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.”
