A convict being sought by authorities after escaping from a maximum-security prison in northern New York was serving a sentence of life without parole for the 2002 killing of an upstate sheriff’s deputy.

David Sweat was one of three men arrested after 36-year-old Deputy Kevin Tarsia of the Broome County Sheriff’s Office was fatally shot on the Fourth of July in 2002 in the town of Kirkwood, near the New York-Pennsylvania border outside Binghamton.

Police said the men had stolen rifles and handguns from a fireworks store just across the border in Pennsylvania by ramming a pickup truck into the building.

Tarsia later confronted the men in a park in Kirkwood, his hometown. Police said Sweat and another man fatally shot the deputy. Sweat and the accomplice pleaded guilty a year after the killing to first-degree murder.

(AP)