Jonathan Tieu and Hossein Nayeri, two of the remaining inmates who escaped from an Orange County jail have been arrested in San Francisco, according to the Orange County Sheriff’s Department, ABC7 reports.
Hossein Nayeri, Jonathan Tieu, and Bac Duong, who had all been charged with violent crimes ranging from kidnapping to murder, escaped in Jan. 22, and were considered to be armed and dangerous.
The trio had headed north to San Jose, and were believed to be traveling to Fresno because of Nayeri’s family connections there, the LA Times reports.
Bac Duong, 43, turned himself in on Jan. 29, after turning around back south earlier in the week. He walked into a Vietnamese business in Santa Ana that had long frequented, and told the owners to call the authorities. Tieu and Nayeri were caught a day later.
Authorities had made a show of their manhunt earlier this week, issuing 30 search warrants and holding a press conference that included an address to the Vietnamese community, whom they suspected could be harboring the trio, the OC Register reports.
Both Tieu and Duong are Vietnamese and were involved in gangs, although authorities refused to say which gangs they were a part of.
The escape probably took weeks or months to plan, authorities said. The three had cut through half-inch steel bars, then traveled through a plumbing tunnel. Then they made their way to an unsecured part of the roof, then used rope made from bed-sheets to get down four stories, over the barbed wires.
“It appears to be a very sophisticated operation, where they were allowed to go through security access points and had some tools that allowed them to do that,” OC Sheriff Sandra Hutchens told the OC Register. “Where they got those tools and how that occurred–we are still looking into that.”
