NEW YORK — A Brooklyn murder suspect was released from Rikers Island in the dead of night after a clerical screwup, leaving the city Correction Department scrambling to find him and lock him up, the Daily News reported.
Correctional officers were warned that Christopher Buggs is considered armed and so dangerous that they should call NYPD instead of trying to apprehend him themselves.
Buggs, 26, was mistakenly released from the Otis Bantum Correctional Center at 2 a.m. Tuesday due to a clerical error. An NYPD spokesperson told Fox News he is still being sought Wednesday.
Buggs — jailed without bail at Rikers Island while awaiting trial for more than three years — is accused of fatally shooting Ernesto Brownlee, 55, outside a bodega in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, on Jan. 29, 2018, the New York Daily News reported. Brownlee, an ex-convict who murdered two men in the 1980s, was shot three times in the chest, and police tracked down and arrested Buggs three days later.
In a different criminal contempt case, a judge sentenced Buggs to just 30 days, and that sentence was mistakenly listed as the final disposition in the murder case, sources told the Daily News. Jail staffers did not realize the error before releasing Buggs early Tuesday.
