chased Mark down one night, and on seeing those flashing lights, this young
man who didn’t quite get how things worked in society, fled on foot.
He had no idea why those cops were after him.
He had no idea about how wills were supposed to be dealt with.
He was arrested and charged with theft, and also got a charge for being in possession
of a weapon.
Next came jail.
This just didn’t seem fair to the young man, a guy that thought he’d taken what
was rightly his.
One day after bible study class, he and the other inmates were being led back to their
cells when some men just started running for it, heading to the razor wire fence.
None of them got over, but Mark knew exactly how to scale such a fence because his father
had once taught him how it could be done.
Mark then hot-wired a car, hit the road, and settled in a motel for the night.
This was his problem.
He understood the technical aspects related to escape, but he didn’t have the nous,
the worldliness, the social intellect, to evade the authorities for long.
He got six more charges after that.
He went back to jail, where he was jumped by 14 inmates who didn’t quite understand
this weird kid who didn’t fit in but wasn’t afraid to talk back to them.
Those 14 so-called tough guys beat him badly and sexually abused him.
After that, Mark slit his wrists...he hit his head against the cell door…he screamed
and shouted all day long, and soon he was taken to that psyche ward where he would spike
a coffee pot with an entire bottle of LSD.
The prison system and the justice system thought what they had was an unruly kid who’d been
lucky to get over a razor wire fence.
They didn’t much like the inmate.
He was troublesome; he used bad language, and he would often not do as he was told.
For that, over the years Mark would be beaten time and again by the guards.
He had to escape; that’s all he ever thought about.
You have to see, in his mind, a mind that worked differently from most people’s, he’d
only taken his father’s tools, and those tools had been given to him.
The escapes, to Mark’s reasoning, were not crimes, but the right thing to do.
He was in fact just being very rational: Tools=mine.
Imprisonment=wrong.
Escape=right.
One day he was asked if he’d like to join the new woodwork and arts and crafts activity.
Of course he would.
This was a guy that was brilliant at making things, but when Mark saw rolled up copper
sheets, the first thing that came to his mind was, “They really mustn’t want me to stay.”
That’s because what he saw in the workshop were all the necessary bits and pieces to
fashion a homemade gun, aka, a zip gun.
With the copper he made the gun barrel and then he fixed that to a homemade pistol grip.
When he had the gun ready the next thing he did was steal an icepick and take that back
to his cell.
He took that spike and ripped out one of his back teeth.
With blood streaming from his mouth, he called a nurse and he was rushed to the psych ward
prison hospital, albeit in handcuffs and leg chains.
The dentist knew right away that this was an act of self-mutilation, and that’s what
he added to his report.
After seeing the dentist, Mark asked if he could go for a pee.
In the bathroom he picked his locks again and produced his homemade gun.
Pointing his zip gun at the guards he shouted, “Anybody move and I’ll blow your brains
out.”
Some inmates at that ward, perhaps not in good mental shape, started jumping around
screaming.
Mark shot a table just to prove to them his gun actually worked.
After that he was gone again, out of the door and running through the nearby woods.
But again, he just didn’t quite know how to stay out.
He stole yet another car but was soon caught.
He was now making the headlines of local news media, but the prison system, they were starting
to get pretty mad at this kid.
He’d had his chances.
Now they wanted him to suffer.
And suffer he did.
In jail, while the authorities tried to figure out if this kid was mentally fit to stand
trial, they kept him locked down for 24 hours a day.
Was he fit to stand trial?
Four psychiatrists said no, no way, he’s mentally ill…this man doesn’t know what
is right or wrong.
Sure, he understands the court system and he’s not raving mad…in fact, he’s obviously
very talented, but still, he doesn’t know why he’s here at all.
He should not stand trial.
One man said that wasn’t the case, calling Mark a malingerer, meaning someone pretending
to be mentally unwell.
That same man decades years later changed his mind.
That didn't help the 20-year old Mark, who was sent back to jail.
There he made another gun, an improved version of his last zip gun, even though for this
one he had had to use an empty roll of toothpaste.
“I was in my gunsmith phase…I could make a gun out of anything,” Mark would later
recall.
This time he threatened the guards and just to make sure the gun was working, he fired
it at a wall.
It was working alright, and many other inmates saw that Mark had not shot anywhere near the
guards.
But enough was enough.
The guards beat Mark within an inch of his life and forced him into a pitch black cell,
naked, bruised and broken.
After 11 days of that, he took a plea deal without really knowing what a plea deal was.
For firing at that wall, he was convicted of attempted murder.
Later, he was sent to the Florida State Prison, a prison that at the time was said to be totally
ungovernable, a prison where violence and murder was commonplace.
No inmate in the U.S. ever wanted to end up there.
It confined the so-called worst of the worst, but as prisons go, it was the worst of the
worst.
Mark was still occasionally unruly…he still didn’t really understand the prison system,
or the prison code.
He was beaten severely by both guards and inmates on many occasions, and so he started
making homemade weapons.
When they were found, he went back into the hole.
His solitary confinement was often a life of total isolation.
The order given by the prison authorities was no clothes for the prisoner; no mattress
or sheets.
Conversation with anyone was prohibited, which included prison trustees.
He was given no toiletries, no tissues, no toothpaste or soap.
They turned the water off in his cell at times and he couldn’t even flush the toilet.
He had to eat with his hands, and in the total darkness.
The torture and humiliation was later compared to what happened at Guantanamo Bay.
He had to live in silence and darkness, naked, like a trapped animal, and if that’s not
cruel and unusual punishment, then what is?
His punishment was nothing short of Medieval, inarguably a form of modern day torture.
The prison put him on a consolidated security list, so when he wasn’t in total darkness,
he still wasn’t allowed out of his cell.
In his own words, he said, “You can go 2,3,4,5,6,7 years without ever seeing the yard.”
In total, he had ten years of requests to see the sun and they were all denied.
But he still caught sight of the guards, and what he would do is study their keys.
After examining them he’d memorize the cuts in the keys and then make his own set out
of paper.
“I made keys for every lock in America,” he said many years later.
Did he ever get to use them?
Well, Mark attempted to escape 13 times in all and he was successful 7 times.
One time he scaled the fence and broke both his feet.
He somehow managed to hot-wire a truck, ram a police roadblock, and then after a high-speed
chase he ended up driving the truck into someone’s living room.
“They were really upset,” he later said, about the people whose house he had driven
into.
He’s had hundreds of disciplinary reports, but he’s never hurt anyone else.
They were usually for minor infractions, or for being found with weapons he was keeping
to protect himself in the ultra-violent places where he was housed.
His story became public and the majority of the public now say this is a man who has some
mental issues who has been chewed up by the prison system, right from the first year when
he was brutally beaten and sexually abused by a gang of inmates.
He was paroled on February 5th 2019 on the condition that he spend a year in a mental-health
and substance-abuse center.
Over the years, he’d developed dependencies on the many drugs he received in prison.
After only a few days he started showing signs of “bipolar mania” and his kidneys were
failing him.
He also tested positive for methamphetamine.
Mark was subsequently sent back to jail and from what we can see, he is now waiting to
see which prison he’ll be sent to.
It’s now 40 years since he drove off with his deceased father’s tools.
27 years of those years have been spent in solitary confinement, either with the absence
of the sun, or in total darkness.
Now go watch this video, “The Most Insane Ways Men Escaped from Prison” or this watch
video “Why Prisoner Proven Innocent Can't Be Released.”