Gaps in Law Enforcement System Allowed Salcido to Flee to Mexico

The U.S. Border Patrol took no special measures to stop Ramon Salcido and did not tell its officers to watch for him until two days after his apparent murder spree, officials said Thursday.

Despite a massive manhunt involving scores of law enforcement officers, Salcido was able to slip out of Sonoma County and travel hundreds of miles, in part because of gaps in the system by which law enforcement tracks fugitives.

“If the public perception is that you may make a single entry and all agencies receive (an all-points bulletin) simultaneously, that doesn’t exist,” said Robert Drake, of the state Department of Justice which runs the telecommunications system.

The Sonoma County Sheriff’s Department did not send photographs of Salcido to Border Patrol offices in California until Sunday, two days after the murder rampage that left seven people dead, Border Patrol officials said. By that time, Salcido already may have crossed the border into his native Mexico.

Even after they received photos and descriptions of Salcido, Border Patrol stations at San Diego and El Centro took no special action to apprehend him other than to furnish the information to officers in the field.

“We did not check any more people going south than we normally do,” said Robert Gilson, assistant chief of the San Diego station, who said he had not been told that Salcido might be fleeing to Mexico.

Blockade Not Set Up

Julian Hernandez, public information officer for the Border Patrol station in El Centro, said the patrol sometimes sets up roadblocks for traffic heading south as part of actions to stop the flow of stolen property, but did not set up such a blockade for Salcido.

“We don’t check southbound traffic,” Hernandez said. “We check people coming north. . . . If he happened to be driving past one of our checkpoints, we would have detained him until the proper authorities were notified.”

The Sonoma County Sheriff’s Department started transmitting an initial all-points bulletin to a handful of agencies sometime after 10 a.m. last Friday, about an hour and a half after the first of the grisly discoveries.

The bulletin described Salcido’s car as being a 1979 Ford LTD, maroon or brown in color with a ragged vinyl top, and said that he might have his three daughters with him.

That bulletin did not reach one of the most important agencies--the California Highway Patrol--until 3 p.m. At the time, the CHP’s computer system was down, and did not resume working until 5:05 p.m., said Alice Huffacker, CHP spokesperson.

“Because the computers were down, we couldn’t do anything with it.”

Once the computer system was working, the information was transmitted to offices throughout the state quickly, Huffacker said. But by 6 p.m., Salcido’s car was discovered abandoned in San Rafael, about 25 miles south of Santa Rosa off U.S. 101. Salcido told authorities in Mexico that he had traveled from Northern California to Mexico by bus.

As it is now set up, the all-points bulletin system, called the California Law Enforcement Telecommunications System, allows individual agencies to send messages to no more than six agencies at a time.

Once those six messages go out, another six can be transmitted. It takes about one minute to send each group of six messages, Drake said. He said the system will be upgraded so that it can send messages to all agencies in the state at once, rather than in six-agency groups.

However, California police agencies have no way of sending photos quickly. The CHP received its glossy photos of Salcido on Wednesday, the day he was arrested in Mexico.

“For a photo to get from one place to another, it has to be mailed, or hand-carried,” Huffacker said.

Drake said a system to send photos to law enforcement agencies is at least two years away. Officials said photos sent by facsimile machines do not reproduce well enough to be of use.