Santa Ana jail escapees likely had inside help, expert says

last updated 26 January 2016

A security expert said he believes that three inmates who escaped from a Santa Ana, California, jail on Friday had assistance from someone on the inside.

The men cut through a metal grate, crawled through plumbing tunnels, sawed through steel bars, then used a rope made of bed linens to rappel down from the roof of the jail to freedom, authorities say. Kevin Tamez of the MPM Group, a firm that consults on prison security, said it's likely the inmates — Jonathan Tieu, 20; Bac Duong, 43; and Hossein Nayeri, 37 — were given blueprints to the Men's Central Jail or told about the layout. "If I were whoever's investigating, there are some people who would be on a polygraph, I guarantee you," he told The Associated Press. "They had to have had some inside help." A spokesman for the Orange County Sheriff's Department said there is no evidence of any help from prison workers, but it hasn't been ruled out.

Others believe the security was too lax. "This summer we had this huge escape from Clinton Prison in New York," Martin Horn of the CUNY John Jay College of Criminal Justice told AP, "and every prison or jail administrator in the country should have said to themselves, 'Huh, I wonder if I am vulnerable?' and should have checked their steam shafts and tunnels and every other thing that gives access to the outside." All three inmates stand accused of violent crimes, including murder, attempted murder, and torture, and it's unclear why there were in a dorm with more than 60 other inmates. They are still on the loose, and authorities believe Tieu and Duong are possibly hiding among Orange County's Vietnamese community.

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Catherine Garcia has worked as a senior writer at The Week since 2014. Her writing and reporting have appeared in Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times, Wirecutter, NBC News and "The Book of Jezebel," among others. She's a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.