NEW ORLEANS — A jail maintenance worker has been arrested after admitting he turned water off to a toilet covering a hole in a cell wall, allowing 10 men to squeeze through the gap and escape the facility.

The inmates pulled off the daring escape from a jail early Friday by yanking open a faulty cell door, moving the toilet and slithering through the hole. Graffiti on the wall included the message “To Easy LoL,” with an arrow pointing to the gap.

Officials have underscored multiple security lapses, including ineffective cell locks and that the inmates escaped when the lone guard monitoring them went to get food. The absence of the inmates, many charged with or convicted of violent offenses such as murder, was not reported to law enforcement for hours. Four have since been apprehended and six remain at large.

During a tense New Orleans City Council meeting on Tuesday, Orleans Parish Sheriff Susan Hutson, who oversees the jail, said she “takes full accountability” for the escape.

Maintenance worker Sterling Williams, 33, admitted to law enforcement that one of the escapees “advised him to turn the water off in the cell” before the men slipped through the hole in the wall, the Louisiana Attorney General’s office said in a statement.

Williams is charged with 10 counts of principle to simple escape and malfeasance in office and is being held at the Plaquemines Parish Detention Center.

Williams said one of the escapees threatened to “shank” him if he did not turn off the water, according to an arrest affidavit. Another inmate tried to take Williams’ phone and attempted to get him to bring a book with cash app information.

When pressed about the alleged threat, Attorney General Liz Murrill said Williams “made some bad decisions” and that the staffer could have brought the threat and escape plan to someone’s attention.

Babbitt settlement: The Trump administration has agreed to pay just under $5 million to settle a wrongful death lawsuit that Ashli Babbitt’s family filed over her shooting by an officer during the U.S. Capitol riot, according to a person with knowledge of the settlement. The person insisted on anonymity.

The settlement would resolve the $30 million federal lawsuit that Babbitt’s estate filed last year in Washington.

On Jan. 6, 2021, a Capitol police officer shot Babbitt as she tried to climb through the broken window of a barricaded door leading to the Speaker’s Lobby.

The officer was cleared of wrongdoing by the U.S. Attorney’s office for the District of Columbia, which concluded that he acted in self-defense and in the defense of members of Congress. The Capitol Police also cleared the officer.

‘Dilbert’ creator cancer: Scott Adams, the cartoonist who created the comic strip “Dilbert,” said on his podcast Monday that he had the same kind of aggressive prostate cancer as former President Joe Biden and that it had spread to his bones. He said he had only months to live.

“My life expectancy is maybe this summer,” he said.

Adams, 67, is a supporter of President Donald Trump and has been critical of Biden, but Monday he expressed his sympathy for the former president.

It was not clear when Adams was diagnosed, but he said he decided to share the news after learning that Biden had the same disease, in part because he hoped that Biden’s announcement would draw attention away from his own.

He had kept quiet about it to prolong a sense of normalcy, he said: “Once you go public, you’re just the dying cancer guy.”

Adams created “Dilbert,” which mocks office culture, in 1989, and it was syndicated around the world.

In 2023, hundreds of newspapers dropped the cartoon after Adams said on his podcast that Black people were “a hate group” and that white people should “just get the hell away” from them. He later said his comments were intended as hyperbole.

Combs trial: An angry Sean “Diddy” Combs demanded $20,000 from Casandra “Cassie” Ventura’s mother and threatened to release explicit sex tapes of his longtime girlfriend after learning she was dating someone else, the mother testified Tuesday at the hip-hop mogul’s sex trafficking trial.

Regina Ventura said she felt “physically sick” when her daughter sent her an email in late 2011 to say Combs threatened to release two explicit videos of her and send someone to hurt her and the man she was seeing, the rapper Kid Cudi.

Cudi, whose real name is Scott Mescudi, is expected to testify by Thursday.

Combs, 55, is accused of exploiting his entertainment power broker status to abuse women, including Cassie, through threats and violence for two decades from 2004 until his arrest last September. He has pleaded not guilty.