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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Henrikson cellmate seeks dismissal of attempted Spokane County Jail escape charge

A man who claimed responsibility for a failed attempt to escape from Spokane County Jail using a rope made from bedsheets says he’s being unfairly targeted by federal prosecutors.

Bud Ray Brown, 33, was the cellmate of James Henrikson at the time, who was awaiting trial on federal charges in the murder-for-hire deaths of a Spokane businessman and another man in North Dakota.

On Aug. 20, a rope made of bedsheets was discovered dangling from their cell window. Brown now faces a single criminal count of attempted escape.

Authorities say 36-year-old Henrikson already had told another inmate of plots to escape – involving guns, grenades and squirt guns full of gasoline – as early as February 2015.

But Brown penned a statement in September absolving Henrikson of responsibility for the escape attempt, saying he’d planned the bedsheet escape long before the two were placed in the same cell. Brown was being held on a murder charge in the December 2012 death of David B. Deponte.

The cell window is less than 5 inches wide, and authorities said at the time that no one had ever been able to force their way out of the jail that way.

Brown, in a motion filed last week by his defense attorney Bryan Whitaker, alleges the indictment on the escape charge was retaliation “for failure to enter a guilty plea on a pending state case, as well as to punish for interfering with the Government’s case” against Henrikson.

Brown said he received assurances the government would not prosecute him for the alleged escape attempt, a promise that was upended when Brown rejected a plea deal in October in the Deponte case.

Jurors in Henrikson’s Richland trial did not hear details of the alleged jailbreak during four weeks of testimony, which ended Feb. 25 with convictions on all 11 counts against him.

Henrikson’s attorneys have filed a post-conviction request to interview those jurors to determine if they received any prejudicial information during the lengthy trial.

Brown was indicted Jan. 27, two days after jury selection began in Henrikson’s trial and less than a week before he was scheduled to stand trial on the murder charge. The murder case was dismissed Jan. 28 pending resolution of the attempted escape charge; Spokane County prosecutors have indicated they’ll refile the murder charge once the federal case is resolved. Brown was not listed in federal prison custody Monday and is not being held at the Spokane County Jail.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office for Eastern Washington, through a spokesman, declined to comment on Brown’s request for dismissal, citing the ongoing legal case.