BATON ROUGE, La. — Just days before 10 men broke out of a New Orleans jail, officials with the sheriff’s office asked for money to fix faulty locks and cell doors deemed a key factor in the escape. As the manhunt for the remaining seven fugitives stretches into a new week, officials continue to investigate who or what was to blame in a jailbreak that even the escapees labeled as “easy” — in a message scrawled on a wall above the narrow hole they squeezed through.

Orleans Parish Sheriff Susan Hutson said she has long raised concerns about the jail’s ongoing “deficiencies,” adding that the breakout has “once again highlighted the critical need for repairs and upgrades” to the ailing infrastructure. But some officials are pointing the blame in security lapses at the person who oversees the control and custody of the inmates, Hutson.

Early Friday, 10 men being held at the Orleans Justice Center yanked open a cell door, slipped through a hole behind a toilet, scaled a barbed wire fence and fled into the dark. Only three of the men have since been caught.

— The Associated Press