PASSENGERS (?) * USA - Prisoners transported via public buses
INVESTIGATION: Prisoners could be sitting right next to you and you would never know it
Saint Paul,MN,USA -KSTP TV, by Nicole Muehlhausen -28 April 2009: -- It’s not unusual for federal inmates to be transferred from one prison to another. But nine month 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS investigation uncovered those prisoners could be sitting right next to you and you would never know it... Every day, buses roll through Minnesota’s big cities and small towns as they make their way across the country... But our investigation uncovered that on board these buses, travels an alarming secret—one that the Federal Bureau of Prisons has been keeping from passengers and authorities... German Cruz looked just like any other passenger waiting for the bus in Rochester—bag in hand with a ticket to Houston, Tex... What the bus driver and passengers don't know, is that Cruz woke up behind the barbed wire and steel bars of the federal prison in Rochester... Cruz has another six months to serve. Court records indicate he was convicted of assault in New York, was deported, and then arrested again after entering the U.S. illegally... Yet there he was on a Jefferson Bus on his way to another federal prison facility in Texas unescorted... Jefferson Bus Line President, Charlie Zelle, says he had no idea the federal government was using his buses to move prisoners around the country... It’s not just the Minnesota-based bus company that's in the dark about this prisoner transfer program. Corrections officials from other states have never heard of this, and neither have police chiefs across the state... "I wouldn't want somebody coming through my town, eating in my café who is on his way to prison and I am not a ware of it," said Houston Police Chief and member of the Minnesota Police Chief’s Association, David Breault. "This person is incarcerated or meant to be incarcerated and this gives them a way out and I put myself in their shoes. If I am going to prison for five years or I have a bus ticket in hand, why would I get on that bus?"... Then there’s Dwayne Fitzen—a drug-dealing member of a biker gang. He was serving time at the federal prison in Waseca... Half way through his 24-year sentence, the BOP dropped him off on a bus bench in Owatonna, and told Fitzen he was supposed to go, ‘on his honor,’ to a prison in California. But he never made it there, bolting when he got to Las Vegas, Nev... Five years later, federal agents are still trying to track him down... Fitzen is not the only inmate to make a successful run for it. 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS found at least 178 other inmates who have escaped as a result of being sent on their way on their honor, according to officials...Labels: dangerous passengers
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