Jail Inmate Still at Large as House Search Proves Futile

An escaped Orange County Jail inmate considered “extremely dangerous” was still at large Friday night after heavily armed officers stormed a Cudahy home where they believed he was hiding and fired six canisters of tear gas inside, authorities said.

Investigators from the Orange County Sheriff’s Department scoured the home after the early-morning raid but found “no evidence” to prove that fugitive Michael Wayde Mohon, 38, had been there, according to Lt. Dick Olson, a sheriff’s spokesman.

Olson said sheriff’s investigators, working with “several other agencies” in Southern California, had mounted an intense search and were seeking a federal fugitive’s arrest warrant for Mohon, who on Thursday disarmed a sheriff’s deputy at UCI Medical Center in Orange and escaped with the officer’s .38-caliber revolver.

Considered ‘Escape Risk’ Mohon tried in 1976 to escape from a Los Angeles County jail by beating a corrections officer with a broom, and he did escape a California Youth Authority facility in 1964. He had been classified as “an escape risk,” Olson confirmed Friday.

Mohon, who has a criminal record dating from 1961, was awaiting trial on charges that he tried to kill a Fountain Valley police officer following an alleged burglary and lengthy chase Dec. 31, 1983.

Olson said Mohon was taken by an Orange County sheriff’s deputy in a “locked and secured van” from the jail in Santa Ana to the medical center in Orange, where Mohon was undergoing regular physical therapy sessions for wounds he suffered in the Fountain Valley shoot-out.

Olson said investigators believe Mohon also is armed with a .32-caliber handgun that was concealed by someone else in the physical therapy building. Court documents filed by sheriff’s deputies Friday indicate that Mohon told the disarmed deputy that the gun had come from the sheriff’s van he rode from the jail, a claim Olson discounted.

In court documents filed Friday supporting the search of the truck Mohon allegedly escaped in, Deputies Stanley Interrante and Dennis J. Sulka stated the following from an interview with the disarmed deputy and a witness:

Deputy William H. Vining Jr., 53, escorted Mohon to the UCI Medical Center’s physical therapy building, where Mohon entered with his left wrist handcuffed to a chain around his waist. His other hand, splinted for a finger that was to be treated, was unrestrained. As both men stood in the entrance area, Mohon reached down, stood back up and turned around. Vining was looking into the barrel of a gun.

The court records said that Mohon, before taking Vining’s weapon, told the deputy, “Don’t reach for your gun! That would be stupid!”

Mohon ordered Vining to handcuff himself, then took another set of handcuffs from the deputy and used them to lock Vining to a corridor water pipe, the records showed.

Vining then warned Mohon, “You shouldn’t do this. You’re going to get caught.” Mohon reportedly replied, “They were bum-beefing me,” in an apparent reference to the charges currently facing him.

(Mohon has filed a $20-million civil suit in federal court against the Fountain Valley Police Department and a reserve officer who shot him five times before Mohon’s arrest. He claims his civil rights were violated by the reserve officer because he used excessive force during the arrest.)

In a court affidavit filed Friday, Sulka stated that a witness to the escape reported seeing both the deputy and Mohon enter the building but saw only the convict emerge about five minutes later. The witness was in a car, parked in the hospital parking lot.

The witness told investigators that Mohon walked out of the structure without handcuffs but was still wearing his jail-issue orange jump suit, the affidavit showed.

Description of Driver The witness told the deputies that Mohon peeled off the jail clothes after he climbed into a blue pickup truck, which was “driven by a white woman in her 20s with platinum-blond hair.”

Mohon’s wife, Sharon Rose Shaw, 36, also charged in the Fountain Valley burglary, was arrested on suspicion of aiding in the escape of a fugitive Thursday night at her former husband’s Stanton home by sheriff’s deputies, Olson said.

Authorities believe it was Shaw who drove the royal-blue truck that Mohon used to flee the hospital. It was Shaw, a Los Angeles County sheriff’s spokeswoman said Friday, who led investigators to the city of Bell in Los Angeles County, where they found the truck parked at the Lido Restaurant.

Mohon Reported in Area

Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies said restaurant employees told investigators they had seen Mohon there about 8 p.m. Thursday. Shaw reportedly told Orange County investigators that a friend living in a house in nearby Cudahy had driven her to her ex-husband’s Stanton house, where she was currently living, Olson said.

About 3 a.m., Bell-Cudahy police officers, Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies and Orange County investigators surrounded the Cudahy house and, with a bullhorn, ordered the occupants out. Two women a mother and daughter --and an 11-year-old boy emerged, authorities said. They said the relationship between the trio and Mohon was not clear.

Four hours later, when Mohon still had not surrendered, a Los Angeles County sheriff’s team “gassed the house,” Olson said, but Mohon had either slipped out or was never there.

By mid-morning, the heavily armed officers had cleared out of the brown clapboard home but huge firefighting fans were still blowing out any lingering tear gas. One of the occupants, Roberta Lombardo, sat in a bathrobe on her porch and talked about the tension-filled morning.

Shaw, she said, is a longtime friend.

Lombardo said that she and her son, Tony, 12, and her mother, Lillian Corder, 68, were awakened by an overhead helicopter. Soon they heard themselves being ordered out of the house, Lombardo said.

“There were cops everywhere. They told us to come out with our hands up,” said Lombardo. “We were in our nightgowns and bare feet. They wouldn’t even let us put on a bathrobe.

“I don’t know why they’d think Michael was here,” she added. “I haven’t seen him for five years. The last time I talked to him was three years ago.”

Shortly before 7 a.m, Lombardo and neighbors said, sheriff’s officers, using flash grenades and tear gas, invaded the house.

“It was amazing, they knocked out all the windows on the side of the house and stormed it like something out of a movie,” said Pedro Rivera, who lives next door to Lombardo.

Another neighbor, Tom Robbins, said, “They told everybody (to) stay inside. They had the street barricaded. It was tense. And when they rushed into that house we didn’t know what was going to happen.”

Room-by-Room Search Lombardo said deputies went room by room and searched the attic.

“This house is going to smell for days,” Lombardo said. A paint can that had broken open had left a swath of blue latex on the side of the house. “All this mess and I still don’t know what’s going on.”

While insisting she had had no contact with Mohon, Lombardo said she was in frequent touch with Shaw. Shaw lived with her ex-husband in Stanton, Lombardo said. “I’d see her now and then--she’d come by, we’d visit,” Lombardo said. “She really loved (Mohon).”

Lombardo said that Shaw spent most of Thursday afternoon and evening at her Cudahy house after calling about 2 p.m. to say she was in the area and was having car trouble. She said that Shaw walked to Lombardo’s and wound up staying for dinner.

“We just chatted about Michael, you know, life in general,” Lombardo said. “She never mentioned anything about him trying to get out. I’m stunned.”

Lombardo said she drove Shaw back to Stanton about 9 p.m.

Meanwhile on Friday, Fountain Valley police detectives who had been involved in the 1983 shoot-out investigation followed the progress of the hunt for Mohon closely.

They said that steps have been taken to protect the officer involved in the gunfight with Mohon but that they had no reason to believe that Mohon would return to Fountain Valley or seek revenge on that officer.

“Knowing Mr. Mohon, he isn’t going to go the easy way,” Detective Steve Isaacs said. “My personal opinion is somebody’s gonna get hurt. . . . He is one dangerous man.”

Times Staff Writer John Needham contributed to this article.