Juvenile murder suspect escaped out of recently reopened detention facility in Butner
BUTNER, N.C. (WTVD) -- A full investigation is underway into how 17-year-old Zane Cesnik escaped a juvenile detention center in Butner on Monday afternoon.
Cesnik was in custody on murder charges when he escaped the Dillon Regional Juvenile Detention Center in Granville County around 2 p.m. He managed to elude capture until late Monday night.
Granville County Sheriff Robert D. Fountain Jr. said Tuesday that Cesnik had some minor cuts and bruises when deputies captured him, but Cesnik did not resist arrests when deputies found him.
Fountain said deputies were responding to a tip given to one of their perimeter checkpoints in the area around the juvenile detention center. That tip came from someone who said they had just seen a young man matching Cesnik's description walking out of the woods to cross Range Road.
Exactly how Cesnik escaped the juvenile detention center remains unclear. North Carolina Department of Public Safety members at Tuesday's news conference for the escapee declined to comment on specific details related to the investigation of Cesnik's escape, but they did say the investigation was looking into actions by personnel at the facility and overall security of the building.
"We're looking at actions by personnel to make sure they did appropriate actions during the incident itself," NCDPS Deputy Secretary William L. Lassiter said. "We're also looking at the physical security of the building itself and seeing if there are any physical security things that we need to improve about the building to make sure that this cannot happen again."
Over the next two months, the department plans to hold mock escape drills at every juvenile detention center in the state. They said these drills were planned prior to yesterday's escape but will have a renewed sense of urgency due Cesnik's escape.
This is also not the first time a juvenile at Dillon Regional Juvenile Detention Center has escaped, according to Lassiter.
The facility has been around since the 1960s. It was closed in 2010 because of the declining number of juvenile offenders in North Carolina.
However, after the passage of Raise The Age, a state law that put more older teens accused of serious crimes in juvenile detention, the juvenile detention population has ballooned. Lassiter said that population has more than quadrupled since the passage of the law.
Because of that boom, Dillon Regional Juvenile Detention Center, along with two other facilities across the state, reopened. The Granville County facility reopened in 2020.
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Murder of 71-year-old
The Wake County District Attorney, Lorrin Freeman, confirmed to ABC11 that the escaped teen was facing a murder charge in Wake County in the death of 71-year-old Jerry Hicks.
Hicks was found dead in his home in June 2023 by deputies called to Old Milburnie Road for a welfare check.
Court documents showed Cisnik was transferred to adult court last August but was being held in the juvenile center in Butner without bond.
