A prisoner who escaped from the Warren County Jail Wednesday after beating a jailer was captured this morning in Chicago, Sheriff Martin Pace said.

Leon Bryant, 33, 4920 Halls Ferry Road, was arrested without incident just before 6 by the U.S. Marshals Great Lakes Task Force, Pace said.

Bryant was found at the apartment of an acquaintance on the west side of Chicago, the second location in the city that officials had checked for the fugitive, the sheriff said.

“We had begun receiving information Friday that he was in the Chicago area,” Pace said today.

Bryant had been wanted in Warren County on 2008 charges of selling cocaine. He had been caught Tuesday afternoon after returning here from Texas on a Greyhound, and held in the county jail overnight.

When jailer Kenneth Robinson picked up laundry the next morning from Bryant’s cell block on the second floor, Bryant overpowered and attacked him, Pace said. He fled using the elevator to the basement level, touching off a manhunt throughout the city and county.

Robinson was treated at River Region Medical Center for cuts and swelling to his head and then released.

Bryant was in the Cook County Jail, Pace said.

He will have an extradition hearing, perhaps as early as Tuesday, and be returned to Mississippi, where he will face additional charges of escape and assault on a law-enforcement officer in the line of duty, the sheriff said. His original charge was based on the sale of $40 of cocaine to a confidential informant and he had two prior felony convictions.

Contact Pamela Hitchins at phitchins@vicksburgpost.con