Escape Attempt Gets Aid From a Friend--and a Quake

Roy (JoJo) Ward Jr., a suspected killer and fugitive who staged an unsuccessful escape from the jail of the Lennox sheriff’s station, apparently got help from two outside sources.

One: a Los Angeles gang member who authorities believe intentionally got himself arrested so he could smuggle a gun into the jail.

The other: the Northridge quake, which disrupted the department’s automatic fingerprint identification system and led authorities to treat Ward like a simple run-of-the-mill drug dealer instead of a dangerous escape artist.

It wasn’t until later that investigators learned that Ward, 24, was wanted by federal authorities for a variety of charges, including staging a daring Thanksgiving weekend breakout from a Shreveport, La., jail with the aid of a gun hidden inside a turkey dinner.

“The guy is a dangerous man,” said Capt. Jack Scully, commander of the Lennox station. “I have no doubt he will try to escape again.”

Ward was arrested Wednesday in the Athens district by deputies who said they discovered about a pound of cocaine in his car. He produced a driver’s license in the name of Sam Hall.

Deputies did not know that “Sam Hall” was Ward, a longtime Los Angeles gang member who had escaped from the California Youth Authority as a teen-ager and fled to Louisiana, where he served three years for manslaughter and was awaiting sentencing on federal weapons charges when he broke out last November.

When Ward was arrested on the cocaine possession charge last week, deputies took him to Lennox station, an aging facility that has five holding cells.

In the past, sheriff’s spokesman Deputy Larry Mead said, it would have taken only about an hour for a computer check of the fingerprints to reveal “Hall’s” true identity. But since the Jan. 17 earthquake damaged the Hall of Justice, where the Sheriff’s Department’s fingerprint section is located, the department has had to use other agencies’ computers to run fingerprint checks, sometimes taking days.

If they had known who Ward was, Scully said, he would have received special handling as a dangerous escape risk. As it was, he was put into a holding cell with other crime suspects. The holding cells are equipped with pay phones.

Scully said investigators are still trying to determine exactly what happened next. But they believe that Ward may have called outside contacts and arranged for a gang member named Damon Goff, 24, to smuggle a gun into the jail.

During the failed escape Friday morning, Scully said, Ward held a gun to the head of a jailer and pulled the trigger. The round did not go off.

Goff and Ward were arraigned Tuesday on charges of attempted murder, assault with a deadly weapon on a police officer and bringing a weapon into the jail.