West could not get through. By the time he had widened the opening enough to allow passage, the other three had already begun their climb. Whether he tried to call up to them, whether they waited any interval, whether there was any communication at this moment — none of this is documented. The other three left.
West descended back to his cell. He found, in the workshop space, the unfinished pontoon, three life preservers (made for the original four participants), a paddle, and his own dummy head — a head that was now useless because West was not going to be leaving.
He looked up through the shaft to see if the others were still there. They were not. He returned to his bunk.
He was found in his cell on the morning of June 12, in a prison that had just discovered three of its inmates were missing.
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## Discovery: The Morning of June 12
The wake-up bell rang at seven o’clock.
The discovery that something was wrong in the three cells would have followed quickly. The standard procedure for a cell check that received no response was to repeat the call, then enter the cell. When guards entered and lifted the blankets, or touched the figures in the beds, the deception was immediately apparent.
Exactly which guard made the discovery, in which sequence the three cells were checked, and what the initial verbal communication up the chain of command looked like — these specifics are not fully documented in sources accessible for this article. What is documented is the immediate consequence: the entire institutional apparatus of Alcatraz went into emergency mode.