ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. – The Bernalillo County Sheriff’s Office say they captured a detainee who escaped on Saturday.

19-year-old Josef Toney escaped from the county’s Youth Services Center Saturday around 1:30 p.m. The sheriff says his office was not notified until around 5:30 p.m. Toney was later arrested around 1:30 Sunday morning. 

New court records show Toney was seen on surveillance video messing with a locked gate on one of the patios while another detainee was on the lookout. 

Deputy County Manager Greg Perez says clearly some changes need to be made to update security and staff training at the Juvenile Detention Center. 

“This was another area where we had some amount of lapse, you can attribute that to a multitude of things. One being very inexperienced staff. We have increased our staff by about 50 individuals in the last three months. So with that comes training, comes overall experience,” said Greg Perez, a Bernalillo County deputy manager.  

Perez says there are 54 juveniles at the center and 27 of them are there for murder.  

But if Toney is 19-years-old, why was he still at a juvenile center? Well, he was convicted for killing two people back in 2021 when he was 16. This is a grey area in the children’s code that Allen says needs to change. 

“My personal opinion is this should be a facility, but not a long term facility. Many don’t know, this is a facility for people to be held here for 90 days, this individual has been here for two years,” said BCSO Sheriff John Allen. 

The sheriff says older juveniles contribute to the prison culture, and that leads to incidents like the recent disturbance last December. That’s when 13 juveniles armed themselves with makeshift weapons and barricaded facility doors.

Allen says he’s pushing lawmakers to make changes and plans to bring his concerns to the governor. 

“It can’t fall on deaf ears anymore. After the Dec. 25 incident here, I told everybody I warned you, and here we are. I warned you. And we’re very lucky that nobody else during this incident was hurt,” said Allen. 

Allen wants to see something come out of all this.

It’s still unclear why it took four hours for BCSO to be notified. Allen says that’s one of the things his office is working to change alongside the Youth Services Center.

Two employees from the Juvenile Detention Center are on administrative leave.

Toney was scheduled to be sentenced this week for the 2021 murder charges. He took a plea deal in April. Now, he’s facing a new charge of escaping from jail, and he’s charged as an adult. 

Toney was booked into the Metropolitan Detention Center.