Search at JPL Resumes for Gunman : Police Resume Search at JPL for Gunman

The search for a gunman who commandeered a car with three hostages after a holdup and took refuge in the grounds of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory near Pasadena was resumed by police helicopters and ground teams this morning when a lab employee said he may have spotted the suspect.

“The employee saw someone who jumped out a window of a laboratory building, probably within the last hour,” Don Bane, a spokesman at the sprawling hillside facility, reported shortly before noon. “He jumped into a laboratory truck, a pickup, and drove it off.

“We have determined that the truck is not in the hands of the person it was assigned to,” Bane added. “The lab has been sealed off, and we assume that the truck is still on the property.

“We don’t know who’s in that truck, but after what happened yesterday. . . .”

Janitor Suspected

On Thursday, police said, Timothy M. Howze, 36, a janitor who worked at JPL and is believed to have committed several armed robberies in the Pasadena area, held up a business near Lincoln Avenue and Palisades Street while under surveillance by a police helicopter. (Story, Page 1, Part II.)

As the officers closed in, Howze reportedly eluded them by dashing out onto the Foothill Freeway and flagging down a car. Officers said he forced the woman behind the wheel to drive onto the grounds of the lab, which is nestled in the foothills of La Canada Flintridge.

Witnesses said police, who had been giving chase in several patrol cars, opened fire as the suspect ran from the hijacked auto and into a lab building, but no one was believed struck by the fusillade of bullets.

‘We Lost Him’

Pasadena police and special-weapons teams from the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department conducted a painstaking, eight-hour search of the premises before concluding late Thursday evening that “we lost him,” according to Sheriff’s Informations Deputy Robert Stoneman.

The search was resumed at about 11:15 this morning after the employee reported seeing a man jumping out of a window at Building 19, the structure into which the suspect was first believed to have fled.

Bane said there are “a lot of buildings, a lot of winding roads and a lot of vehicles” on the 176-acre laboratory grounds--many places where the suspect, and the truck, could still be hidden.