Prison Escapes

A rape defendant on Friday overpowered a sheriff's deputy, took her gun and burst into a courtroom where he allegedly killed a judge and a court reporter before fatally shooting another deputy during his escape. Authorities said Brian Gene Nichols, 33, fled just after 9 a.m. from the eighth floor of the Fulton County Courthouse after killing Superior Court Judge Rowland Barnes, 64, and Julie Ann Brandau, 43.

A teenager being booked at a small-town police station grabbed an officer's gun and opened fire early Saturday, killing two officers and a dispatcher before fleeing in a police car, authorities said. The cruiser was spotted about 3 1/2 hours later, about 10 miles beyond the state line in Mississippi, and the driver was arrested, said Lowndes County, Miss., Sheriff's Deputy Tony Mulligan.

When Los Angeles County officials opened the doors to their rebuilt juvenile hall in the San Fernando Valley three decades ago, the facility was supposed to provide a modern, safe place to house young offenders. But by the time four teenagers jumped a wall there last week, Barry J. Nidorf Juvenile Hall had become a grim illustration of the chaos and violence that has engulfed the county's troubled juvenile detention system.

Iouri Mikhel's first plot to escape federal custody unraveled when an inmate housed beneath him in the downtown Metropolitan Detention Center noticed bits of gravel in an overflowing toilet. The Russian emigre -- whose trial for allegedly murdering five Los Angeles residents and dumping their bodies in a remote reservoir began last month -- soon found himself in solitary confinement, under security measures designed for terrorists. But the feds would not break his will.

On a wall in his island home on Puget Sound, Michael Taylor hung a picture of himself posing in front of posters of the FBI's 10 Most Wanted fugitives. Police who searched the place saw it as an expression of an ambition, which they found unsettling. "It seemed like it would make his life to be on that 10 Most Wanted list," said Newport Beach Police Detective John Desmond. Today, Taylor may be a candidate for just such a distinction.

A helicopter made a daring landing in the exercise yard of the Santa Fe prison Monday morning, plucking three prisoners from inside the walls and roaring away in a fusillade of gunfire. In the hours that followed, a drama was acted out that included high-speed chases in the air and on the ground, and a manhunt in the densely wooded river bottom of the Rio Grande, which runs through this small community south of Albuquerque.

The warden of Terminal Island federal prison has been reassigned, but the move is unrelated to eight escapes there in the last five months, Jerry Williford, Bureau of Prisons regional director, said Friday. Warden Rodrick (Dutch) Brewer has been transferred to the federal prison in Bastrop, Tex., and will be replaced by Fred Stock, the warden at Bastrop, said Williford.

A convicted murderer's arguments persuaded an Orange County jury Friday that he should be acquitted of escape charges because he had been beaten in jail and had fled for his life. The Superior Court verdict, which stunned the Sheriff's Department, came in the escape trial of Ivan Von Staich, 32, who is serving a sentence of 37 years to life for the 1983 claw hammer attack on his girlfriend and the murder of her husband. Von Staich escaped from the Orange County Jail on Jan.