This is the fifth in a six-part series.
A marijuana dispensary owner and his roommate are abducted in the middle of the night at gunpoint from their Newport Beach home by three masked men.
Driven to the Mojave Desert while the man was tortured, the disturbing events of that night became known as one of Orange County's most horrific crimes.
It was sometime after the 5 a.m. head count on Jan. 22, 2016 when three inmates escaped from the Orange County Central Men's Jail in Santa Ana.
They crawled through an air vent, climbed in the bowels of the jail using a ladder made of bedsheets and onto the roof where they rappelled four stories to the ground.
Jailers didn't notice the missing inmates until 15 hours later, during an 8 p.m. head count in a dormitory filled to capacity with 68 inmates.
When Sheriff's Deputy Gabriel Perez called for Hossein Nayeri, Jonathan Tieu, and Bac Duong, he got no answer.
The deputy called again and heard nothing.
Perez checked to see if he had misidentified them or if he missed them altogether in the count.
A voice from inside the dorm said they might be in court.
But they had no court dates or any other excused absences that day.
The dorm was cleared and a search was launched for three missing criminals with a history of extreme violence.
Sheriff's officials aren't talking about the escape, citing the ongoing criminal case and a lawsuit by deputies against the county about jail safety. But the breakout is detailed in court documents, a grand jury report, and a video of the jailbreak that Nayeri filmed and provided to NBC4 last summer.
'Hannibal Lecter'
Witnesses, victims and law enforcement scrambled to go into hiding.
The missing inmates were considered armed and dangerous. Tieu was a documented member of a Vietnamese gang, facing a retrial on murder and attempted murder charges in a gang-related attack, officials said. Duong also had gang ties. He had felony convictions for drugs and burglary. At the time of the escape, Duong was facing trial on an attempted murder charge. Nayeri was in custody awaiting trial in the kidnapping and torture case from 2012.
Tieu's attorney declined to comment. Duong's public defender did not respond to requests seeking comment. In a jailhouse interview, Nayeri didn't deny the escape, but did deny the kidnapping and torture charges.
It was after midnight — 20 hours after the breakout — when Heather Brown got a text from Newport Beach police Detective Ryan Peters.
Brown, Peters, and other law enforcement spent years getting Nayeri into custody.
Brown said Nayeri was violent, manipulative and cunning. She compared him to Hannibal Lecter in an interview with a reporter. Now he was on the loose after being extradited to the U.S. to face charges in a case that carries two life sentences without the possibility of parole.
"'Please tell me you're lying,'" Brown said she told Peters.
"'No, I'm not lying,'" she said the detective told her. "'I have a unit on my house. I suggest you do that as well.'"
Brown called the sheriff's department to request a patrol unit to watch her home. The sheriff's department expedited a concealed-weapons permit for Brown to carry a gun, she said.
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She called one of her main witnesses — Nayeri's wife, Cortney Shegerian.
Shegerian was a reluctant witness who had initially refused to talk to police, but agreed to cooperate as she faced potential charges of aiding and abetting, prosecutors said.
Shegerian testified in December in the trial of her ex-husband's high school friend and alleged co-conspirator, Kyle Handley.
She said in court that Nayeri's escape terrified her. He had abused her for years, she testified.
She feared that if Nayeri ever got the chance, he would kill her.
Police knocked on her door before dawn.
"'We need to take you with us now,'" she said police told her.
She was put into protective custody. Police also hid Shegerian's grandmother, and other family members also went into hiding, Brown said.
Brown called Eric Schweitzer, an attorney for Naomi Rhodus, an accused accomplice in the kidnapping case, in Fresno.
Rhodus feared Nayeri would not only come after her, but her children as well.
"We took it very seriously," Schweitzer said.
They Had Help
As sheriff's officials announced rewards for their arrests, law enforcement fanned out across the state to find them. Deputies at the jail began to piece together the escape route.
Sheriff's Department photos showed a section of razor wire that had been cut and moved aside on the jail's roof. A rope made of bedsheets could be seen hanging off a grate.
Surveillance video showed movement on the roof in the early morning hours, just before, officials said, a getaway driver whisked them away once they were on the ground.
That driver, Loc Ba Nguyen, a longtime acquaintance of Duong, later told investigators he had visited Duong in jail and got a list of tools and supplies needed for the escape.
He left a backpack with a rope, a knife, and clothing and a duffle bag with clothes, wire cutters, and cellphones attached to a rope that the inmates hoisted up from the roof in the weeks leading up to the escape, Nguyen's attorney said.
Nguyen was arrested two days after the escape. He pleaded guilty to felony charges and was sentenced to a year in jail.
His attorney, Ed Welbourn, said Nguyen, who had known Duong's reputation in gangs in the Vietnamese community, got nothing in return for his help but felt like he had no other choice.
The Cabbie
About 90 minutes after the sheriff's department discovered the breakout, Long Ma, a 74-year-old cabbie, got a call from a man who wanted to be picked up outside a restaurant in Westminster.
When Ma got to there, Duong, Nayeri, and Tieu climbed into his Honda Civic.
From there, he later told investigators, the men told him to drive to a Walmart and a Target. Then they held him at gunpoint while they drove with him in his own locked car to hotel rooms across Southern California and the Bay Area, he later told investigators.
In the rooms, he was never left alone, nor was he allowed to get off the bed. He had to ask permission to use the bathroom.
The cabdriver said Duong told him later that Nayeri had wanted to kill him, but Duong protected him and rescued him after an argument with Nayeri in Northern California.
The two Vietnamese men drove back to Southern California where Duong surrendered to police.
The cabbie drove to a courthouse in Santa Ana and told authorities about his ordeal.
They Got Him
Nayeri and Tieu spent their last night of freedom in the back of a stolen van parked on a street next to a Whole Foods Market in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco.
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They smoked marijuana and ate bananas in the back of the van, their makeshift home.
"This is our casa, right now, for the moment," Nayeri says as the camera pans around the van showing sheets, a Target store bag and bottles of water.
"Want some bananas?" he says, as the camera pans to bananas.
"No, we don't have crack," Nayeri says. "We don't have crystal meth. We're smoking weed and eating bananas."
Nayeri and Tieu laugh.
"It's kind of bananas."
They were arrested Saturday, Jan. 30, 2016, when a passer-by saw Nayeri get out of the van and walk into a McDonald's.
He was arrested after a short foot chase.
When Brown, the prosecutor, got the news that Nayeri was back in custody, she jumped for joy.
"I was so excited," she said. "Relief washed over me."
The Fallout
The escape raised questions about visitor security and contraband smuggled into the jail.
A jailhouse ESL teacher was ensnared in the escape fallout.
Even though he speaks perfect English, Nayeri took classes from the woman at the jail and developed a close relationship with her, officials said.
Sheriff's officials said he used her to get Google Earth map printouts of the jail complex. He also asked her for printouts of pictures of two prosecutors — Brown and Matt Murphy, Brown said.
The teacher told investigators he wanted the pictures to know who the lawyers were on his case, Brown said.
The teacher was arrested, but no charges were filed against her, officials said.
Nayeri allegedly went so far as to forge "love letters" in her handwriting, officials said, falsely implicating her in helping the escape.
The escape prompted a grand jury investigation and a lawsuit against the sheriff and the county by the Association of Orange County Deputy Sheriffs. The lawsuit claims the 1,433-capacity jail is not safe, and is like a state prison with "violent, hardened criminals."
Deputies alleged that management had dismissed or ignored grave concerns about security years before the jailbreak.
The union also charged that management had cut staff the night of the escape and ignored department policy on proper inmate counts.
The grand jury report found a laundry list of problems — improper inmate head counts, inadequate searches of plumbing tunnels and roofs, a lack of supervision and improper training, confusing policies on inmate head counts and inspections, and outdated video security equipment.
Last summer, Sheriff Sandra Hutchens announced upgrades — clarified rules for inmate counts and inspections, upgraded lighting and fencing, closed circuit television cameras and more staffing.
But questions remain about Nayeri's status in a dorm with other inmates. He was a flight risk, had a history of fleeing the law and had told his sister that if he ever got out, he'd go back to Iran, according to court documents.
This time, when Nayeri was booked back into the Orange County Jail, the sheriff's department was taking no chances on his security.
