California Jail Escape Update: One Of Three Escapees Surrenders To Police

One of three inmates who escaped a week ago from a maximum-security jail in Southern California has been taken into custody after surrendering to law enforcement, police said on Friday.

Bac Duong, 43, gave himself up to police in Santa Ana, California, shortly before noon, Orange County Sheriff Sandra Hutchens told a news conference.

The other two escapees remained at large on Friday afternoon.

Carrie Braun, a sheriff's spokeswoman, said Duong apparently surrendered "because of the pressure that was being put on him by the general community" during an exhaustive, week-long manhunt.

Duong broke out of the Orange County Men's Central Jail in Santa Ana on Jan. 22 along with 37-year-old Hossein Nayeri and Jonathan Tieu, 20. Hutchens said Duong approached a woman on the street in Santa Ana and said he wanted to turn himself in.

Nooshafarin Ravaghi, a community college instructor who taught at the jail and had befriended Nayeri, was arrested on Thursday on suspicion of assisting in the escape by furnishing the inmates with Google Maps information that included overviews of the jail rooftop and surrounding areas.

Ravaghi and Nayeri had also exchanged handwritten letters outside of class that were personal in nature, sheriff's office spokesman Lieutenant Jeff Hallock told a news conference earlier on Friday.

Nayeri, the presumed mastermind of the breakout, was in jail on charges stemming from the 2012 mutilation torture of a kidnap victim.

Duong and Tieu are both reputed to be connected with Vietnamese-American street gangs. Tieu was facing murder charges and Duong charges of attempted murder and assault with a deadly weapon, among other crimes.

Hallock said it was Duong who on Sunday took what was supposed to be a test drive in a utility van advertised for sale in south Los Angeles and never returned.

Authorities say the men made their getaway by cutting through steel grating inside the jail, climbing through a plumbing conduit to the roof and lowering themselves four floors with bedsheets to the ground. Their disappearance went unnoticed for about 16 hours.

Ravaghi is expected to be arraigned on Monday.

The breakout marks the first jail escape in Orange County since the 1980s, sheriff's officials have said.

In a high profile New York prison break last year, the fugitive inmates had help from a female prison employee who allegedly had sexual relations with one of them. She was sentenced to seven years for her role.

(Reporting by Eric M. Johnson and Dan Whitcomb; Writing by Dan Whitcomb; Editing byTom Brown and Sandra Maler)