Prison Drop-Ins Were Special Ops

It's a little frightening to know that our Speical Ops troops don't know where they can and can't land. The paratroopers who recently landed on local state prison grounds were Special Operations Command forces on a training mission, according to The Associated Press.

The 25 heavily-armed soldiers landed at the Fremont County Correctional Facility, some 3 miles away from the intended target of the Fremont County Airport.

“Those were Special Operations Command forces conducting routine training,” Army Col. Hans Bush, a spokesman for the command at MacDill Air Force Base, Fla., said Monday, according to the AP. He declined to specifically identify the units.

Katherine Sanguinetti, Colorado Department of Corrections spokeswoman, said this morning the Department of Defense has not officially released the troops’ identification.

The special operations troops could include Navy Seals or Green Berets.

When confronted by correctional officers shortly after landing in a cornfield on prison grounds, the paratroopers provided documentation that identified them only as Defense Department employees, Sanguinetti said.

The troopers dropped from the sky just before 5 a.m. last Thursday.

Although they were heavily armed with exercise rifles and rubber bullets, the incident ended without violence because prison guards are trained to watch the skies following a helicopter escape in 1989 from a prison near Ordway.

“We don’t know who they were and I’m not sure we’ll ever know who they were,” Sanguinetti said. “Everyone acted appropriately.”

“The good news is everyone was able to quickly assess the situation,” Bush said.

“We train and practice here in the U.S. so we can work through things like this,” Bush said.

The Fremont Correctional Facility is a mixed custody facility that houses inmates classified from minimum to administrative segregation. It houses 1,471 inmates and employs about 450 people.

Canon City Record