When the news is interesting enough it can spread amazingly quickly by literal word of mouth alone. Back in the Eighties a local Philly newscaster was rumored to have been hospitalized in a gerbiling mishap and it took about a day for everyone in the region to have been told about it. With just phones and face-to-face meetings you can have an exponential rise in knowledge of a thing in no time at all. Probably the whole prison knew within minutes of the incident, and the people on the outside would be hearing about it, the medical people, all the people they told and swore to secrecy, all the people they told, all the DOJ officials and the penumbra around them, the news moving out and out and out, and meantime there’s the time-consuming process of getting the official news approved and sent out and sure, someone’s on his or her phone and that’s that. There’s probably no followable trail on this.