Rick Neale

Florida Today

COLUMBUS — The Ohio Adult Parole Authority board voted Thursday afternoon to release Frank Freshwaters, a fugitive who spent 56 years on the run, on parole on or after April 24.

Freshwaters, the 79-year-old 'Shawshank Fugitive,' had been living quietly in Florida since the mid-1980s until authorities tracked him to a trailer park on the marshy outskirts of Melbourne last May. He remains behind bars in Ohio, the state where he walked away from a minimum security work camp in 1959.

The case has drawn international attention along with a social media following demanding his freedom.

Freshwaters will be placed on parole for five years, and parole board members prefer that he be released in West Virginia.

“We thank God for their decision. There are probably 2,000 people praying for him across a half-dozen states,” Gordon Beggs, Freshwaters’ defense lawyer, said minutes after the announcement.

“There was wonderful support from people who knew him for many, many years. So many people wrote in, telling what a kind, generous guy he was,” Beggs said.

“That’s who he is today,” he said.

Palm Bay, Fla., resident Shirl Cheetham, a longtime friend of Freshwaters’ whose children know him as "Grandpa Bill,” requested Freshwaters’ release on Thursday, and she offered to bring him back to her home.

Back in 1957, when he was 21, Freshwaters was speeding on an Akron, Ohio, street when he struck and killed 24-year-old Eugene Flynt, a married father of three. Freshwaters pleaded guilty to second-degree manslaughter in 1958, and he was sentenced to five years of probation in lieu of one to 20 years in prison. But he violated probation and got shipped off to the Ohio State Reformatory — which later provided the setting for the classic film The Shawshank Redemption.

'Shawshank Fugitive' might gain permanent freedom

After his escape from a Sandusky, Ohio, prison honor farm, he spent more than a half-century in West Virginia and Florida using the assumed alias William Cox.

Friends, family, lawyers and prosecutors converged on Columbus for the hearing. During testimony on Thursday, Brad Gessner, chief counsel with Ohio's Summit County Prosecutor’s Office, requested that Freshwaters serve more than four years in prison.

According to limited records still available, Freshwaters struck Flynt with a 1953 Mercury while he was driving 50 mph in a 35 mph zone, Summit County Prosecutor's Office records show.

After the crash, Freshwaters told Akron police that “there was a man in front of me and then I don’t know what happened,” according to a police report.

Flynt was pronounced dead less than an hour later, and he died from shock from a fractured skull and compound fractures of both legs, a coroner's report shows.

Board members asked Richard Flynt, who was 3 when his father was killed, his thoughts on an appropriate action. Thursday afternoon, Richard Flynt replied that the decision was in the hands of the board.

But on Wednesday, in a phone interview from his home in North Canton, Ohio, Flynt said: "In essence, he caused my life nothing but trouble. I don't think they can just pat him on the back and send him home."

As of Sept. 11, the prosecutor's office calculated that Freshwaters owed Flynt's widow $12,660.88 in unpaid restitution, factoring for inflation.

Follow Rick Neale on Twitter: @RickNeale1