The word from is a prepositional term that is used to mark a starting point in time or space. If your subject was once in prison or if he was once caught by Agent Hanratty, you would state "escaped from" to indicate that the subject, at some specific point in time, "escaped" his existing state of captivity.
To state that your subject "escaped prison" or "escaped Agent Hanratty" could also be correct. In this context, the implication is that your subject was nearly sent to prison or that Agent Hanratty almost caught the subject. Since captivity never occurred, we state that your subject "escaped" a circumstance that could have happened.
Since the subject was never held captive, there was never a point in time which the term from can reference. Thus, from is omitted.
However, English is often a tricky language. It isn't uncommon for news headlines to leave out some prepositional terms for the sake of brevity. For instance, a newspaper may run a front-page articles with the headline, "John Doe Escapes Prison!"
Did John Doe escape prison by being acquitted of a court accusation? Did he break out and flee from a prison complex? It is impossible to know without reading the story and gaining further context. This is because newspapers and news sites will quite often omit the word from for the sake of saving a bit of headline space.
This may seem inconsequential. However, often what "feels" right about a spoken language is what is commonly heard or read. If you frequently read headlines and news articles, brevity will feel correct.
Hindi doesn't use articles and it is widely spoken as both a first and second language in India. Other Indian languages in the same family might be the same but I can't say for sure. So it seems very natural to assume that this usage arose there as a common mistake in translation that became standard usage over time.
Having lived in India and trained Indians in skills other than English it's been my experience that people there are sometimes perplexed when corrected on these kinds of mistakes that have become so common in India that they are in effect standard. Another example, "One of my cousin called me yesterday."
One might argue that because these mistakes are so ubiquitous they really indicate that the language is changing and developing into its own dialect. This is a question for linguists that I'm not qualified to discuss any more than I have already. However, I would point out that there are almost no native speakers of English in India. With the possible exception of some highly educated enclaves in big cities, English is learned only as a second language, albeit from an early age.
Best Answer
Both are fine; they are both adverbs, though 'near' is as mentioned above also an adjective and a verb. It's entirely up to the writer; English is a rich language. The '-ly' form may place a little more emphasis on the verb, being a conventional adverbial form - the reader's attention is subliminally directed to the verb.[phew, can't quite do it]. 'Near' slightly suggests, in contrast, a quality belonging to whatever is being so described. [wooah, that's not on, effectively]