Most notorious fugitive never finished bus ride

By Walter Wright
Advertiser Staff Writer

Albert Batalona, the most notorious of the three inmates who escaped a week ago today from Halawa prison, sat cowering in the front seat of City Bus 617 yesterday morning, pulling his stocking cap down over his head as far as he could.

Three Honolulu police officers, guns drawn, stood beside him, trying to figure out which of the 50 passengers was their escapee.

At that moment, bus driver Hubert Fernandez recalled, a voice crackled over one of the officers' radio: "Suspect is wearing orange shirt and black shorts."

The officers looked down at the skinny, bearded man with dark glasses sitting right next to them in the front seat, who was trying hard to make himself look smaller.

He was wearing an orange shirt. And black shorts. And the man who had fired 26 bullets from a fully automatic AR-15 at a police officer during a Kahala bank robbery four years ago, was quietly taken into custody.

"One officer grabbed one of his hands, another grabbed the other, and it was all over," the driver said.

The officers took Batalona out of the bus "nicely," Fernandez said, and made him lie down on the grass near the Pizza Hut on Kamehameha Highway in Kane'ohe where a patrol car had pulled right in front of the bus a moment before.

Fernandez said he didn't realize right away what was going on, and began waving his hand at the officer in the patrol car, trying to shoo him out of the way so the bus could continue on the "circle island" run back to Ala Moana Center.

Although he said he had had some vague suspicions earlier, only then did Fernandez, 51, of Kane'ohe, realize his front-seat passenger was one of the three most wanted men in Hawai'i.

Fernandez recalled that the man in the orange shirt and black shorts was running down the highway in Hau'ula when he flagged down the bus that morning. He was in clean clothes and seemed to be in good spirits and had kidded with Fernandez about the construction workers who seemed to be taking forever to get out of their way on Kamehameha Highway, the bus driver said.

Several stops later, another group of people got on and a male passenger from that stop spoke to Batalona but got off the bus while Batalona rode on.

But a woman in her 50s, sitting across the bus from Batalona and just behind the driver, seemed to have figured it out, the driver said. "She apparently called her daughter on her cell phone and said she thought the guy was on the bus." Police said an undercover officer had earlier spotted Batalona on the bus and boarded, monitoring him until uniformed police arrived.

TheBus management hadn't yet distributed to its drivers fliers of the escapees, Fernandez said.

"We were going to do that," TheBus marketing executive Marilyn Dicus said, "today."

Reach Walter Wright at wwright@honoluluadvertiser.com or 525-8054.