A SHERIFF from Tennessee, the U.S., has revealed how six men managed to escape jail on Christmas Day — by squeezing out of a hole behind a toilet.

    The men made the undignified exit — which had echoes of the movie “The Shawshank Redemption” — early Sunday morning, from a toilet block in the Cocke County Jail Annex.

    What might have seemed like a Christmas miracle for the prisoners was short-lived as five of them were rounded up in the last two days. But their escape — explained by a local sheriff to WVLT — is still startling.

    The six men — David Wayne Frazier, John Mark Spier, Steven Lewis, John Shehee, Eric Click and Harce Allen —were all being held in the jail for various reasons; some were awaiting trial, others were serving time.

    But all wanted out.

    At around 1:30 a.m. Sunday morning, the men — possibly aided by some of the 17 other offenders being housed in the jail — headed to the toilet block.

    There, they went to work on a deteriorated metal toilet that had been bolted onto a damaged wall.

    “The inmates escaped after a water leak occurred behind a wall unit stainless steel toilet,” Cocke County Sheriff Armando Fontes told WVLT.

    “Apparently the bolts holding the unit rusted out and there was prior damage to the concrete due to plumbing repairs.”

    The men wrenched the toilet from the wall, uncovering a hole leading to a hinged metal panel.

    That panel opened onto the outside of the building. The men squeezed their way through the hole — leaving behind just debris and a pair of Crocs — and jumped a fence outside in their bid for freedom.

    It was only when guards performed a headcount the following morning that they realized the men had gone. Fontes said that the building had suffered deterioration and sewage problems, and that patching it up would be expensive. In the meantime, he said, he was focused on hauling the men back in.

    That focus paid off, with all but one of the men now being back in custody.

    The breakout has been likened to the one seen in the movie “The Shawshank Redemption,” in which Tim Robbins’s character tunnels into a sewage pipe and uses it to escape prison.

    (SD-Agencies)