Officers Storm House but Fail to Find Escapee
Heavily armed officers early Friday stormed a Cudahy home where they believed an escaped Orange County Jail inmate was hiding and fired six canisters of tear gas into the house, but they did not find the convict, authorities said.
Investigators from the Orange County Sheriff’s Department scoured the home after the raid but found no evidence that fugitive Michael Wayde Mohon had been there.
Lt. Dick Olson said sheriff’s investigators, working with several other agencies in Southern California, had mounted an intense search and were seeking a federal fugitive arrest warrant for Mohon, 38, who disarmed a deputy at the UC Irvine Medical Center on Thursday afternoon and escaped with the officer’s service revolver.
An ‘Escape Risk’
In 1976, Mohon beat a corrections officer with a broom in an attempt to escape from Los Angeles County Jail. He succeeded in escaping from a California Youth Authority facility when he was a teen-ager and had been classified as “an escape risk,” Olson said.
Mohon, who has a criminal record dating to 1961, was awaiting trial on charges that he tried to kill a Fountain Valley police officer after an alleged burglary and lengthy chase in December, 1983.
According to Olson, Mohon was taken by a 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 that investigators believe Mohon also is armed with a handgun that was placed by someone on the grounds of the medical center.
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