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The Brazilian Inmate Who Tried to Escape Dressed as His Teen Daughter Was Found Dead

After the failed jailbreak attempt, he was put into a high-security
42-year-old convicted drug dealer’s plan of escape was to switch places with his daughter and put her in prison instead of him

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The Brazilian inmate who tried to escape from prison disguised as his teenage daughter, wearing a plastic mask, a black wig, a grey hoodie — and a bra — was found dead in his jail cell three days later.

After his elaborate jailbreak attempt, captured on video, Clauvino da Silva allegedly killed himself, said Rio de Janeiro state authorities on Tuesday.

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“The inmate appears to have hanged himself with a bedsheet,” Rio’s prison authority said in a statement.

The 42-year-old convicted drug dealer’s plan of escape was to switch places with his daughter and put her in prison instead of him, according to Rio prison officials. After visiting hours at Banju jail, da Silva tried to flee through the front door dressed as her.

Guards quickly snatched the disguised prisoner after his nerves got the best of him and gave him away, according to prison officials.

“When he started talking, and pretending to speak like a woman, the guard realized that it was an attempted jailbreak, and identified him,” said Moyses Henriques, deputy head of prison operations in Rio state, to Reuters.

Following the failed getaway, Silva was put in a high-security unit. But prison guards later found him lifeless in his cell. He'd been serving a sentence of nearly 74 years.

Silva’s death is the latest shocking incident from Brazil’s troubled prison system. Nearly 60 people died last week when a riot broke out in a Para prison, according to Reuters, and 55 died in a three-day riot incited by rival gang violence across four prisons in Manaus in May.

The country’s rising prison population is only expected to get worse, with its recently-elected far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, calling for criminals to die ‘“like cockroaches.”

Cover: This photo released by the Rio de Janeiro Penitentiary Administration Secretariat, shows the mask, wig and women's clothing that was used by jailed Brazilian drug trafficker Clauvino da Silva, alias “Baixinho,” which means "Shorty," in an attempt to escape from jail in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Sunday, Aug. 4, 2019. (Rio de Janeiro Penitentiary Administration Secretariat via AP)