Inmate captured after he escaped facility

A man with a lengthy criminal past was captured Wednesday afternoon, one day after he managed to escape from a mental health facility in Fort Lauderdale.

Azmi Mahmoud, 46, was back in custody after the Broward Sheriff ’s Office Fugitive Task Force set out to find him. At 2:51 p.m., Davie Police spotted Mahmoud in a white BMW that had been stolen during a carjacking earlier Wednesday in Hollywood, the Sheriff’s Office said.

While attempting to out-run officers, the Sheriff’s Office said, Mahmoud drove the wrong way on a road until crashing. The Broward Sheriff’s Office arrested him on charges of fleeing and eluding.

Additional charges are expected.

Mahmoud has been a frequent inmate at both Miami-Dade and Broward jails over the past decades.

Mahmoud’s criminal record dates back to 1993 when he was 18 and arrested on aggravated battery charges in Miramar. Two months later he was arrested again on aggravated battery charges, this time by the Broward Sheriff’s Office.

Mahmoud was arrested four more times on aggravated battery charges over the next four years, including once against an officer. Between February 1993 to October 1997, Mahmoud was arrested at least 11 times, including while he was in jail and in prison.

Between 2001 and his arrest in November, he’d have 12 more arrests on a wide-range of charges from habitually driving on a suspended license to grand theft to again battery.

In a particularly public case of domestic violence in 2013, he

stormed into beachfront restaurant Lulu’s Bait Shack in Fort Lauderdale, struck his longtime romantic partner and dragged her across the floor, according to court documents. Mahmoud let go of her only after customers and staff members intervened, the arrest affidavit says.

The escape happened after detention deputies had brought Mahmoud from the Broward Main Jail to the Henderson Behavioral Health facility in Fort Lauderdale at 1:30 p.m. Tuesday. A judge ordered Mahmoud there, according to the Broward Sheriff’s Office.

When workers at the facility went to find Mahmoud about 5:30 p.m., he was gone and so was a master key, something that is needed to exit the facility, said Sgt. Don Prichard, a spokesman for the Sheriff’s Office.

“Now we don’t know if he took the key, we just know the key is missing,”

Prichard said hours before the capture.

Prichard said to fully leave the property the inmate would have to scale a roughly 10-foot fence that surrounds the property.

After the escape on Tuesday, the facility contacted the Fort Lauderdale Police Department at 6:18 p.m. and then called the Sheriff ’s Office at 6:30 p.m. The building is located near Northwest 27th Avenue and Northwest 19th Street in Fort Lauderdale, about a block west of Interstate 95 and south of Oakland Park Boulevard.

Mahmoud had been jailed since his Nov. 21, 2020, arrest on allegations that he violated his probation on charges including battery on a person 65 years or older, grand theft and possession of cocaine, according to a news release.

He was being held without bond, and a judge ordered his transfer to the Henderson Behavioral Health facility. It’s unclear why.