Shooting Suspect Fled Prison in ’75

A man suspected of shooting a sheriff’s deputy and then ramming his van into a patrol car is a prison escapee who has been on the loose since 1975, authorities said Saturday.

Robert Earl Olmsted, 46, escaped from state prison while serving a sentence for shooting two California Highway Patrol officers, said Sacramento County Sheriff Glen Craig.

It was unknown where Olmsted has been for the past 23 years.

James Maddock, special agent in charge of the FBI’s Sacramento district office, said a motive in the Friday attacks remained unclear. Although the FBI has no information that the suspect was acting in a terrorist plot, Maddock said his agency is investigating the incidents as possible terrorism.

Apparently acting alone, the heavily armed attacker shot a deputy in the back outside a sheriff’s substation and then crashed his van head-on into another deputy’s car a few blocks away in Sacramento, near McClellan Air Force Base.

Neither of the deputies was seriously injured.

Olmsted, who was wearing camouflage clothes and multiple bulletproof vests, suffered a cut. He was expected to be released from the hospital and booked on various charges Saturday. Officials described him as very calm.

In the 1969 crime, Olmsted shot two CHP officers along a freeway in Sacramento. They suffered slight wounds.

Olmsted escaped in 1975 from a low-security prison in remote Siskiyou County. Authorities concluded that he had probably died during the escape.

After Friday’s attack, the remains of numerous weapons, ammunition and several bombs were found in the van, which burned after it rammed the officer’s car.

Authorities decommissioned one bomb that remained intact. Residents who were evacuated from nearby homes had returned by Saturday.

Investigators also found a fully automatic weapon that they said may have been the one used in the attack on the deputy.