Another murder suspect takes a walk out of Monterey County Jail.

For reasons that are not clear to me now and that may never be clear to me, the Monterey County Sheriff’s Office uses Facebook as its main form of communication, with the press and the public. So if you’re not on Facebook (good for you), or if you’re not keeping a close eye on Facebook (good for you again), it was easy to miss the post the Sheriff’s Office dropped late afternoon on Monday, Jan. 18: “This afternoon, inmate Luis Armando Sarabia escaped from the Monterey County Jail. Sarabia was arrested in January 2019, for a homicide in Greenfield and is awaiting trial… the escape is under investigation.”

The post gave his age, height, weight and mugshot. It didn’t offer any advice to the public (lock your doors, for example, do not approach but please call 911 if you see him, for example) and lacked any other details, including how he managed to get out of a locked facility surrounded by concertina wire. There are better ways to communicate urgent information; the same technology used to send out Amber Alerts on missing and endangered children, for example, could be used to alert people in neighborhoods near the jail that an accused killer had strolled out into their midst.

The murder for which Sarabia was awaiting trial involved him and three other alleged Sureño gang members – Jose Juarez, Eduardo Solis and an unnamed juvenile – who allegedly spent a great deal of time planning the killing of 19-year-old Charles Adolfo Jose. Jose was shot and killed on Jan. 13, 2019, while washing his car outside a home in Greenfield. In that mix, Sarabia was charged with conspiracy to commit murder and the enhancement of conspiring to commit murder for the benefit of a criminal street gang. Everything’s slower because of the pandemic, but the trial in Jose’s killing was supposed to start in March.

One guy facing a murder trial who escapes from jail is a hair-raiser. But this is the third time in 14 months that defendants awaiting trial for murder have skipped out of Monterey County Jail. The first two Shawshanked their way out – they found a corner of a bathroom that was out of camera view, busted through the ceiling, Sheetrock and wire mesh, made their way to the roof and then all the way to Mexico, where they crossed the border, had a change of heart and then turned themselves in.

Sarabia was already on a roof when he escaped – a rooftop exercise yard. It’s believed that others in his housing unit distracted the lone deputy monitoring them, allowing him time to jump from the roof onto a lower roof, from which he then jumped over a concertina-wire topped fence and out of the jail. He’s seen on a video released by the Sheriff’s Office – having dropped his jail stripe uniform in a gutter, he’s running away from the facility in gray boxer shorts.

When the deputies did a head count, Sarabia’s podmates apparently spun a tale that he was visiting someone elsewhere in the jail, and that’s why he couldn’t be accounted for. By the time deputies sounded the alarm that he was missing, three hours had passed since Sarabia escaped. Juarez and Solis, the other inmates accused of the same killing, were housed together in the same pod, but Chief Deputy John Thornburg, who acts as the Sheriff’s Office spokesperson, couldn’t say if they were in on the escape plan.

Sarabia turned himself in on Jan. 20.

Now, one of the guys who holds the purse strings on the sheriff’s budget is wondering why Sheriff Steve Bernal didn’t alert anyone in the county administration the escape had happened.

“There’s frustration from the supervisors, and there’s frustration from the community,” says County Supervisor Luis Alejo. “The community is asking why they’re not getting real-time information and since the news broke, the Board of Supervisors, which funds the sheriff’s department and provides oversight, has received no updates from the sheriff.”

Alejo says he plans on asking the county’s civil Grand Jury to look into the jail’s safety protocols, policies and plans. As part of that ask, he wants to figure out a better way to notify residents when escapes occur.

“We’ve had three in [14] months,” Alejo says. “I think there should have been much more done to prevent this.”

MARY DUAN writes Local Spin for the Weekly. Reach her at mary@mcweekly.com or follow her at twitter.com/maryrduan