What’s a Girl to Do When She’s in Love and Her Boyfriend Is in Jail?

Lots of prisoners try to break out of jail, but not many people try to break in.

However, that’s just what Fresno County sheriff’s officers say Susan Luna, a star-crossed lover, tried to do.

Luna, 18, scaled a 10-foot-tall chain-link fence topped by barbed wire and a second brick and chain-link fence Saturday night before she was caught inching along the walls of a barracks looking for her inmate boyfriend, said Sgt. Robert Hagler.

“She said she was in love,” Hagler said. “She was going into the Army in a few weeks and wanted to see him.”

She was somewhat the worse for wear with two black eyes, a bloody nose and torn clothes that she first told officers resulted from an assault--and later said stemmed from a fight during a party earlier in the evening. After the fight, the Mendota resident said, she decided to drive to the minimum-security jail at Caruthers to visit her boyfriend, whom she refused to identify.

But instead of getting to visit her boyfriend, she was booked into the women’s jail for investigation of being drunk and attempting unlawful communication with an inmate. Hagler said Luna couldn’t see her boyfriend during regular visiting hours because she has been banned from the facility for showing up drunk.