Military secures Acapulco, and tourists return

An aunt of a convicted murderer who was captured in Chicago after a nearly three-day manhunt was charged Saturday with giving her nephew information that helped him escape from an eastern Illinois jail where she had once worked.

Authorities say Kamron T. Taylor escaped Wednesday from the Jerome Combs Detention Center in Kankakee by beating and choking a guard into unconsciousness and stealing his uniform, keys and SUV. Taylor was captured Friday night.

His aunt Tonya Grant, who was once a guard at the jail, was charged Saturday with obstructing justice and aiding in the escape of an inmate, according to Kankakee County Sheriff’s Chief Deputy Ken McCabe. Grant, 50, is accused of giving Taylor confidential security information about the detention center during a jail visit with her nephew.

Taylor’s bond was set at $150,000. Taylor is being held on weapons charges until he can be turned over to the Kankakee County Sheriff’s Office, Chicago police said.

Taylor fled on foot as Chicago police officers responding to a call of a suspicious person approached him in the South Side neighborhood of Calumet Heights Friday night. Officers caught up with him after a few blocks and found him with a loaded handgun.

“I think I can speak for ... everyone who’s been involved: tired, I guess is the word,” Kankakee County Sheriff Timothy Bukowski told reporters Saturday in summing up the frenzied search for the fugitive.

Taylor, 23, escaped after lying in wait for a guard making 3 a.m. rounds and then attacking him. Wearing the guard’s uniform, Taylor fooled officers in a master control room into buzzing him through three security doors before driving off. He ditched the SUV a few miles away. Authorities haven’t pieced together how he got to Chicago, but they say he does have connections to the area.

Taylor was awaiting sentencing for shooting 21-year-old Nelson Williams Jr. in the head during a June 2013 robbery attempt on his front porch. He also made a run for it moments after hearing the guilty verdict in his February murder trial, as well as when he was first arrested for the killing.

He will certainly face additional charges, possibly including attempted murder for the attack on the guard, Bukowski said.

“We ... believe that Mr. Taylor believed that he had killed the correctional officer by strangling him,” the sheriff said.

From the beachfront boulevard, the predominant view here is of tourists throwing themselves into the sunset off bungee platforms above techno-blasting beer bars, as paragliders drift along under billowing Dos Equis chutes.

But closer up, you can’t miss the guns. There are state police with black masks in trucks with gun mounts. Roving pods of armed federal gendarmerie on soupedup three-wheelers. Assault-rifletoting Mexican marines on foot patrols with armbands that read “Tourist Protection.”

Once the most famous and glamorous beach spot in Mexico, Acapulco has long struggled with drug violence and gang warfare that have sullied the sun-and-sand image.

Over the past several months, teachers strikes and street protests have clogged the city. Military and federal forces took control from the ousted municipal police.

Mexico’s worst tragedy of the past year, the disappearance and likely murder of 43 students at a teachers college, took place up the road in the same state, Guerrero.

“In the city of Acapulco, we definitely have security problems,” said Luis Walton, the former mayor and current gubernatorial candidate.

But despite the image problems, domestic tourism has been inching up. Droves of tourists are arriving; most are Mexicans leaving the capital during the Easter holiday.

The city’s tourism department estimates that 350,000 people will visit Acapulco over the next two weeks, and occupancy rates in the city’s 18,500 hotel rooms will surpass 80 percent.

Boosters say there have been no violent incidents targeting tourists in more than two years, since a group of six Spanish vacationers were raped by gunmen.

To attract tourists, there are cheap flights and discount hotel rooms. This spring, Acapulco has held an international banking conference, a professional tennis event and a big tourism conference. Expedia, the online travel company, said that demand for trips to Acapulco grew by 50 percent last year.

But billy-club wielding marines and patrolling police trucks can be seen everywhere.

“The tourist area is ‘bulletproof,’” said Netzah Peralta Radilla, the city’s tourism secretary, in a new government center to help tourists. And it needs to be. “We don’t have anything else. We live off of tourism. That’s why it’s so important.”

Grecia Falcon, a 22-year-old veterinary student from Leon, in central Mexico, was worried about spending her holiday in this “gangsters’ paradise,” but agreed to come with a friend who grew up in Acapulco.

“I’m kind of afraid,” she said, sitting on a beach blanket one evening next to tourists who had set up tents in the sand. Now that the local police have been replaced, “people do whatever they want.”

Acapulco once symbolized luxury and glamour.

A post-World War II haven for Hollywood stars such as Errol Flynn and John Wayne, it was known as the Mexican Riviera and a place where people such as the Nixons would celebrate their anniversaries.

The gradual transformation from international hot spot to domestic weekend getaway has been accelerated by the city’s drug wars, which local police could not or would not stop.