SANTA ANA, Calif. (CN) — He was certain they would kill him; having survived, he feels owed something.
Long Hoang Ma, 71, was taken hostage by three prisoners who escaped from Orange County Central Men's Jail in January and held in motels across the state for a week before he finally escaped. He thinks he helped Orange County recapture them, so he should get some, or all, of the $200,000 reward. But he got nothing, so he sued the county, its Board of Supervisors and the Sheriff's Department.
Bac Duong, Hossein Nayeri and Jonathan Tieu were all in jail for violent felonies.
Duong, 43, a member of a Vietnamese gang, was awaiting trial for attempted murder.
Nayeri, 37, had been extradited from Iran on charges of kidnapping and torture after his alleged victim was found alive in the desert, burned, beaten and with his penis severed.
Tieu, 20, was awaiting retrial on charges of murder and attempted murder.
They escaped sometime after 5 a.m. on Jan. 22, but it took jailers 12 to 15 hours to realize it, the Orange County Sheriff's Department acknowledged at the time.
On that morning, Ma, a Vietnamese-American who advertises his taxi service in Vietnamese-language newspapers, got a call to pick up three passengers at a Garden Grove restaurant.
Ma, who had been a lieutenant in the South Vietnamese Army during the Vietnam War, and taken prisoner and tortured after the North won, finally escaped and made it to the United States.
"He had a lot PTSD to start with, and they literally physically and emotionally tortured him," his attorney Walter Emil Teague III said in an interview. Teague is with The Tu Firm in Fountain Valley. Hoang Huy Tu is the lead attorney.
In the May 17 complaint in Orange County Court, Ma says nothing seemed amiss when he picked up his fares. He drove them to a Wal-Mart in Santa Ana and then to a Target in Rosemead to go shopping.
They came out of the Target with a gun and forced him to drive to the Flamingo Hotel in Rosemead and rent a room for all of them.
In the ensuing days the three men chain-smoked cigarettes and watched news of the manhunt on TV. The reward increased from $50,000 to $200,000 and they laughed gleefully about it.
They also discussed whether to kill Ma and dump his body in the ocean.
At one point, Nayeri, who wanted to kill Ma, punched Duong in the face. Duong wouldn't let the other men kill him, Ma says, and often was cordial to him, calling him "uncle" or "Daddy Long."
That weekend Duong stole a white van and using both vehicles the men drove to San Jose on Tuesday, Jan. 26. There they rented a room at the Alameda Motel and drank a lot of beer and whiskey, Ma says.
Ma slept on a twin bed, Nayeri on the other twin bed across the room, and the other two on the floor in front of the door. On Wednesday they went to a Western Union to collect $3,000, allegedly sent by Nayeri's mother.
On Thursday morning, Nayeri and Tieu left the motel to get the van's windows tinted and left the gun with Duong.