At a news conference Saturday at the Santa Ana jail police detailed how they believe the men escaped.
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In a story reminiscent to the Shawshank Redemption, three men escaped a high-security Orange County prison on Friday, leading to a manhunt throughout Southern California. This undated booking photo provided by the Orange County, Calif., Sheriff’s Department on Saturday, Jan. 23, 2016, shows 43-year-old Bac Duong, one of three jail inmates charged with violent crimes, who esca…
Two of the inmates, Jonathan Tieu, 20, Bac Duong, 43, have deep ties to the community, and sheriff’s officials put out a call in both English and Vietnamese on Monday for help in finding them.
Meanwhile a separate probe was launched into how the inmates managed to obtain the tools to cut through the steel bars and plumbing tunnels to make it to the roof.
The risky inmates were discovered missing Friday from a section of the Santa Ana jail known as Module F, about 16 hours after they broke out of Orange County’s largest jail.
“They cut through a quarter-inch metal plate”, Orange County Sheriff’s Lt. Jeff Hallock said Monday.
Hallock said the facility’s general policy is to do walk-throughs every hour to check on inmates. The man survived, Orange County Lt. Dave Sawyer said. All the time the men wore their orange jail jumpsuits.
Tieu is a gang member who had been in the jail since October 2013 and charged with murder, attempted murder and street terrorism, officials said. “I want you to be…I want my son back”. “We try and limit that”.
“We’re going to take a look at everybody who may have been assigned there”, Lieutenant Hallock told the Associated Press.
“If I were whoever’s investigating, there are some people who would be on a polygraph, I guarantee you”, Kevin Tamez, a prison security expert from Philadelphia-based MPM Group, told the Associated Press. “People in jail have time to sit around and think about ways to defeat our systems”.
There had been two previous escapes from the jail but they were decades ago.
For many years, Vietnam did not honor US government requests to repatriate deportees.
The aging jail was built in 1968 and houses some 900 men. The jail is a “transitory” facility, which means inmates are able to move from area to area for services and other appointments throughout much of the day. “We understand that the gang involvement of at least the two individuals is pretty strong” and community members could be intimidated by the escapees. “There are requirements that they get out and exercise from time to time”, Hutchens said.
Jonathan Tieu, 20, is charged with murder and attempted murder for a gang-related attack.
On Sunday, his mother and sister said they hadn’t heard from him and tearfully pleaded for him to surrender.
Tiffany said, “I for sure, I know he wasn’t the one that orchestrated this, so I feel like he was manipulated or tricked into doing this”.
“Just turn in yourself in”. Mr Nayeri is accused, along with three other men, of kidnapping the owner of a California marijuana dispensary in 2012. They allegedly drove the dispensary owner to a desert spot where they believed he had hidden money and then tortured him using fire and bleach, before cutting off his penis, authorities said. Authorities do not have extradition agreements with Iran, where Nayeri has family, so investigators used a ruse to get him to the Czech Republic, which is more cooperative with the USA for extraditing fugitives, according to Senior Deputy District Attorney Matt Murphy. He was arrested in Prague in November 2014 while changing flights from Iran to Spain. Detectives have not ruled out the possibility that other inmates or jail staff helped, but they don’t now have any suspects, according to Sawyer, who is commander of the sheriff’s criminal investigations bureau.
Authorities have raised the reward for any information that leads to an arrest of the inmates to $50,000. “If anyone sees them, call 911 immediately”.
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The three were also formally charged with escape Monday, prosecutors said.
