4 Seized in Shoot-Out After Armed Wives Force Copter Pilot to Fly Men From Prison

DENVER — Two armed women forced the pilot of a rented helicopter to swoop down on a Colorado prison baseball field and fly off with their convict husbands Friday, but all four were captured hours later after a shoot-out in Nebraska, authorities said.

Holdrege, Neb., Police Chief Ken Jackson said one suspect was wounded and was treated at the Phelps Memorial Health Center in Holdrege for a gunshot wound in a finger. Three others were in custody in the city jail, Jackson said.

He said no one else was injured, despite indiscriminate shooting by the suspects as police officers converged on them in the farming town of about 5,600 people in south-central Nebraska, about 40 miles north of the Kansas line.

The four were in a rental van when a Holdrege police officer tried to stop them. The van rammed the police car and shots were fired at the officer. At least eight shots penetrated the car’s windshield, the police chief said.

‘Never Stopped Shooting’

A witness, John Swenson, told the Associated Press that he and his neighbor Jim Brenn ducked behind Brenn’s pickup truck when the shooting began.

“I saw the gun come out of the passenger side of the van and then they never stopped shooting,” Swenson said. “It was just like on TV. These were big guns, not little ones.”

No shots were fired during the morning incident at the Arkansas Valley Correctional Facility, which houses 980 medium-security prisoners at Ordway in southeastern Colorado.

“It just buzzed in and buzzed out,” said Liz McDonough, information officer for the Department of Corrections.

State troopers, the Air National Guard and sheriff’s deputies from four counties set up roadblocks and joined the search for the escapees.

McDonough said the pilot and his blue-and-white Bell helicopter were found about an hour after the escape near an abandoned farmhouse on a highway 35 miles north of the prison.

The pilot, Tim Graves, had been bound and gagged but was not injured. He was being questioned by authorities and was not believed to be an accomplice, McDonough said.

Identities of Prisoners

The prisoners were identified as Fred Gonzales, 21, who was serving four years for robbery and would have been eligible for parole in September, 1991, and Ralph Brown, 30, serving 16 years for multiple offenses, including sexual assault. Brown would not have been eligible for parole until 1996.

Their wives were identified as Pat Gonzales and Rebecca Brown. Authorities said Rebecca Brown had rented the helicopter under the alias of Julie Quinn.

Graves told police that the fugitives had fled in a U-Haul van that may have carried a small car in the back.

At the prison, spokeswoman Juanita Novak said that about 15 prisoners were in the yard when the helicopter landed.

“Everybody was just watching,” she said. “It happened so fast.”

McDonough said an internal investigation was under way to determine why guards in the two towers did not open fire.

“One reason apparently was because the angle was very, very awkward,” she said. “But it is standard policy to do everything in your power to prevent an escape, and we’re investigating why no shots were fired.”

Officers in the yard were not armed, she said.

McDonough said that the two women rented the helicopter at a small county airport about 20 miles south of Denver, then stopped to refuel at another airstrip near the prison.

“We believe that’s when the weapons were brought on board,” she said. It was not known how heavily armed the women were.

The prison, about 50 miles east of Pueblo, is in a sparsely populated area. McDonough said there had been “four or five” escapes at the facility last year, but this was the first by helicopter.

The incident was the latest in a rash of helicopter prison escapes and attempts. In April, a helicopter crashed after its tail rotor snagged on a fence at the federal Metropolitan Correctional Center in Miami. The pilot and the prisoner survived.

In July, 1988, a woman hijacked a helicopter and forced the pilot to land in the prison yard at the Penitentiary of New Mexico near Albuquerque. Three convicts escaped but later were captured.

In November, 1986, an inmate escaped from the minimum-security federal prison in Pleasanton, Calif. He later hijacked a helicopter and returned to the prison to free a woman inmate who had worked with him in the prison business office. They were captured 10 days later when buying wedding rings.