CHATTANOOGA (AP) -- The state will parole a 73-year-old man who had been captured after 46 years on the run.

State parole board spokeswoman Melissa McDonald said Leroy Albert Morgan was not yet released, but soon would be.

Morgan was arrested in February. He escaped from the Tennessee State Penitentiary in 1962 after serving one year of a three-year burglary sentence from Hamilton County.

Morgan must prove he has adequate housing and can provide for himself. His family said previously he was living in a mobile home next to his son's home in Mosheim. His granddaughter said Morgan was drawing Social Security benefits.

Correction Department officials support the prosecutor's decision not to prosecute Morgan on escape charges. Morgan will be on parole for a year.

Morgan was apprehended in a Tennessee Department of Correction cold-case sweep in February at his Mosheim-area home.

Authorities alleged he had been on the run since a 1961 prison break at the now-closed Nashville Penitentiary.

The elderly escapee had been using the alias James Albert Morgan.

He served one year of a three-year prison term for breaking into a Chattanooga grocery store, records show.

Jerry Lester, director of the Tennessee Department of Correction's Internal Affairs unit, said in March that Morgan told him following his arrest at his Wisecarver Road home in Greene County last month how he and two others escaped.

Lester said Morgan told him that the three floated across the Cumberland River on a log to escape from the "lower farm" of the old Tennessee State Prison in Davidson County on Sept. 22, 1961.

After escaping, Morgan made his way back to his native Hamilton County and changed his name, Social Security number and date of birth.

After working for a time in the Chattanooga area, he fled to Florida where he lived and worked for 14 years before moving to Greene County, Lester said.

At the time of his arrest, Lester said, Morgan was living alone in a mobile home off Wisecarver Road.

Lester described Morgan as "cooperative and kind."

After his arrest in February, Mr. Morgan immediately was taken to the Brushy Mountain Correctional Complex, a maximum security facility in Petros, Tenn., officials said.

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Information from: Chattanooga Times Free Press, http://www.timesfreepress.com