By Richard Winton and James Queally
Los Angeles Times
LOS ANGELES — Several gang members have been arrested in connection with a jailbreak at Orange County’s largest lockup, but police have yet to locate the three men who escaped from the Men’s Central Jail in Santa Ana last week, Sheriff Sandra Hutchens said Wednesday.
It was not clear what role, if any, the men played in the escape, but law enforcement officials have been pressuring local gangs ever since Jonathan Tieu, Bac Duong and Hossein Nayeri broke out and disappeared last Friday.
The sheriff did not provide more details about the arrests or name the suspects.
Hutchens also said she believes Nayeri, a 37-year-old inmate with a military background who was awaiting trial in a vicious torture plot, masterminded the escape plot.
Sheriff’s officials have turned their attention to the local Vietnamese community in recent days, based on Tieu and Duong’s possible ties to the Little Saigon section of Westminster and Garden Grove. Tieu lived in the neighborhood and police have described him as a “documented Vietnamese gang member,” and Duong was a Vietnamese national who entered the United States legally in 1991.
Hutchens said she was interviewed on local Vietnamese radio and television stations Wednesday, and police previously made pleas for the public’s help in locating the suspects in English and Vietnamese during a press briefing earlier this week.
Hutchens, who also said she suspects the escapees had “outside help,” announced changes to the jail’s head count policies, which have been heavily criticized in recent days.
The trio broke out of a fourth-floor dormitory that housed 65 other inmates on Friday morning, but the escape went undetected for at least 16 hours. Deputies only conduct physical head counts of inmates twice a day in Orange County, a practice that has drawn stark criticism from corrections experts.
Hutchens said changes had been made to the policy, but did not elaborate. She also continued to defend the decision to house the three men in dormitory-style housing, rather than in individual cells, despite the fact that all three were awaiting trial on violent crimes.
“We house based on behavior and there were no issues with Mr. Nayeri, with any of these individuals, while they were in our custody,” she said. “In terms of the count, that was a breakdown, and we are looking at who helped these individuals because they did have help.”
Hutchens said the jail does have individual cells, but normally reserves those for transgender inmates or other prisoners who must be separated from the general population.
The men cut through at least four layers of steel, metal and rebar before ascending to the roof of the Santa Ana jailhouse, where they used a makeshift rope of knotted bed sheets and cloth to rappel down the side of the building.
They haven’t been seen since.
Copyright 2016 Los Angeles Times