This sounds familiar ...

Last week, a prisoner escaped the Fayette County Prison by jumping out a window 25 feet above ground. He was quickly apprehended, but in the aftermath of this event, Commission Chairman Vincent Zapotosky took advantage of a public relations opportunity and weighed in.

"This is a great concern, and the other commissioners, along with myself, are taking this very serious," Zapotosky told HeraldStandard.com. "Too many bad things could have happened. Thank God, nothing did.

"The commissioners are going to work to ensure that this does not happen again."

That assessment had a familiar ring to it. So we searched the Fayette Patch Hunky archives and found an eerily similar quote from 2011. Here it is:

"I will assure the people of Fayette County there will be accountability. I will work on it and I will find out what went wrong, and we will do everything we can to hopefully prevent future incidents of this kind."

That comment was made in January 2011, after a 15-month-old girl died in Point Marion, in a case where criticism was levied at Fayette County Children and Youth Services. The person who spoke those words? Fayette County Commissioner Vincent Zapotosky.

Nine months later, in September 2011, CYS came under fire again, after a 4-year-old boy from Springhill Township died. When Zapotosky then said that his solution woud be to seek help from state and federal officials, we pointed out that as a county commissioner, Zapotosky had the power to make changes at CYS, including the hiring of more caseworkers if they were needed.

Although Zapotosky and fellow Commissioner Al Ambrosini raised county property taxes 28 percent this year -- roughly double what Commissioner Angela Zimmerlink supported -- we aren't sure if any addition money for more CYS staff was included in the budget. (We sure would not expect to read some sort of follow-up in the Herald-Standard, either way.)

Some guys over at the fire hall are saying that with Zapotosky again in the vanguard of solving a problem, there is better than a 50-50 chance that another inmate will escape the prison in the near future.