Officials Won’t Sound Alarm for ‘Jailbreak’

The bloodhounds scouring the hills near Pitchess Detention Center this morning will be real, but the quarry won’t be.

The dogs, as well as human trackers, will be hunting U.S. military escape and survival specialists posing as escaped inmates as part of a training exercise.

Organizers expect about 70 reserve Sheriff’s Department deputies and trained volunteers, some on horseback, to join the search of a four-mile radius around the Pitchess compound--the site of the county’s largest jailbreak in 1995, when 14 inmates escaped through the ceiling of a large holding cell and scaled a razor-wire fence.

Deputies plan to keep the 7 a.m. exercise low-key. The mock inmates--survival experts borrowed from the Air Force--won’t be wearing jailhouse jumpsuits. Instead, they’ll probably be marked with an X on their backs. And authorities won’t sound the sirens, as they would after a real breakout.

“This isn’t a big show,” said Capt. Rick Byrum, a reserve deputy who will lead the exercise. “This isn’t a Hollywood event.”

The lack of publicity, however, is exactly what has at least a few residents worried. Town Council President Phil Mazzeo said he hadn’t heard of the exercise until he was contacted by The Times.

“I like the idea of training. I don’t necessarily care for the idea of no notice,” said Mazzeo. “Everyone’s pretty sensitive about escapes. If people see [mock inmates hiding] and they’re not aware it’s a drill, they’re going to raise a stink.”

Rick Fryklund, who manages a condominium complex, suggested an armed resident who stumbled on the exercise might do more than complain.

“There are a lot of cowboys out there,” Fryklund said. “If they thought something was going down, [it] could get misunderstood. Who knows what could happen?”

Sheriff’s officials downplayed the likelihood of confusion.

“It should be pretty clear it’s not an escape,” said Deputy Artie Thompson, assistant coordinator for the reservists. “People don’t wake up till 10 or 11 on Saturday anyway.”

By then, organizers hope the trackers will have found the faux fugitives, who will probably number about a dozen.

When deputies last staged such an exercise two years ago, the searchers found eight of the 10 escapees within six hours, and nearly caught the other two, who had made it to a fast-food restaurant in town.

Finding the escapees, nicknamed “rabbits,” is less important in the exercise than learning to pick up their trail, said Byrum.

Byrum, a reservist who first picked up the art of tracking while working as a missionary in West Africa more than a decade ago, said an average person who hikes one mile through brush leaves behind 3,000 clues, from footprints to fibers.

“If you find the clues, you’ll find the person eventually,” he said.

Searchers tracked down all but one of the 14 prisoners who escaped from Pitchess in April 1995, according to the Sheriff’s Department. The other has been located in Costa Rica and is awaiting extradition, authorities said.

Outrage over the escape prompted more than a dozen residents to form an advisory committee and set up a phone tree to alert others in the event of another jailbreak.

The committee’s founder, Sam Azhderian, said he received a phone call Friday morning notifying him of today’s exercise.

“We were told to just stay calm and pay no attention,” he said. “It’s not a real breakout.”

Then he paused, and considered one possibility that might touch off a bit of confusion after all: “It would be terrible if someone broke out at the same time.”