An Arkansas man convicted of nearly beating his fiancée to death with a hammer broke out of prison overnight, officials said Wednesday.
Henri Hatten, 56, was missing from a headcount Wednesday morning at Pulaski County jail in Little Rock. Earlier this month, he’d been sentenced to 35 years in prison.
How exactly Hatten escaped was not immediately clear. Police only said the “initial investigation showed that the inmate had escaped overnight.”
Hatten is not the first man to successfully break out of Pulaski County jail in recent years. Two men orchestrated their own release back in May 2019, only to be caught in New Mexico the next day
Hatten had been behind bars since he was arrested in Little Rock on Dec. 15, 2021. His fiancée, Scherice Johnson, called police after he attacked her with a hammer.
Hatten first struck Johnson with the hammer after he asked for money and she had none, Johnson testified at his sentencing hearing. The first blow knocked her into a bathtub, and Hatten continued the assault, Johnson said. He only quit when the hammer broke.
Responding cops said Johnson’s brain matter was visible when they arrived.
At the sentencing hearing, the judge said the crime scene photographs were more gruesome than some murder cases she’d presided over, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette reported.
After all the trauma, Johnson said she was simply happy to be alive. “I’m blessed to be here,” she testified. “I want to go on with my life.”
Hatten was initially charged with attempted first-degree murder and first-degree domestic battery. He pleaded guilty to the battery charge in exchange for prosecutors dropping the attempted murder charge.
At his sentencing, Hatten attempted to go back on his guilty plea, but the judge wouldn’t let him. On the witness stand, he said he suffered from throat tumors that required regular surgery.
“I don’t know how long I’m going to live,” he told the court.
Judge Karen Whatley pointed out that during a previous hearing, she had questioned Hatten at length about his guilty plea, and he stood by it at the time.