STORY TKthought. And then...nothing. The three got in
the van and drove back to the Alameda Motel.
When they returned from the strange trip,
grim news awaited. Five people had been
arrested for aiding the prisoners before and
after they’d fled. Police weren’t releasing the
names, but the escapees began to wonder:
Was it Tieu’s alleged gang associates? Duong’s
connections? The English instructor with the
map? How close were the cops? Their small
room became claustrophobic.
Ma watched Nayeri and Duong start shout-
ing at each other—the noise loud and fast
and visceral. Suddenly, Nayeri glanced at Ma
and ran his index finger across his throat. In
an instant, days of anger and anxiety broke,
and Nayeri and Duong fell to a rolling heap.
After thrashing on the floor, Nayeri maneu-
vered his way atop Duong and landed a series
of clean shots to the nose and jaw, one after
another, the whole thing hard to watch.
Satisfied, Nayeri pulled himself out of his rage.
Each man gasped for air.
Ma was too terrified to move. But Nayeri
did not grab the gun and kill the cabdriver. He
did not haul the old man outside and, in the
shadows of the motel, slit his throat. Nayeri
simply retreated to a corner. For another
night, the four watched one another and, as
they went to bed, stewed in the frustration
that had filled the room.
The news reports were no better the next
morning—their sixth on the run. Law enforce-
ment shared photos of the stolen van the men
were driving. This rattled Nayeri and Tieu,
who announced to Duong that they were leav-
ing to have the van’s windows tinted and its
license plates changed.
When the door closed behind them,
Duong—his face battered from the fight—
turned quickly to Ma.
“Uncle, we have to go,” he said in Vietnamese.
“What?” Ma was leery of falling into a part-
nership with Duong.
“We have to go now,” Duong said.
Ma knew he didn’t have any other option.
He nodded, and the two rushed to his car.
- ••
THEY DROVE SOUTH. The horizon opened,
and the fear of being noticed, or the panic
of seeing the white van behind them, leveled
into something more prosaic: The day felt
like two men on a road trip, tires humming
along the highway.
Ma was back behind the wheel, empow-
ered but still uneasy. When Duong said to
him, “Don’t be afraid; you’re not in danger
anymore,” Ma snickered to himself. We’ ll
see. He had understood enough of the news
to piece together Duong’s criminal past: a
1995 burglary conviction in San Diego, four
years after he became a U.S. resident; twice
pleading guilty to selling cocaine; stints in
state prison; and then, in November 2015, the
alleged attempted murder of a Santa Ana man
after an argument.
And yet, in spite of Duong’s past, there had
been—this whole week—another composite
on view, too: that of a flawed but compassion-
ate man. Ma had caught flashes of details, but
not the full picture of Duong’s conflicted life.
He didn’t realize how chronic drug depen-
dency and what Duong’s friends saw as
mental disorders had pushed Duong down a
criminal path—and he didn’t yet know that
Duong was also the father of two boys, Peter
and Benny, whom he always wanted to make
happy. He lived for their smiles.
Duong began to tell Ma that he regretted
his misdeeds and hated how his crimes placed
him outside society. That was the most pain-
ful thing—not being accepted. A few years ago,
out of prison after serving a drug sentence, he
had asked a friend of a friend, Theresa Nguyen,
to accompany him to his grandfather’s memo-
rial service. She found the invite strangely
intimate. But she understood it better when
she walked in: His father wouldn’t speak to
him. His mother later said she was ashamed
of him. Duong—a discarded man—just wanted
someone to stand by him.
Another time, Duong asked Theresa and
her husband, Tri, to go with him to his moth-
er’s home—“Because I want her to know that I
have normal friends, too,” he told her. He could
never atone in his family’s eyes. Theresa began
to get it, why Duong called her “Sister.” Why
he phoned her the day her daughter gradu-
ated from college, another immigrant success
story: “I’m proud of you, Sister.”
He had wanted so badly to make things
right but kept getting so much wrong. That
was what he recognized now; this was what
he told Ma as they drove. As he sat there, next
to a cabdriver he’d kidnapped six days ear-
lier, Duong’s eyes filled with tears. He had
caused so much pain, brought such shame to
the ones he loved. Ma listened, reticent but
knowing that sometimes people need to be
heard even more than consoled.
Duong realized he should never have gone
along with Nayeri. He was a monster, Duong
said, and the allure of joining in Nayeri’s jail-
break had only trapped him once he made it
to the outside. He told Ma that Nayeri’s plan
had been to kill the driver on the beach. But
for whatever reason, Nayeri didn’t go through
with it. The brutal fight the night before had
been over Ma, too. Duong said that Nayeri was
adamant: If the driver were dead, the men
would have no witnesses to their escape. But
Duong couldn’t abide seeing the cabdriver
murdered—or su≠ering for Duong’s mistakes.
Ma drove on, trying to absorb this. He said
at last, “You should turn yourself in.”
Duong didn’t balk at the suggestion. He
looked contrite, in need of some sort of abso-
lution. He was grateful for the way Ma hadn’t
judged him. He didn’t want to call Ma “Uncle”
anymore, he said. Given the circumstances
of the last week, Duong said he wanted to
call Ma “Father.”
The suggestion moved Ma, who under-
stood the cultural obligation that came with
the moniker: To call Duong “Son.” To trust
him, to love him, even. This scared Ma. Life
had taught him to be cautious around love.
And yet when he looked at the damaged
man next to him, his face bruised, his psyche
scarred, he saw the good that the rest of the
world failed to see. It warmed him.
“Yes,” Ma said. “You can call me ‘Father,’ and
I will call you ‘Son.’ ”
A while later, they pulled up in front of an
auto-repair shop in Santa Ana. As instructed,
Ma slunk inside the garage while Duong sat
in the car. In a moment, the old man returned
with a woman who put her head inside the
vehicle. Duong started to cry, his face swollen
and almost unrecognizable.
“Sister,” he said to Theresa, “I’m tired.”MONTHS LATER, Long Ma picked me up in
his Civic. An interpreter and I drove with him
through Little Saigon. As we talked, Ma told
me how it all ended.
The day after Duong turned himself in, Ma
spoke with the police about where the other
two fugitives might be. The next day, a home-
less man in San Francisco noticed a white van
on Haight Street. Jonathan Tieu was found
inside the vehicle, and Hossein Nayeri bolted.
Police tracked him down a few blocks away.
The homeless man shared in the reward that
had climbed to $200,000. For his part in the
capture, Ma got nothing. (He’s since filed a suit
claiming he deserves a portion of the reward
and arguing that lax oversight at the jail led
to his kidnapping.) He returned to his board-
ing room in Garden Grove. No one had even
reported him missing.
There were moments, Ma told me as we
drove, when the awful memory of the ordeal
came back to him in waves of anxiety. But
still, he agreed to share his experiences, from
which this story has been drawn. Nayeri and
Tieu consented to jailhouse interviews as well,
though there were many aspects of their week
on the run that they would neither confirm nor
deny. They face new charges, including felony
counts for kidnapping and car theft (they’ve
all pleaded not guilty), and didn’t want to
compromise themselves. “It’s a hell of a story,”
Nayeri granted me at one point, speaking in a
surprisingly gentle voice.
Despite their refusal to elaborate, a picture
of each emerged through numerous pages of
police and government reports I received, and
the relatives and friends of theirs who talked
with me, as well as the lawyers who repre-
sented them and the law-enforcement agents
who pursued the men and those who helped
them. (Three associates suspected of aiding
the trio were eventually charged with crimes.
And for her part, Nooshafarin Ravaghi, the
English teacher who had worked in the jail,
was arrested but never charged with a crime.)
Though Duong is back in jail now, Ma has
stayed in touch; he has sent Duong books on
Buddhism, to assuage his guilt. And while
money has always been scarce for the cab-
driver, he has put cash in Duong’s jail account.
The two men have talked by phone, and Ma has
even visited the man who’d kidnapped him.
The last time he went, Ma watched through a
glass partition as Duong, in an orange jump-
suit, bowed when they met. “Daddy Long!”
Duong said, greeting his friend.
Throughout their half-hour visit, the two
men wept softly and spoke—in their native
language—of the bond they had nurtured
since their week on the run. They both felt
so grateful, so surprised by the possibility of
friendship. Perhaps Ma, especially. Whatever
he had expected to experience on that dark,
cold night when he left his house in his paja-
mas, it wasn’t this. Wherever he’d figured that
trip might lead, it wasn’t here. Ma told me that
as he grinned through the glass of the visitors’
room wall, he realized that Duong had saved
his life, even redeemed his soul. “My son,” Ma
said to Duong, “as long as you are still here, I
will rescue you like you rescued me.”paul kix is a deputy editor at ‘ESPN The
Magazine.’ His book, ‘The Saboteur,’
will be published in November. This is his
first story for gq.THE ACCIDENTAL GETAWAY DRIVERCONTINUED136 GQ.COM MAY 2017