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SANTA ANA, Calif. (AP) — Unlike similar escapes where dangerous inmates fled into rural areas, the three men who broke out of a Southern California lockup escaped into densely populated suburban communities where they have close ties.
Hundreds of officers are focusing on neighborhoods where the trio charged with violent crimes could be hiding among friends, family or fellow gang members, particularly Orange County's huge Vietnamese population, authorities said Tuesday, the fourth day of the manhunt.
It is just a few miles from the jail where the trio broke out Friday, and two of the inmates, Jonathan Tieu, 20, Bac Duong, 43, have deep ties to the community, which is among the largest in the U.S.
Sheriff's officials put out a call in both English and Vietnamese on Monday for help in finding them. The two "may be embedded" there, said sheriff's Lt. Dave Sawyer, who is leading the investigation.
"We sincerely need input from the community to help us," Sawyer said.
Tieu, Duong and Hossein Nayeri, 37, are considered dangerous and all were awaiting trial for separate violent felonies, authorities said. They have now each been charged with the escape.
Tieu had been held since 2013, accused of murder and attempted murder. Duong faced attempted murder and assault charges in the shooting of a man on his front porch. Nayeri was arrested in 2014 on charges including kidnapping and torture. Authorities said he abducted a marijuana dealer, burned him with a blow torch and cut off his penis because Nayeri thought the man had buried money in the desert.
The men were gone for as long as 16 hours before officials noticed they were missing from the common dorm they share with more than 60 other inmates at Orange County Central Jail. An attack on a guard delayed a Friday night head count by hours.
The trio sawed through a quarter-inch-thick grill on a dormitory wall, got into plumbing tunnels and then sawed through half-inch-thick steel bars as they made their way behind walls to an unguarded area of a roof atop a five-story building. There, they moved aside razor wire and rappelled to the ground using a bed linen.
The sheriff's department has been slow to add more rooftop security cameras at the jail despite a grand jury's recommendations for eight years straight, according to a report Monday in the Orange County Register (http://bit.ly/1OLYVow ). The department has said since 2008 that budget constraints prevented upgrades to the camera systems at the five county jails.
The escape was eerily similar to one last year in New York, where two inmates cut through a portion of a wall hidden under a bunk bed and used piping and tunnels inside the facility to get out. But the search for the pair focused on nearby woods instead of a dense urban population.
A major question for California investigators will be how the men could plan and execute their escape with such precision, said Kevin Tamez, a managing partner for MPM Group, a Philadelphia-based firm that consults on prison security, management and infrastructure.
There is no evidence so far that the trio had help from the inside, but authorities know it's a possibility, Orange County sheriff's Lt. Jeff Hallock said.
It's likely someone slipped them blueprints or told them how the bowels of the jail were laid out, he said.
"If I were whoever's investigating, there are some people who would be on a polygraph, I guarantee you," Tamez said. "They had to have had some inside help."
Motion sensor cameras — available for $55 and often used as baby monitors — can be installed along interior tunnels and pipes to catch inmates, Tamez said. Thorough searches of dorms likely would have discovered tools or damage to the vent grill, he said.
It was the first escape in nearly three decades from the California facility built in 1968. It holds 900 men and is in Santa Ana, about 30 miles southeast of Los Angeles.
Hallock said the jail's general policy is to do walk-throughs every hour to check on inmates. More thorough searches are done randomly, he said, declining to give more details.
It's unclear why the inmates — who are charged with violent felonies — were housed in the common dorm with dozens of others. Assigning them to a large, busy room likely made it easier for them to avoid detection, said Martin Horn, a professor of corrections at John Jay College of Criminal Justice at City University of New York.
Federal authorities are offering $50,000 for information leading to their capture.
DETROIT (AP) —
Michigan's top environmental officer was by turns cooperative and confrontational with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in a letter pledging to work with the federal government to ensure the safety of Flint's drinking water but challenging the legality and scope of some federal demands.
The interim director of the Department of Environmental Quality wrote Friday in a letter to EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy that the state "is committed to working" with her department and Flint to deal with the city's lead-contamination problem. But Keith Creagh said the state has "legal and factual concerns" with an EPA order a day earlier taking state and city officials to task for their efforts so far and requiring them to take specific actions.
Creagh said Michigan "has complied with every recent demand" of the EPA and that Thursday's federal order "does not reference the tens of millions of dollars expended by ... the state for water filters, drinking water, testing and medical services."
"The order demands that the state take certain actions, but fails to note that many of those actions ... have already been taken," Creagh, who recently replaced an official who resigned over the water crisis, wrote in his required response to the EPA's order.
Flint's water became contaminated with lead when the city switched from the Detroit municipal system and began drawing from the Flint River in April 2014 to save the financially struggling city money. The water was not properly treated to keep lead from pipes from leaching into the supply. Some children's blood has tested positive for lead, a potent neurotoxin linked to learning disabilities, lower IQ and behavioral problems.
Creagh wrote that state officials don't know whether it's legal for the EPA to order Michigan to take such actions. Among other requirements, the EPA said the city should: submit plans for ensuring that Flint's water has adequate treatment, including corrosion controls; ensure city personnel are qualified to operate the water system in a way that meets federal quality standards; and create a website where the public can get information.
Earlier Friday, The Flint Water Advisory Task Force issued recommendations to Snyder aimed at restoring reliable drinking water in Flint. The advisory group said its recommendations are more detailed and comprehensive than what the EPA ordered, and Snyder said officials would "move as quickly as possible to determine the best way to achieve the results."
Separately, Snyder announced the suspensions of two employees of the state Department of Environmental Quality in connection with regulatory failures that led to the crisis.
Snyder reportedly also is hiring public relations specialists to help him deal with the Flint water crisis. Snyder chief of staff Jarrod Agen said public money won't be used to hire the Mercury firm, where Agen's wife is a senior vice president in a Florida office, according to the Detroit News and Detroit Free Press. Snyder spokesman Dave Murray didn't reveal how the PR team will be paid.
The advisory panel's recommendations to Snyder included working with the EPA staff on a comprehensive lead-sampling program and seeking help from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in assessing an outbreak of Legionnaires' disease and its cause.
"To help address both the technical issues facing Flint, as well as the public-trust issues, we believe it is imperative to have the right people and organizations involved," task force Co-Chairman Chris Kolb said. "Until the public trust starts to build, this crisis will continue."
Flint's public health emergency led to local, state and federal emergency declarations, the last of which could bring up to $5 million in direct funding to the city. The federal government denied a request for additional aid through a disaster declaration, saying the program is designed for natural disasters and therefore not appropriate for the city's drinking water crisis. The government announced Friday that it had denied an appeal of that decision by Snyder.
The unnamed DEQ employees who were suspended Friday pending investigations work in the agency's drinking water division, state spokesman Kurt Weiss said.
The agency's director and communications director resigned last month.
"Some DEQ actions lacked common sense, and that resulted in this terrible tragedy in Flint," Snyder said.
While much of the blame over the crisis has been directed at Snyder and state officials, particularly the Department of Environmental Quality, some have faulted the EPA's Region 5 office for not acting more forcefully.
The EPA's order to state and city officials came the same day that the agency announced that Susan Hedman, head of the agency's regional office in Chicago whose jurisdiction includes Michigan, was stepping down Feb. 1.
LOS ANGELES (AP) —
It was a daring and elaborate escape. Three inmates, including a man suspected in a killing, cut through metal, crawled through plumbing tunnels, climbed a roof and rappelled down four stories to freedom using ropes made from bedsheets.
It wasn't a Hollywood movie. The real-life breakout eft authorities struggling Monday to find the men and to figure out how they managed to escape the maximum-security jail in Southern California.
The priority was finding the men who could be armed and dangerous, but a probe also was underway to see if they had any help from inside or outside the Orange County Men's Central Jail, authorities said.
Jonathan Tieu, 20, Bac Duong, 43, and Hossein Nayeri, 37, were all awaiting trials for unrelated violent crimes. They vanished early Friday from a dormitory they shared with about 65 other men.
Somehow, the men obtained tools, cut through a quarter-inch-thick grill on a dormitory wall and got into plumbing tunnels.
Cutting through additional half-inch-thick steel bars, they made their way to an unguarded area of a roof atop a four-story building, moved aside razor wire and rappelled to the ground using the bed linen.
The escape wasn't noticed for 16 hours, until a nighttime head count that had been delayed about an hour because of a fight involving other inmates who might have been part of the escape plan.
Clearly, the plan was a long time in the making and carefully thought out, sheriff's Lt. Jeff Hallock said.
"We're talking about breaching, in some places, significant amounts of steel, rebar and metal," Hallock said.
The Mexican border is only a couple of hours south of the prison, but authorities said they had no evidence that the men had left the country.
Authorities say their victims, prosecutors and detectives involved in their cases have been warned and investigators also are reaching out to their families and acquaintances.
Federal authorities are offering $50,000 in rewards for information leading to their recapture.
"There's people out there that know who these people are, who may have seen them. We're asking for phone calls, whether it's any piece of information you may have," Hallock said.
Investigators also eyed questions about how the men got the cutting tools; how they knew the jail layout so well; and who might have provided help.
"We're going to take a look at everybody who may have been assigned there," Hallock said. "What I can assure you is that the compromises in security have been shored up."
He didn't provide details.
"Escapes do occur from time to time," Sheriff Sandra Hutchens said. "We try and limit that. We learn from the mistakes. I can tell you that this is a very sophisticated-looking operation. People in jail have a lot of time to sit around and think about ways to defeat our systems."
There were two previous escapes from the jail decades ago, but nobody had managed another in more than 20 years — until Friday.
The aging jail was built in 1968 and houses some 900 men. Its design allows inmates to move through different areas more easily than more modern jails, making it difficult to get daytime head counts.
"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. There are requirements that they get out and exercise from time to time," Hutchens said.
Tieu had been held on a $1 million bond since October 2013 on charges of murder, attempted murder and shooting at an inhabited dwelling. His case is believed to be gang-related.
On Sunday, his mother and sister said they hadn't heard from him and tearfully pleaded for him to surrender.
"I for sure know he wasn't the one who orchestrated this. I feel he was manipulated or tricked into doing this," his sister Tiffany Tieu told KABC-TV..
"Just turn in yourself in. Don't let (it) drag on," she said.
Nayeri had been held without bond since September 2014 on charges of kidnapping, torture, aggravated mayhem and burglary. He and three other men are accused of kidnapping a marijuana dispensary owner in 2012, driving him to a desert spot where they believed he had hidden money, and cutting off his penis, authorities said.
Nayeri fled the U.S. to his native Iran, where he remained for several months. He was arrested in Prague in November 2014 while changing flights from Iran to Spain.
Duong has been held without bond since last month on charges of attempted murder, assault with a deadly weapon and other charges.