The last two inmates from a trio who escaped from a California jail last week have been arrested, the Orange County sheriff's office said Saturday.
The last two inmates from a trio who escaped from a California jail last week have been arrested, the Orange County sheriff's office said Saturday.
Jonathan Tieu, 20, of Fountain Valley, and Hossein Nayeri, 37, of Newport Beach were arrested one day after Bac Duong, 43, surrendered by asking a civilian on the street in Santa Ana to contact police.
The sheriff's office gave few details of the arrest of Tieu and Nayeri, but scheduled an afternoon news conference.
The three inmates had been held in a dormitory with about 65 other men in Santa Ana, about 30 miles southeast of Los Angeles.
They escaped early Jan. 22 after cutting a hole in a metal grate then crawling through plumbing tunnels and onto the roof of a five-story jail building, the Associated Press reported. They pushed aside barbed wire and rappelled down using a rope made of bed sheets.
Authorities say Duong has been held without bond since last month on charges of attempted murder, assault with a deadly weapon and other charges in a gang shooting. Immigration authorities and records indicate he had been ordered deported to Vietnam in 1998 but remained in the country and racked up a lengthy rap sheet.
Nayeri had been held without bond since September 2014, charged with kidnapping, torture, aggravated mayhem and burglary.
Nayeri and two other men are accused of kidnapping a California marijuana dispensary owner in 2012, driving him to a spot in the desert where they believed he had hidden money and then torturing him.
The prosecutor in his case drew criticism from her boss when she compared Nayeri to fictional cannibal killer Hannibal Lecter after the escape.
Nayeri, the probable mastermind in the escape, had help from a woman whose English classes he was taking while locked up, authorities allege.
He came to know Nooshafarin Ravaghi, 44, during an English as a second language.
language course inside the Orange County jail.
Investigators believe a close relationship developed between the two, who had exchanged handwritten letters of a "personal nature," sheriff's spokesman Lt. Jeff Hallock said.
"It wasn't the relationship that you would expect between a teacher and an inmate in a custody setting," he said, noting that jail employees go through training about rules and the risk of being manipulated by inmates.
Authorities say Duong stole a van the day after the escape after taking it for a test drive in the only reported sighting of the men since the breakout.
