Fugitive pair captured in San Francisco after Orange County jail escape
A civilian tip near a Whole Foods parking lot led San Francisco police to Hossein Nayeri and Jonathan Tieu, ending an eight-day manhunt after the Orange County jail escape.
A civilian tip near a Whole Foods Market parking lot in San Francisco’s Park District led officers to Hossein Nayeri and Jonathan Tieu, two fugitives who had slipped out of Orange County’s jail system eight days earlier and were moving through the city with a stolen white van. For San Francisco, the arrests landed as a reminder that high-risk suspects can cross into local neighborhoods quickly, with the first break in the case coming from a resident who noticed something suspicious rather than from a broad public warning.
Police said the search narrowed on Saturday, Jan. 30, 2016, after a passerby flagged down officers about a suspicious person and vehicle near Golden Gate Park. San Francisco Police Department officers first arrested Nayeri, 37, after a short foot pursuit. They then found Tieu, 20, hiding inside a stolen white GMC van linked to the escape. Both men were taken first to the San Francisco County Jail before being transferred back to Orange County early Sunday, around 1 a.m.
The pair’s arrest came less than 24 hours after the third escapee, Bac Duong, 43, surrendered in Santa Ana, closing out an eight-day manhunt that began when all three broke out of the Orange County Men’s Central Jail on Jan. 22, 2016. The escape involved sawing through steel bars, moving through plumbing tunnels and rappelling down from the jail roof, a sequence that exposed major security failures at a maximum-security facility. Orange County Sheriff Sandra Hutchens said at the time that “the entire state can breathe a sigh of relief,” while authorities said they would keep investigating how the jail breakdown happened.
In San Francisco, the episode raised immediate questions about how the fugitives had stayed hidden long enough to reach the city and whether they had tried to contact a friend or relative in the Richmond District. The case also underscored how much depended on sharp-eyed residents and street-level coordination between agencies: local police handled the arrests, while Orange County authorities took the fugitives back south and continued the wider investigation.
A homeless San Francisco man, Matthew Hay-Chapman, later received credit for helping identify the fugitives after noticing the white van police were seeking and recognizing Nayeri from the papers he read each morning. Orange County Supervisor Todd Spitzer helped distribute a $150,000 reward among tipsters, including a $100,000 award to Hay-Chapman, a small but concrete reminder that in this case, one resident’s observation helped close a multiday gap between an Orange County jailbreak and an arrest in San Francisco.
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