LOS ANGELES — The three men who escaped from an Orange County jail last week held a cab driver hostage for several days, and an argument over whether or not to kill the man may have prompted one of the fugitives to surrender, sheriff’s officials said Monday.
Investigators Monday released a detailed timeline of the inmates’ movements, describing in great detail a weeklong flight from that took the men from the Men’s Central Jail in Santa Ana, across several cities in Southern California and north to San Jose.
Lt. Jeffrey Hallock, a Sheriff’s Department spokesman, said the escape plot was hatched over the span of six months. Nooshafarin Ravaghi, an English as a second language teacher who worked at the jail, was involved in the planning phase with inmate Hossein Nayeri, the alleged mastermind of the escape, Hallock said.
Ravaghi was arrested in connection with the escape plot last week, but Orange County District Attorney Tony Rackauckas said there was “insufficient evidence” to bring charges against her during a separate news briefing Monday.
Nayeri, 37, Jonathan Tieu, 20, and Bac Duong, 43, escaped from the Men’s Central Jail on Jan. 22 by cutting through several layers of metal, steel and rebar on their way to the facility’s roof, before rappelling down the side of the building shortly after 5 a.m.
They vanished after a head count, and the escape went undetected for at least 16 hours until deputies conducted a second inmate count.
The men used that head start to their advantage, Hallock said Monday. Immediately after escaping the jail, the men were picked up by an accomplice in Santa Ana and driven to a home in Westminster. They spent the rest of the day moving between residences in Westminster, Huntington Beach and Santa Ana, as deputies remained unaware that they had left the jail, Hallock said.
Around the same time sheriff’s deputies realized the men were gone, the trio were riding in a cab to Rosemead, where they stopped at a Target store.
At some point, Hallock said Duong shoved a gun into the cab driver’s rib cage, and took him hostage.
The men spent the night at an unknown location in Los Angeles County. The next morning, Jan. 23, Duong stole the White GMC utility van that the men would travel in as they continued to avoid detection, Hallock said.
Over the next three days, as police continued to scour Southern California for the fugitives and began leaning on a Vietnamese street gang that Tieu was affiliated with, the men hid out at the Flamingo Inn Motel in Rosemead, Hallock said.
The cab driver remained their prisoner.
On Jan. 26, four days after the escape, Tieu sent a letter to his mother from a U.S. Post Office in Garden Grove, according to Hallock, who said he believed the mailing of the letter was a distraction. The men fled north to San Jose a short time later, with the cab driver in tow.
The escape plan began to crumble the next day inside the Alameda Motel in San Jose. An argument over whether or not to kill the cab driver and “bury his body” prompted a physical fight between Nayeri and Duong on Jan. 27, Hallock said.
Nayeri and Tieu left the motel room on Jan. 28 in order to have tints applied to the windows of the stolen van, and Duong and the cab driver used that opportunity to flee back to Southern California, according to Hallock.
Duong and the cab driver drove south in the man’s taxi, returning to Rosemead on Thursday night. Duong surrendered to authorities the next day.
Rackauckas also said Monday that another accomplice, Loc Ba Nguyen, has been charged with smuggling weapons and tools into the jail that were used in the escape. Nguyen was arrested last week during a series of sweeps connected to the jailbreak investigation.
While Hallock maintained that Ravaghi was critical to the escape plot, Rackauckas said he was referring the case back to the Sheriff’s Department for further investigation. The teacher was released from police custody Monday, and Rackauckas said it was “unfortunate she was labeled as a conspirator.”
Hallock said last week that handwritten letters between Nayeri and Ravaghi suggested an unprofessional relationship between student and teacher. But on Monday, Rackauckas said Nayeri was the lone author of those messages.
Police have yet to recover the tools used to cut through walls and air ducts to gain access to the roof, and it remains unclear how they obtained them or managed to make their escape without causing enough noise to attract attention.
Ravaghi was arrested last week on suspicion of aiding in the escape but denied providing the men with any cutting tools. Investigators are still trying to determine if Ravaghi provided a Google Earth map of the jail, but have not recovered the printout.
The hunt for the three men came to a close over the weekend. On Friday, Duong walked into an auto body shop in Santa Ana, not far from the jail itself, and asked a longtime friend to call the police and arrange his surrender.
A few hours later, police developed information that Nayeri and Tieu had fled to San Jose, and could be traveling to the Fresno area, where Nayeri grew up. A passerby noticed the van the men had been hiding in outside a Whole Foods market in San Francisco early Saturday morning, and city police captured the two men in short order.
Nayeri took off on foot but was arrested within minutes, while Tieu was found hiding in the van.
Orange County Sheriff Sandra Hutchens has promised a thorough investigation to determine what measures could have been taken to prevent, or more quickly discover, the escape. The jail’s head count policies have been criticized by prison experts and the union that represents county sheriff’s deputies.
In a letter issued Friday, the union called for the removal of the captain who oversees the Santa Ana jail and accused the facility’s staff of ignoring the proper policy on counting inmates for months before the three men escaped.
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