SANTA ANA, Calif.—The alleged mastermind of a brazen California jail break was a small-town paint store manager fresh out of the Marines when his life changed with a car accident. That accident killed his friend and sent him into a spiral culminating with his arrest on charges he tortured and mutilated a man, then left him to die in the desert.
The prosecutor in the kidnapping and torture case against Hossein Nayeri was so alarmed by his escape from the Orange County jail last week that she called defense attorneys in a panic at 2 a.m. In an interview with a reporter, she described him as a Hannibal Lecter, the sadistic killer in “The Silence of the Lambs.”
Nayeri, 37, and two other inmates, 43-year-old Bac Duong and 20-year-old Jonathan Tieu, sawed through a metal grate over a plumbing tunnel and sliced through more metal and rebar to reach an unguarded section of roof. From there, they rappelled down four stories using a rope made of bed linens to reach freedom — the first jail break at the facility in nearly three decades, authorities said.
Nayeri was born in Iran and as a child emigrated to the U.S. with his family. He attended high school in Fresno and then joined the Marines.
Orange County Sheriff Sandra Hutchens said investigators believe he was the leader of the jail break partly because of his military background. On Thursday, authorities announced they had arrested a woman of Iranian descent who taught English at the jail and is suspected of providing help for the escape. Nayeri attended her classes.
His attorney, Salvatore Ciulla, did not return a request for comment.
Nayeri had no felony record in 2005 when he was charged in a drunken-driving accident that killed his high school friend, Ehsan Tousi, and left Nayeri hospitalized with burns and struggling with depression, according to friends and family.
While free on bail, Nayeri fled but eventually was arrested in Washington and extradited to California in 2009. At his sentencing, friends and family wrote letters to the judge on his behalf, saying that the accident had turned him into a shell of his former self.
He hung a photo of Tousi on the wall of his hospital room and cried daily, one friend wrote. A sibling wrote that he stopped calling and spent hours at his friend’s gravesite.
“It was a horrible feeling to watch my little brother drift away, but there was nothing I could do,” Sheri Nayeri wrote the judge.
Nayeri told the judge he remembered the smell of burning flesh and was screaming his friend’s name before he blacked out.
“To this day I wish I wouldn’t have gained consciousness to see the look on their faces,” Nayeri wrote.
