Theophilus “Theo” Lacy, was a farmer, stable operator, and former Santa Ana town treasurer. He was also Orange County’s second (1891-95) and fourth (1899-1911) sheriff. Because the county was principally agricultural and sparsely populated, however, Lacy didn’t have much to do other than chase vagrants, look into an (infrequent) fight or robbery, and oversee the simple jail. Theo Lacy died in June 1918, as one of the county’s best-known citizens. Today, one of Orange County’s modern jails is named after the Lacy family.
The Spurgeon Square Jail, aka “Lacy’s Hotel,” 1897-1924
Today, the Orange County Sheriff’s Department oversees three jails, with a daily inmate population generally averaging about 6,800. At the first of August, 1889, when Orange County was carved out of Los Angeles County, OC had not only no jail and no inmates, but also no county offices of any kind. So the county rented fourteen rooms in Santa Ana for a dollar a year, including a sheriff’s quarters at 302½ East Fourth Street. That took care of the office shortage, but there was still the jail problem. So jeweler Joseph H. Brunner offered the dark, dungeon-like basement of his building at 116½ East Fourth Street in Santa Ana. It was 30 feet long, extending partially under a sidewalk; 10 feet wide; and 10 feet to the ceiling with scant ventilation, double iron doors, and was known as “Brunner’s Basement.” “I have been in the basement,” an unfortunate scoundrel would bemoan. Following, then, is the chronology of Orange County jails:
Brunner’s Basement, 1889-1890
The “First Sycamore Street Jail,” 1890-1897
The Spurgeon Square Jail, aka “Lacy’s Hotel,” 1897-1924
The “Second Sycamore Street Jail,” aka “Old Sycamore,” 1924-1968
The Central Jails Complex (one jail each, for Men, Women), 1968-present; the Theo Lacy Facility, aka “The Branch,” 1960-present; the Intake Release Center, 1988; and the James A. Musick Facility, aka “The Farm,” 1963 (technically the IRC and Central Jails Complex are the same facility, located at 500 Flower St. in Santa Ana)
The subterranean Brunner’s Basement, clearly a stopgap measure, was in use only from August 1889 to May 1890 (although there are vague records of an unnamed “basement” lockup used for intoxicated persons, back in the late 1870s, before the county existed. This may have been a Santa Ana city jail). With the first county jail came the first jailbreak, in November 1889 when four of the eight prisoners manually threw a lock bolt and strolled out. Sheriff Richard T. Harris thought it over, surmised that the escapees “were well on their way to San Diego” by now, and good riddance. Saved the county 40 cents a day to feed them, anyway.
In any event, that 1889 “walk-away” jailbreak meant it was time for Orange County to have a real jail, so $4,000 was allocated for a new facility on Sycamore Street between Second and Third Streets, which opened in May 1890. Sometimes called the “First Sycamore Street Jail,” this was a small brick building containing three iron cells. It had its own rock pile next door, where the prisoners “made little ones out of big ones.” There was said to be no fence, just a ball-and-chain for each guest.
Although there is no record of a break-out from this jail, there was, unfortunately, one break-in, and it is still to the county’s great regret. Sheriff Theo Lacy had only two deputies in 1892, one who stayed in the office and one who oversaw the jail. (There was no such thing as routine patrol; officers went out only when summoned.) Among the prisoners was ranch worker Francisco Torres, who had used an ax to kill a well-liked local ranch foreman, and then fled to Escondido, where he was arrested. Sheriff Lacy retrieved Torres by train, but the sheriff had heard murmurings of a lynching. Accordingly, he ordered the train to stop early as it entered Santa Ana, and he whisked the prisoner to the jail. Still concerned at the growing restive sentiment, Lacy asked the County Supervisors for funds to transfer Torres to the Los Angeles jail for safekeeping. The supervisors responded by authorizing an additional guard instead. On August 20, 1892, a quiet, orderly mob broke open an iron jail door, shoved Deputy Robert Cogburn aside, removed Torres, and strung him up from a telegraph pole at Fourth and Sycamore streets.
Along about now (date uncertain), two inmates using a jackknife and a bucket dug their way out of the jail and slipped away, taking the jail blankets with them. The fleeing blanket-thieves split up but were captured. At some point, two other men burglarized a blacksmith’s shop, and stole tools that were then used to break into the jail and free about five vagrants. They were all captured, but then one of them took off again. Next, a group of prisoners removed metal bars from a furnace, and then, with a knife and two forks, dug themselves out. Such unseemly events were beginning to wear thin with the public, and in 1893 the Supervisors were forced to begin considering a new jail.
By 1897, the (slowly) growing Orange County required its third jail upgrade in eight years. A land parcel in the 200 block of Santa Ana Boulevard was purchased for $8,000, and $23,000 was allocated for a three-story lockup to be named Spurgeon Square Jail. It was better known as “Lacy’s Hotel,” named after Sheriff Lacy, whose family resided in, and oversaw, the lockup. The fortress-like Lacy’s Hotel, the first building in Spurgeon Square and soon to be joined next door by the grand old red sandstone courthouse, which elegantly survives today, was the county’s jailhouse for 27 years.
The fourth Orange County Jail and Sheriff’s Office, “Old Sycamore,” was constructed at 615 North Sycamore Street in Santa Ana in 1924 and remained in use for 44 years. (Orange County gets high mileage out of its jails.) It had an initial capacity of 260 inmates, but soon surpassed that number, as Orange County jails have tendency to do (and which for decades has drawn Grand Jury attention). In the early 1930s, crowding necessitated adding a fourth floor (“The Penthouse”) to Old Sycamore.
Old Sycamore closed in 1968, upon completion of the $10.4 million Central Jails complex in Santa Ana at 550 North Flower Street. Twenty years later, the biggest aggravated jailbreak in OC Sheriff history occurred when five men rappelled four stories down from the Men’s Central Jail roof, and disappeared. Unlike the four-man jail walk-away of 1889, however, this time the escapees were pursued, although it took six months (and help from the America’s Most Wanted TV show) to catch the last one. Rappelling remains the favored modern method of busting out of the Men’s Central Jail. On January 22, 2016, three violent and dangerous prisoners rappelled off the jail’s roof after cutting through multiple layers of metal, wriggling through a plumbing tunnel, evading barbed wire, sliding four stories down a bedsheet rope, and disappearing. Authorities said the trio had been working at it for weeks, even months. The escapees’ absence was not noted for fully 16 hours. The escapees fled to Northern California. One promptly returned to Orange County and surrendered, but thanks to alert citizens—and a $150,000 reward—the other two were captured in San Francisco within a week. The still-publicly-unannounced source of their cutting tools was a sizable exasperation for sheriffs’ officials. When Old Sycamore was torn down in 1973, an old ball and chain was discovered hidden away in its attic—obviously not in use in 1889, 1988, and 2016! The artifact is now retired to the Sheriff’s Archives.(1157)
