Burnet escapee recaptured
By James Walker
A former Burnet man who was serving a nine-year sentence in a federal prison in Bastrop was recaptured early Tuesday, Dec. 16, after escaping from the facility Sunday evening. Dec. 14.
Jimmy Morrisett, who was found guilty of defrauding investor clients of almost $7 million in an Oklahoma federal court last year, was found in an abandoned home in Burnet at about 2:30 a.m., a Federal Bureau of Prisons official said.
Morrisett was discovered missing from the minimum security Satellite Prison Camp Bastrop at about 10:15 p.m. Sunday, according to an official statement released Monday afternoon.
The prison did not say how long Morrisett might have been missing before his absence was discovered.
Burnet Police Chief Paul Nelson said his department received a call from Bastrop prison officials at about 10:30 p.m. Sunday, alerting them to the fact that Morrisett had escaped.
“We went to his home here in Burnet and conducted a search, but didn’t find anything,” Nelson said.
Morrisett, who still has family in Burnet County, worked at the 24 Hour Fitness Center operated by his wife before being sentenced to prison in September of 2013.
The Bastrop Federal Corrections Institution is listed by the Federal Bureau of Prisons as a low-security facility with an adjacent minimum security satallite camp.
The main FCI facility houses 1,125 inmates and the satellite camp has 189, according to the FBP website.
Morrisett is 55 years years old, is about five feet eight inches tall and weighs about 185 pounds, the Burnet police statement said.
Morrisett, once chief executive officer of Red Earth Resources, Inc., and Alpine Petroleum, LLC, pled guilty in a Northern Oklahoma federal court in Tulsa to an unlawful monetary transaction with the funds he obtained from a four-year investor fraud scheme that victimized 238 investors in Oklahoma and 37 other states and Canada.
Morrisett lived in Central Texas with his wife after the FBI and Internal Revenue Service seized their home and other property in Tulsa in January 2007.
At the time of his conviction and sentencing Morrisett worked as a fitness trainer at the Burnet 24 Hour Fitness center.
Federal officials said at the time that Morrisett’s wife was the owner of Burnet 24 Hour Fitness.
Morrisett promoted a Ponzi scheme in which investors supposedly received returns from oil and gas properties, prosecutors said.
Actually, however, most of the returns came from monies provided by investors themselves, many of whom were elderly and lost their life savings.
Morrisett 's schemes began to unravel in 2006 when the number of new investors dwindled and the FBI and IRS began to get complaints from earlier investors that they were not being paid, prosecutors said.
