SANTA ANA, Calif. – Unlike similar brazen escapes where inmates fled remote prisons into rural areas, the three men who broke out of a Southern California lockup escaped in the middle of densely populated Orange County – where hundreds of officers are centering the search.
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Following a 5am body count at the maximum-security facility on Friday, Jonathan Tieu, Hossein Nayeri and Bac Duong cut their way into unsecured plumbing tunnels, followed them up to the roof, and then rappelled down from the roof using their bedsheets. Then they fled on foot.
No new cameras have been added yet to the two atop the men’s jail, both positioned to capture a fenced recreational area, said sheriff’s spokesman Lt. Jeff Hallock.
Authorities said the inmates were last seen around 5 a.m. Friday in their holding tank and were not reported missing until 9 that night.
Orange County sheriff’s deputies investigate early Saturday morning, January 23, 2016, after three jail inmates charged with violent crimes escaped from Central Men’s Jail in Santa Ana, Calif. The men include 20-year-old Jonathan Ti…
In a dramatic new warning about the danger posed by a southern California jailbreak, an Orange County prosecutor said of one of the escapees: “They let Hannibal Lecter out”.
“They may be embedded somewhere in the community”, Sawyer said of the trio. More involved searches are done randomly, he said, but declined to be more specific. The inmates were considered to be armed and unsafe, with two of the men believed to have ties to Vietnamese gangs.
It’s also unclear why the inmates – who were charged with violent felonies – were housed in the common dorm with dozens of others. “I feel like he was manipulated or tricked into doing this”, said his sister, Tiffany Tieu, telling her brother: “Turn yourself in”.
Mr Tieu’s mother and sister appeared on local news station ABC7 on Sunday to plead with him to give himself up.
He escaped along with 37-year-old Hossein Nayeri, who is accused of kidnapping and torture, and Bac Doung, 43, who was arrested a month ago for attempted murder and several related charges. The other three are a comparison of computer records with a “mod card”, which is essentially a jail ID card that lists a detainee’s charges and other information, Hallock said.
“We have people going to court, we have people going for medical treatment, and you can’t leave them locked down 24 hours a day”. He was arrested in Prague in November 2014 while changing flights from Iran to Spain to visit family. The Orange County Sheriff’s Department provided images of how the inmates escaped.
“There was a disturbance among the inmates… where a deputy was assaulted”, Hallock said. “People in jail have a lot of time to sit around and think about ways to defeat our system”, Hutchens said. Sometime around 8 p.m. there was a fight, which authorities suspect was staged to distract and delay the second head count.
By Sunday, the department had received a number of “very good tips” from the public, and that investigators were on the “right path”, according to Hutchens.
But the aging jail, built in 1968 and housing some 900 men, does have some vulnerabilities.
Attorney Michael Molfetta, who represents Nayeri’s co-defendant, Ryan Kevorkian, blasted sheriff’s officials, saying they should have had a more watchful eye on Nayeri.
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“I think that if they’ve broken out of jail, the last thing they’ll do is try to draw attention to themselves”.
