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The U.S. Border Patrol has been notified that a 17-year-old suspected murderer who escaped from San Mateo County Youth Services Center on Thursday night might be headed to Mexico where he has family, a sheriff’s lieutenant said Friday.
Law enforcement agencies throughout California have been notified and a wanted persons bulletin has been distributed for Josue Raul Orozco, 17, Lt. Marc Alcantara said. Orozco, a member of the Sureno gang, is the youngest person to be charged as an adult for murder in San Mateo County.
Orozco was playing basketball with two other inmates around 7:15 p.m. when he scaled a high wall surrounding the athletic area, Chief Probation Officer Loren Buddress said. Once he made it over the wall he escaped through a hole that had been cut in the chain link fence that surrounds the detention facility at 222 Paul Scannell Drive in San Mateo.
“It appears that an accomplice cut a hole in the fence and was waiting for him outside the facility in a car,” Buddress said.
Surveillance cameras at the detention facility show a mid-size black sedan, possibly a Chevrolet Impala, with chrome wheels pulled up to the chain link fence around the time of the escape, Alcantara said. A K-9 unit was called to the scene and tracked Orozco’s scent from the hole in the fence to the adjacent roadway, where the scent disappeared.
Sheriff’s deputies began contacting Orozco’s family, who lives in Redwood City, and associates Thursday night, Alcantara said. Information gleaned from those interviews indicates that he may be headed to Mexico, but detectives are following other leads as well.
“Hopefully by putting out this information to the public we hope to get some fresh leads and catch him quickly,” Alcantara said.
Orozco, and co-defendant, Faustino Ayala, 23, are charged with murder and participating in a criminal street gang in connection with the death of 21-year-old Francisco Rodriguez in Redwood City on July 12, 2005.
At the defendants’ 2006 preliminary hearing, a witness testified he saw a man, who prosecutors believe was Orozco, get out of a vehicle the afternoon of the shooting and reach for something in his waistband. Prosecutors allege that Orozco shot Rodriguez and that Ayala was driving the car. Orozco was 14 at the time of the shooting.
Alcantara said he does not believe that Orozco will seek revenge against people who testified that he shot Rodriguez.
“He has been in custody for 3.5 years,” Alcantara said. “This was purely about him getting out.”
Three other juveniles who were arrested in connection with Rodriguez’s killing were already convicted and sentenced for aiding and abetting a murder, Chief Deputy District Attorney Steve Wagstaffe said. Orozco is “a man we wanted to get to trial and convicted,” Wagstaffe said. “Hopefully he will be apprehended and we will give him his day in court.”
Buddress said the probation department is conducting an internal investigation to look at security issues at the facility.
“We are doing everything we can to make sure that this can never happen again,” Buddress said.
Orozco was in custody on no bail status and if convicted was looking at up to life in prison, Wagstaffe said. A jury trial for the case was continued for the fifth time in January until May 12.
