Geiger inmate walks away while working at fair

A prison inmate walked away Thursday morning from a work crew at the Spokane County Fairgrounds and has not been located.

It’s the third time in six years an inmate has escaped custody at the fairgrounds.

Daniel F. Murinko, an inmate at the Geiger Corrections Center, was arrested Sept. 9 and was being held on a $20,500 bond for multiple charges of driving under the influence and driving with a suspended license.

The 26-year-old was last seen around 10:20 a.m. Thursday while working on a trash pickup crew.

Geiger Lt. JoAnne Lake said those work crews don’t include inmates accused of violent crimes or sex offenses. There usually are several inmates for each corrections officer supervising the crews, she said.

“It’s a low-risk program and that’s how they’re supervised,” she said. “They’re not chain gangs. They’re not high-risk offenders.”

Murinko has brown hair, hazel eyes and numerous tattoos on his arms. He’s 5-foot-9 and about 185 pounds. He was wearing blue pants, a maroon shirt and a yellow vest that identified him as an inmate.

Anyone with information on his location is asked to call Crime Check at (509) 456-2233.

Work release crews are supervised by Detention Services guards, which fall under the authority of Spokane County government.

Spokane County Commissioner Todd Mielke said authorities were still gathering information on Murinko and the escape. He said the incident should not inhibit other work of Geiger inmates.

“They do a lot of good work in the community,” Mielke said, listing park maintenance, snow removal and trash cleanup around the county as low-cost labor inmates provide. “I don’t want to lose sight of the value of the program.”

Last year Geiger inmate Robert E. Reed, 46, walked away from a work crew at the fairgrounds and was on the lam until February.

In 2009, paranoid schizophrenic Phillip Paul walked away from the fairgrounds while on an Eastern State Hospital field trip. Paul had been declared not guilty by reason of insanity for the 1987 murder of an elderly woman and sent to Eastern. He was on the run for three days before being captured in Klickitat County.

Spokane County Fair director Rich Hartzell said he doesn’t believe Murinko is a public safety concern. “He’s doing more harm to himself than anyone else by doing this,” he said.

Inmates on work crews are “not a threat to the public from a physical or mental standpoint. If they were, they wouldn’t be here.”

Geiger crews are at the fairgrounds every day during the fair doing labor-intensive tasks such as collecting trash. Hartzell said hiring employees to do the same job would be cost prohibitive. “It takes a lot of people to do this,” he said.

Still, Hartzell said he’s not happy that an inmate has walked away two years in a row. “We’ll be sitting down with Geiger to see what we can do about this,” he said.