A prison guard in New Jersey has killed himself after two inmates who escaped left a note thanking him for his help.

Rudolph Zurick, 40, shot himself in the head at his home on Wednesday only hours before he was due to be questioned by investigators about the jailbreak, which has been compared to the one inThe Shawshank Redemption.

Otis Blunt and Jose Espinosa broke out of the Union County jail on December 15 by crawling through holes chiselled through a cinder-block cell wall with a length of wire and the knob from a water tap.

They had hidden the holes with pin-ups of scantily clad women, just as Tim Robbins’s character in the 1994 film uses a poster of Raquel Welch to conceal his escape tunnel.

Investigators believe that Blunt, who was awaiting trial for allegedly shooting a supermarket manager during a robbery, squeezed through a hole into Espinosa’s cell.

From there Espinosa, a Blood Street gang member awaiting sentencing for a fatal drive-by shooting, and Blunt both crawled through a second hole in an exterior wall on to a roof.

The pair jumped over a 25ft-high fence topped with razor wire on to a railway track outside the prison walls and ran in opposite directions.

The two left behind a mocking note reading: “Thank you Officer Zurick for the tools needed. You’re a real pal. Happy holidays.” It was signed with a Smiley face and a drawing of a hand with a raised middle finger. The escape was not discovered immediately because the two inmates left dummies made out of bedsheets in their bunks as decoys. It was Mr Zurick who first noticed that they were missing and reported their disappearance at 5pm.

Theodore Romankov, the local prosecutor, has emphasised since the escape that investigators believe the note was intended simply to mock Mr Zurick, a guard at the jail for 15 years.

Michael Mitzner, his lawyer, insisted that Mr Zurick had done nothing wrong and had been cooperating fully with the investigation. He was due to appear for a routine interview at police headquarters yesterday morning. The inquiry was into possible administrative infractions rather than any criminal conduct. “I don’t know why he did it. Obviously, he was unhappy that an escape occurred and that his name got mentioned,” Mr Mitzner told the Newark Star-Ledger. “It’s hard to figure out what goes through one’s mind.”

Neighbours and friends suggested, however, that the investigation had been weighing on Mr Zurick’s mind and described him as visibly upset. “I saw him two days ago,” one neighbour told theNew York Post. “He was looking really sad. I said to him, ‘Hang in there. It’s not your fault’. He said, ‘They are going to say it is’.”

They said that the prison guard lost his father two years ago and his mother also died recently. The family did not put up their usual Christmas lights at their home this year.

Mr Zurick, described as a “by-the-book” warder and champion weight-lifter, shot himself with his own private semi-automatic pistol in the basement of the home in Sayreville he shared with his wife, Lisa, and their four-year-old daughter, Nina. Blunt and Espinosa remain at large and are to be featured tomorrow on the television show America’s Most Wanted.

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