Twin Towers jail escapee now will do his time in state prison

An inmate who walked out of a downtown Los Angeles jail by impersonating another inmate and then spent three weeks on the lam pleaded no contest Thursday to one count of escape.

Christopher Lee Brown, 37, is expected to be sentenced to eight months in prison -- on top of his original sentence of four years and eight months -- when he returns to court next week, the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office said.

And rather than serve his time in county jail as originally ordered, prosecutors said Brown would instead be sentenced to state prison.

Brown escaped from the Twin Towers Correctional Facility the night of March 12, just hours after he was sentenced to more than four years in jail for stealing computer equipment from an Alhambra medical center.

He was in the jail’s Inmate Reception Center about 10 p.m. when he somehow “impersonated another inmate” and walked out a “release area door,” the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department said in a statement.

Jail officials did not discover Brown was missing until later that night, when a count “revealed the inmate was not where he was supposed to be,” the statement said.

The jail was searched but closed-circuit television footage showed Brown “leaving through the release area.”

Sheriff’s Cmdr. Mike Parker pointed to a lapse in security, saying it “appears that mandated security practices may not have been followed.” He said the “identified security concerns were immediately remedied.”

Brown was found three weeks later outside a youth and family center in Santa Monica, sheriff’s officials said.

Authorities said he was taken into custody without incident by Santa Monica police.

kate.mather@latimes.com

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