Pou Back in Custody, Faces Added Charges : Military: Air Force deserter and escapee surrenders in San Diego. He had been hiding out in the mountains.

Convicted Air Force deserter James Douglas Pou was locked up in a Navy brig here Thursday, facing new charges after his escape this month from a March Air Force Base jail.

Chief Petty Officer Martin Wicklund, Navy spokesman in San Diego, said Pou, 33, surrendered at the Miramar Naval Air Station brig at 1:20 a.m. He was driven to the Navy jail by his civilian defense attorney, Paul Nestor of Orange County.

When Pou escaped from the stockade June 1, he was awaiting a court-martial on charges of robbing a Texas bank in 1988 and fraudulently obtaining a passport. In an interview over a car telephone while en route to Miramar, Pou, who had belonged to an elite Air Force search-and-rescue unit, told The Times he hid out in the mountains in Southern California.

He was convicted in a 1992 court-martial of desertion and bigamy and was sentenced to 18 months in custody. He had faked his death in 1987, making it appear that he had vanished in the Rio Grande near Albuquerque, N.M., and moved to San Diego, where he assumed a new identity.

On Thursday, Nestor said the Air Force has slapped three new charges on Pou as a result of his recent escape.

“They didn’t waste any time. He’s charged with desertion, escape from confinement and (stealing) a field jacket,” Nestor said.

Pou’s escape from the March stockade was a great embarrassment to Air Force officials,who still have no idea how he was able to escape away from his cell. Pou, a military expert in escape and evasion techniques, had repeatedly warned his captors that he would walk away from confinement whenever he felt like it.

Charles Moore, an investigator with the Air Force Office of Special Investigations, called a Times reporter at home Wednesday night inquiring about Pou’s whereabouts and asking if the reporter had any information on how Pou managed to escape.

A source familiar with the case said that Moore and other investigators wanted to talk to Pou on Thursday to question him about his escape, but Pou’s attorney refused to give them permission to speak with him.

When he first disappeared in 1987, Pou left a wife and two young sons in New Mexico. He assumed a new identity and four months later married Monica Marie Joyce in Chula Vista. Joyce, who knew about Pou’s secret life, reported him to Air Force authorities in 1992 after their marriage became strained and Pou got a neighbor pregnant.