A drone feared to have aided in the jail break of a murder suspect was actually being used by a local retired nurse to inspect his gutters, DailyMail.com has learned.
In a press conference Wednesday afternoon, police said they’d received tips that a drone was flying in the immediate vicinity of the Warren County Jail in Northwest Pennsylvania shortly before Michael Burham escaped night of July 6.
Lt. Col. George Bivens, deputy commissioner of operations for the Pennsylvania State Police, suggested the drone may have been providing useful intel to aide Burham’s jail break. He urged anyone with information on the unmanned aerial vehicle to contact his department.
But the truth was far more prosaic.
Bob Anderson, 77, a retired nurse who lives right next door, was relaxing on his front porch shortly after the press conference, wearing a Hilton Head Pickleball t-shirt and sitting on a chair with his feet crossed.
Bob Anderson, pictured, says a drone feared to have aided a prison break near his home in Warren, Pennsylvania, was actually just inspecting gutters at his home
The retired nurse’s home is pictured. He laughed when told by DailyMail.com how cops worried the drone had been used to help Michael Burham escape
Asked whether he’d seen any drone flying around the jail shortly before the escape, he laughed, incredulously. That was his doing, he revealed. And he had a simple explanation.
Burham – a murder suspect – escaped July 6 and remains on the loose
‘We were looking at my roof with a drone, at around 8 that night, and I’ve got pictures of what we were looking at,’ Anderson noted.
Asked whether he told the cops this, he replied, ‘No. Nobody asked.’
Anderson said his son-in-law, visiting with family from Pittsburgh for the holidays, brought the drone to take aerial footage of his property.
‘My son-in-law has a drone and I asked him to fly it around the perimeter of my house and look at my gutters,’ said Anderson. ‘I recently had some gutter work done. I could see some things curled up on the roof from the work they did with the gutter guards, little pieces of it sticking up. And I’m thinking, I paid a lot of money for these guys. Nothing should be sticking up. So I told my son-in-law, while you’re flying over the house, let’s see what we can see.
‘I have pictures of it on my phone,’ he said, showing DailyMail.com the images. ‘You could see it sticking up.’
Warren County Jail – where Burham escaped from – is pictured on Wednesday
He chuckled again.
‘That’s so interesting that, coincidentally that same night, there was a jail break,’ he said. ‘Who would think this is going to come back to bite me, that there was going to be a jail break the same night. That’s just crazy.’
Burham escaped three hours later, around 11:20 p.m., and has evaded capture since.
Anderson noticed the commotion outside the morning after the jail break.
‘So I thought about it, and I talked to him (my son-in-law) later and I said, Jesus, we were flying the drone around,’ he said. ‘Somebody’s going to try to make the connection there. And there isn’t, absolutely nothing. It’s just completely coincidental.’
He was shocked to learn from DailyMail.com Wednesday that police were discussing it during a press conference, and that the story about the mysterious drone was picked up by news outlets across the country.
‘The thing is, my son-in-law has had his drone here before,’ Anderson further explained. ‘We’d just fly it, look around the neighborhood, and the kids enjoy looking at it. And it’s fun to see your house from above and all that stuff.
‘And when he flew it around the neighborhood in the past, when he got too close to the jail and courthouse, there’s an electronic field or something up there that says you can’t fly drones over here,’ he continued. ‘The warning comes right up on his phone. He knew that before he came here, so we steered clear.’
