An escaped prisoner was caught in Georgia - after he called his mom from a gas station

A prisoner who escaped from a correctional facility in Enfield, Conn., was captured in Canton, Ga., Wednesday.

The move that wound up ending the 10-day manhunt for 25-year-old Jerry Mercado? Calling his mom from a gas station.

Mercado escaped from the Carl Robinson Correctional Institute in Enfield, Conn., on Jan. 7, where he was serving time on third-degree burglary charges, according to NBC Connecticut.

Police said he may have escaped the prison by hiding under a vehicle - either a garbage truck or state police van - before fleeing to New York City and, eventually, Georgia, the station reported.

Somehow he ended up in Canton, where he walked into a Chevron gas station to asked to use the store’s phone.

“He asked if the phone was tapped. He asked if the calls were being recorded,” the store’s manager Jennifer Fernandez told the Hartford Courant. “He asked me if there were a lot of sheriffs in town.”

Fernandez told WSB-TV she heard one of his phone calls. It was to his mother.

“Hey mom, I’m fine,’ he said, according to Fernandez. “Well, I’m calling from hell.”

Fernandez told WFSB she and Mercado spoke a little bit after that call.

“When he hung up he asked me if any jobs were hiring and I told him about a couple of places around here. But he said ‘I need money now, I need at least $100 to leave,’ Fernandez told the station.

“I told him, ‘Well I don’t know you can stand here and see if somebody will come pick you up and get a job.’ But he said I don’t have an ID, I don’t have a social security or a birth certificate.’”

Connecticut police were able to trace the phone calls back to the Chevron and called Canton police to look for Mercado.

He was still in the store when officers walked in, but they didn’t make the connection. He slipped away as the cops were looking at surveillance video, the Hartford Courant reported. Nobody had realized who the scruffy looking man in the back was until it was too late.

Police told Fernandez to call them if she saw him again, and when she saw him standing by a building later that day, she immediately called the police. He had been staying at a nearby warming station for the homeless at a church, WSB-TV reported, and so was still in the area.

He was arrested without incident. Officials say they plan to take him back to Connecticut and transfer him to the maximum-security Northern Correctional Institution, according to WTNH.

This story was originally published January 19, 2018 at 8:50 AM with the headline "An escaped prisoner was caught in Georgia - after he called his mom from a gas station."