The 81-year-old North Carolina man with 29 years of Maryland prison time hanging over his head has been let loose - for now.
Willie Parker spent the past eight days in a Sampson County, N.C., jail before posting a $25,000 bond that a county judge ordered yesterday. He had been living quietly in rural Clinton for the past several decades, after escaping from an Eastern Shore prison camp in 1965.
Parker, whose Maryland sentence was for selling marijuana and for violating his parole on an armed robbery conviction, will await extradition in Sampson County or at his nephew's home in Fayetteville, about an hour away, the judge ordered.
Andrew Jackson, Parker's attorney, said it was "extremely unusual" for a judge to set bail in an extradition case and that Judge Leonard Thagard did so only because of Parker's age and poor health.
In interviews last week, Parker described himself as sick with "everything that you can name," including hepatitis C that can't be treated because of his weak heart.
Parker was arrested Feb. 20 by three U.S. marshals who found him at the small home he shared with another ailing older man.
Maryland authorities have said they found Parker as part of an initiative to close old fugitive cases. Parker's was among the oldest.
Parker said he was not guilty of the Baltimore drug charge and that he persuaded a civilian farmer at the Eastern Shore prison camp to give him a lift to Baltimore, where he promptly caught a Greyhound bus to New York.
For the next decade, he was in and out of more legal trouble - even serving a prison sentence in Washington state - but was never returned to Maryland to serve the rest of his sentence. He said in interviews last week that he figured Maryland authorities had stopped looking for him.
Jackson said the Maryland authorities with whom he has been in touch are researching their options in the case. But a spokesman for the Maryland State Police has said that Parker's age and health do not change the fact that he owes the state prison time.
Parker's next scheduled court appearance is March 7 in Sampson County, but as soon as the two state governors sign off on Parker's extradition, "he's pretty much immediately going back to Maryland," Jackson said.
Nearly everyone at the Sampson County jail was glad to see Parker sprung about 2:30 p.m. yesterday, said Deputy Major Kemely Pickett.
Fellow inmates and sheriff's deputies alike had felt sorry for the hobbled old man they called "Pops" and "Grandpa."
"We've never had anybody of his age in jail here," Pickett said. "A lot of the people who work here weren't even born when he was first incarcerated."
julie.bykowicz@baltsun.com