He was on the run for 15 years and had made it onto the Oklahoma Department of Corrections most wanted list.
This Saturday, the 15-year run from law enforcement came to an end, nearly 800 miles away from where it started in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Augustus King, 64, was arrested by Knoxville Police at the Tennova-Physician's Regional Medical Center in North Knoxville after police said he attempted to get into the hospital using false information. Police were called after hospital employees became suspicious.
"It was a disturbance call that there was someone trying to pass themselves off as someone who he was not," said Darrell DeBusk, Knoxville Police Department spokesperson. "The more we looked into it, the more we started getting information that matched information we had received out of Oklahoma. We ultimately got a hit that this was an individual who had escaped from the Oklahoma Department of Prisons back in 2002."
King was first arrested in Oklahoma in 1983, and escaped from the Department of Corrections in 1985. He was sentenced to 10 years behind bars for forgery and fraud in 1989. In 2002, he escaped from a halfway house while on probation and was placed on the most wanted list.
"15 years is a long time to evade capture, and we had a lot of guys looking for him," said Matt Elliott, Oklahoma Department of Corrections spokesman. "It’s a big operation and he was able to avoid capture for a while, but we finally got him thanks to the Knoxville Police Department."
King was homeless while living in Knoxville, but authorities do not yet know how long he had been here. With the help of federal marshals and local law enforcement, the Oklahoma Department of Corrections had been searching in Georgia, Texas and Oklahoma, where they believed King to be. It came as a surprise when King was found in Knoxville.
"We’re not really sure exactly what he’s been doing, but he’s been a career criminal," Elliott said. "He was just real adept at using different identities, things like that, that he had assumed to escape our grasp."
King had several known aliases, including Augustus W. King, Charles Bryant, Wayne L. Jenkins, Augustus W. King III and Britt M. Schrigver.
King remains in Tennessee waiting for an extradition hearing back to Oklahoma.
"Now he gets to come back to Oklahoma and spend some time with us," Elliott said.