From an abrupt abduction at gunpoint to forced beachside pictures and motel room brawls, an independent taxi driver this week testified to going through a week of terror in 2016 while being held captive by three inmates who were attempting to elude a massive manhunt after a daring escape from an Orange County jail.
Long Ma — the Garden Grove driver who says he became an unwitting driver for three increasingly at-odds escapees — took the stand this week in the jailbreak trial of Hossein Nayeri, the alleged mastermind of the headline-grabbing escape from the Central Jail Complex in Santa Ana.
Ma’s testimony — which took place in an Orange County Superior courtroom less than a block from the scene of the jailbreak — came after Nayeri’s defense attorney argued at the start of the trial that Ma was not the victim of an abduction, but instead someone who agreed to ferry the fugitives to safety for a large monetary payout. Nayeri has admitted to breaking out of jail, but denied kidnapping Ma or being involved in a related car theft.
The taxi driver — testifying through a Vietnamese-language interpreter — flatly denied willingly spending a week with Nayeri and the other escapees — Bac Tien Duong and Jonathan Tieu — describing the defense allegations as “absolutely made up.”
Nayeri, Duong and Tieu allegedly spent months cutting through half-inch steel bars in order to access plumbing tunnels within the Men’s Central Jail. On Jan. 22, 2016, the three men allegedly climbed rungs inside the tunnels in order to access the roof of the jail, where they used a makeshift rope of bedsheets to rappel five stories down the side of the building. A friend of Duong’s testified to picking the escapees up a short distance away from the jail and driving them to a Westminster home.
Ma — who advertised his independent, unlicensed taxi service in the pages of local Vietnamese-language newspapers — received a call from one of the men, and picked them up in…
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