Authorities Say Outsiders May Have Helped Escapees

California Youth Authority officials said Wednesday that outsiders may have helped in the escape Sunday of four men, including two convicted murderers, from the Ventura School in Camarillo.

Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department officials said they were continuing their search for the four Los Angeles-area men, and examining a possible link between their escape and the slaying of Jacqueline Kirkham, 43, in Malibu on Tuesday.

Witnesses said they saw three young men, ages 15 to 18, fleeing Zuma Beach County Park in Kirkham’s red 1990 Nissan 240SX sports car Tuesday afternoon. Deputies said they believe that the three took the car after stabbing Kirkham several times in a public restroom 200 yards from the beach lifeguard headquarters.

Although detectives said there was no evidence linking the four escapees directly to Kirkham’s death, they were showing photographs of the escapees to witnesses on a hunch that they might be involved.

CYA officials said the four Ventura School inmates, ages 19 to 21, escaped through a two-foot-wide gash cut in the chain-link fence while they were on trash duty.

“We have not ruled out the possibility that it could have been cut from the outside,” CYA spokeswoman Allison Zajac said.

Inventories of tool storage areas found no cutting tools missing, and any other missing tools had been gone for months, she said.

“Things have been taken along the way,” she said. “But we do regular room searches and regular institution searches.”

When the men escaped Sunday, the school had only partly finished installing a high-tech perimeter fence around the existing fence, which is topped with razor wire.

So far, workers have installed the wiring for the new fence, which eventually will be rigged with video cameras and sensors to detect anything or anyone touching its wire mesh, and could cost $400,000 to $500,000, she said.

Officials at the Ventura School and CYA headquarters in Sacramento refused to release more information about the four escapees because state law protects records of crimes they committed as juveniles.

The men lived in the same “cottage,” the medium-security institution’s term for a one-story, brick cellblock housing about 90 wards.

The escapees are: Jose Dubon, 20, committed to CYA in March, 1990, for exhibiting or drawing a firearm; Osvaldo Pineda, 19, committed in January, 1988, for voluntary manslaughter; Carlos Ramirez, 21, committed in May, 1988, for first-degree murder; and Ismael Solis, 20, committed in April, 1987, for two counts of second-degree murder.

Solis is from Compton, and the other three are from Los Angeles, CYA officials said.

Meanwhile, beach-goers wondered whether Zuma Beach would be changed by Kirkham’s death, the second major incident of violence there in two months. In April, a 17-year-old boy was critically injured when he was stabbed with a screwdriver during a fight involving about 70 youths.

“It certainly is the second incident and even if it is a coincidence, the city and the county need to review security at the beach,” Malibu City Councilwoman Missy Zeitsoff said of Kirkham’s slaying.

“I don’t think it can be taken lightly. We need to be sure that as the season approaches for mass public use of the beach there is a safe, family atmosphere.”

But others called Tuesday’s attack a “freak thing” and downplayed its effect on the beach’s legendary allure.

“You can have an isolated incident like Tuesday’s stabbing at any time at any place,” said Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Lt. Arvie Sherman, whose deputies patrol the white sand and rugged mountains near Malibu. “Zuma is not an unsafe place to go.”

Reed reported from Ventura. Times staff writers Aaron Curtiss and Amy Louise Kazmin in Los Angeles contributed to this story.