A video released this week by the attorney of one of the accused escaped convicts from Southern California who ended up living in a van in SF's Haight Ashbury in January 2016 before getting spotted and arrested shows the three men's jailbreak (set to the Mission Impossible theme song) and shows footage of life inside that van. As CBS 5 reports, the video comes from the attorney for Hossein "Adam" Nayeri, who along with Bac Duong and Jonathan Tieu escaped from the men’s central jail in Santa Ana on January 22, 2016, setting off a manhunt that went on for eight days.
The video, shot on a stolen cellphone, may be an attempt to paint a more sympathetic picture of Nayeri, who as LAist reported at the time of the escape is kind of a scary dude who was accused of torturing a guy with a blowtorch, chopping off his penis, and leaving for him dead in the desert.
The Nayeri we see in the video is expressing his gratitude to the Orange County cab driver whom the trio kidnapped and drove to Santa Cruz with them, and then we see him with Tieu getting stoned and drinking Jack Daniels in the van saying "This is our casa right now for the moment. This is our crib."
Duong ended up turning himself in after the ordeal, after deciding to drive the cabbie back to Orange County. Nayeri and Tieu managed to steal a white van and head to San Francisco, where they took photos of themselves, like tourists, at the corner of Haight and Ashbury, and then parked themselves in that Whole Foods parking lot to chill for a few days. That is, until a news-loving semi-homeless man who'd just been reading about them in the paper recognized Nayeri in the McDonald's at Haight and Stanyan, and followed him back to the van. That guy ended up collecting a $140,000 reward for their capture.