Eric Frein — forty-eight days in the Poconos, captured at an empty hangar

On October 30, 2014, members of a U.S. Marshals tactical team arrested Eric Matthew Frein without resistance in an open field beside an abandoned aircraft hangar at the Birchwood-Pocono Airpark, ending a forty-eight-day manhunt across the wilderness of northeastern Pennsylvania. Frein, then thirty-one, was a self-taught survivalist and military reenactor who, seven weeks earlier, had ambushed the Pennsylvania State Police barracks at Blooming Grove with a high-powered rifle, killing one trooper and gravely wounding another before vanishing into the Pocono Mountains. The marshals, in a detail noted at the time, restrained him with the handcuffs of the corporal he had killed.

The attack came during a late-night shift change on September 12, 2014. Firing a .308-caliber rifle from the treeline outside the barracks, Frein killed Corporal Bryon K. Dickson II, thirty-eight, and shot Trooper Alex Douglass, who survived with disabling injuries. Frein then disappeared into terrain he knew well, prompting a search that at its peak involved nearly a thousand officers, ranged across more than three hundred square miles, closed schools, and cost an estimated 11.9 million dollars.

The hunt was a slow contest of attrition rather than a chase. Searchers periodically recovered items Frein abandoned in the woods — among them an AK-47-style rifle, pipe bombs, ammunition, and soiled diapers he had apparently used to remain motionless in hiding. The discoveries confirmed both his presence and his preparation, but for weeks he stayed ahead of the cordon, moving at night through a landscape of dense forest and abandoned structures. The end was an anticlimax: spotted near a disused airfield, he gave up without a fight.

A jury in Pike County convicted Frein in April 2017 on all twelve counts, including first-degree murder of a law enforcement officer, two counts of terrorism, and two counts involving weapons of mass destruction. A week later the same jury sentenced him to death. In April 2019 the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, in a mandatory review, affirmed the conviction and the death sentence, finding the evidence sufficient to support both.