Once again, OnTV brings you a tale which has shades of The Count of Monte Cristo or more recently, Stephen King's The Shawshank Redemption...

Through the course of several weeks, three Allegheny County Jail inmates had planned their danger-filled escape from their 17th-floor cells, by braiding strips of bed sheets to form a makeshift rope they would use to rappel to the ground 200 feet below.

However, on November 12th, the escape plan ended in tragedy when one of the inmates, Jerome Bullock, 18, of the Hill District, fell nearly 13 stories to his death.

The two survivors of the failed scheme, David Michael Torres, 24, and Jermaine Walker, 25, told investigators what they had witnessed.

According to Torres, the plan was to rappel down from one window ledge and on to the next, but Bullock only got one level down when the sheet snapped and broke.

Bullock died of the fall, his body entangled in 115 feet of braided strips of bed sheets. The plan's failure was inevitable and doomed from the start: even if the fabricated rope were stronger, it would still have been 85 feet short.

Both Walker and Torres were held on escape and criminal mischief charges relating to the fatal plan. The charges already compound Torres' three homicide charges and Walker's drug possession and aggravated assault.

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