Updated: Wednesday, May 26

By Juliana A. Torres
Staff Writer

Michael France, a 21-year-old Florida Department of Corrections inmate, who escaped from his work crew last week Thursday morning, was found at around 1 p.m. the next day after St. Cloud residents saw him and called 911.

“He just kind of looked suspicious to begin with, and everybody kept telling me he was right in the area,” Corey Christopher, one of the residents who reported the sighting, said.

France was working with a crew of 10 prisoners and two supervisors to clean a ditch at the south end Massachusetts Avenue in St. Cloud, less than three miles from where he was eventually found.

He asked to use the restroom and because there were no facilities along the rural, dead-end road, his supervisors gave him some privacy in the wooded area, the Osceola County Sheriff's Office reported.

The supervisors realized they could no longer see him at around 12:35 p.m., Florida Department of Corrections spokeswoman Jo Ellyn Rackleff said.

As local law enforcement began looking for France, several schools went on lockdown. The Sheriff's Office released the perimeter at around 10 p.m. that night but continued to actively look for him.

Then, just before 11 a.m. Friday, Christopher saw the suspect.

The longtime Orlando resident had just moved with his wife, Jessica, and five children to St. Cloud. His home, along Chippewa Court in the Indian Lakes subdivision, sits in front of a retention pond. Through the sliding glass door of his backyard, Christopher saw a man running along the edge of the woods on the other side of the retention pond behind his house, at about 10:50 a.m. He was carrying a white T-shirt and wearing blue pants with a white stripe, the bottom half of the Department of Corrections inmate uniform, rolled up to his mid-calf. From about 100 yards away, Christopher said he could tell it was a younger man and thought at first he might just be a local person jogging.

Then the man “just stopped,” Christopher said.

“It looked like he was catching his breath or something, and I thought to myself, a runner doesn't just stop.”

The “runner” disappeared into the woods and didn't come out from the trees or around the pond as Christopher watched for another 30 or 40 seconds.

“That's when it started to click,” Christopher said.

He didn't know what the escaped inmate was supposed to look like, but he told his wife and her friend about the suspicious-looking man. She had heard the description of the escaped inmate and thought her husband's description of him sounded like him.

“Putting it all together, we decided to make the call,” he said. “Sure enough, it was him.”

St. Cloud police responded within four minutes after the 911 call, he said, just long enough for him to warn his neighbors that police were on their way.

Within 90 minutes, law enforcement had found France, not far from the spot where Corey Christopher first saw him.

"I thought it was hilarious," Jessica Christopher said. "What were the odds? Now all our friends are joking: 'Aw, you guys are only here a week and you've done something heroic. I've gotta step up my game!' "

The search parties found the inmate’s blue uniform shirt first, in a different portion of the woods, which threw them off at first, Corey Christopher said. But eventually, after the K-9 unit got involved, the escapee was found, not far from where he had spotted France.

“They found him pretty much right there,” Christopher said. "He must have bunkered down and hadn't really moved."

Christopher said he didn't feel unsafe when he heard there was an escaped inmate in his neighborhood; he used to live near a jail in Orange County. He also said he didn't find it odd that the inmate ended up right near his house.

“There are so many woods in the area, I wasn't terribly surprised,” he said.

The Christophers were the second call to report seeing France in the Indian Lakes area Friday morning. Arlene Olson, a resident on Canoe Creek Road, called 911 shortly beforehand and said she saw a stranger, who she thought might be the escaped prisoner, walking along her neighbor's fenceline.

“Last I saw him, he was headed toward the canal. He was within 250 feet of the canal headed back that way,” Olson said in the recorded call to the Osceola County Sheriff’s Office.

France was taken to the county sheriff's office to be interviewed by detectives and, afterward, was released back to the custody of the state Department of Corrections.

He was serving a five-year sentence at the Central Florida Reception Center on Beeline Road, near the Orlando International Airport, as a minimum-security inmate. He was convicted of burglary and grand theft in 2008 and then several counts for failure to appear in 2009.

As is policy, the Florida Department of Corrections in investigating Thursday's incident to see if any protocol was not followed that allowed France's escape, Rackleff said.

Nine schools in Osceola County – St. Cloud High School, Michigan Avenue, Neptune, Lakeview, St. Cloud and Hickory Tree elementary schools, Neptune and St. Cloud middle schools and Canoe Creek Charter School – all went on lockdown Friday afternoon, after Christopher reported the sighting and law enforcement closed in on his location.