In 2012, an Iranian resident of the United States named Hossein was sentenced to life imprisonment for robbery and kidnapping. He was transferred to a maximum-security prison in Orange County, California, where he would go on to experience one of the most unusual events in the history of that prison.
At the start of his life sentence and after four years had passed, Hossein Nayiri began contemplating an escape from the maximum-security prison in Orange County. He started crafting an escape plan from the prison, a place from which no one had successfully escaped in the past 20 years.
Hossein Nayiri, the mastermind behind this escape plan, needed the prison map to complete the project successfully. To achieve this, he befriended an Iranian woman who worked as a language teacher in the Orange County prison. He asked her to provide him with the prison map, which she successfully managed to do.
After a short period, Hossein stored all the escape plan information on an iPhone, which had been smuggled into one of the most secure prisons in the United States. He reviewed the plan and, on January 22, 2016, successfully escaped from the prison along with two of his friends.
According to the Orange County prison reports, Hossein, along with two other inmates, descended from an upper-tier cellblock through a network of pipes leading to the prison’s exit. However, the most remarkable aspect of this case was that Hossein had recorded the entire escape process with his mobile phone, just like a television series.
When the three-member team escaped from the prison, they contacted a 71-year-old taxi driver to pick them up as passengers from a restaurant located near the prison. This taxi driver then drove them to their destination, a journey that took a week as he had to travel across all the states of the United States to help them evade capture.
Hossein Nayiri and his friends, with the help of the elderly taxi driver’s information, were able to find accommodations in hotels and continue their journey on the roads. In their initial suspicions, the elderly driver was forced into this situation, but after Hossein Nayiri’s capture, it was revealed that the driver had willingly joined them and could have escaped himself.
In the end, the escape of Hossein Nayiri and his friends didn’t last long. Just one week after extensive police alerts and public notifications, they were apprehended in a stolen white van in San Francisco. Hossein Nayiri had intended to escape to Turkey from the airport.
