Inmates’ escape video shows everything is caught on tape

SANTA ANA (AP) — In an age when everything else is captured for public consumption on a smartphone, why not your own jailbreak?

Inmates who broke out of the maximum-security wing of a Southern California jail last year did just that with a smuggled cellphone and through an attorney released it to the public Wednesday, complete with glossy voiceover from one of the convicts.

It shows the kind of images usually relegated to movies like “The Shawshank Redemption,” with the three inmates shimmying into a vent and crawling through plumbing shafts.

It was provided to The Associated Press by an attorney for escapee Adam Hossein Nayeri.

The crisply edited video has a pop-music soundtrack and includes TV news clips about the escape and subsequent manhunt. It also contains voice-overs by Nayeri, recorded after their capture, giving his version of events, praising the cab driver the trio kidnapped and railing against the legal system.

One clip shows the inside of the maximum-security dorm room, known as Module F, at the jail in Santa Ana. How the inmates got the cellphones and were able to record in jail is not clear.

“You know, a lot of people like to credit us with some Houdini escape act all in eight minutes flat. It’s an interesting myth,” Nayeri says in voiceover to the video. “In reality we did leave that mod after count. Not the one they’re claiming though. I left that module at least eight hours earlier the night before.”

Inmates in the cramped dorm seem to know Nayeri is recording, but do not react, except for fellow escapee Bac Duong, who flashes a grin.

The video then shows the escape.

Nayeri carefully lifts a sawed-off bunk bed leg, exposing a previously cut metal screen on a wall. The screen is set aside as he disappears into a vent.