Prison escapee is captured eight years later carrying a fake Harvard ID, feds say
A man has been indicted on a count of escaping from custody nearly eight years after officials said he left a California prison and went on the lam, according to federal prosecutors.
Eric Pree, 55, of San Francisco, was indicted on Dec. 5 in federal court, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of California wrote in a news release. Information about his legal representation wasn’t listed in court records the afternoon of Dec. 6.
Pree was arrested in October in Walnut Creek, about a 25-mile drive northeast from San Francisco, with “several cellphones, ID cards, debit and credit cards in different peoples’ names, as well as multiple driver’s licenses and a fake Harvard University student ID,” officials said.
He’d been at large since he left the U.S. Penitentiary Atwater in Merced County on Jan. 29, 2017, where he was serving a 101-month sentence stemming from a 2012 conviction on federal wire fraud and aggravated identity theft charges, prosecutors said.
The Federal Bureau of Prisons describes the facility as being “high security,” with “an adjacent minimum security satellite camp.”
Pree was discovered missing at about 10 a.m. from the minimum-security camp, the Merced Sun-Star reported at the time. The camp held about 130 men and had “minimal perimeter fencing,” the paper reported.
Pree now is serving the rest of his original sentence while facing the new indictment, officials said. He faces up to five additional years in prison and a $250,000 fine if convicted, officials said.
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