After more than three decades on the run, a 79-year-old California fugitive has been arrested, ending a 31-year manhunt.
Ronald Keith Harvey escaped from FCI Dublin in 1994 while serving time in the federal prison for running a large-scale illegal marijuana operation. Authorities say he was arrested with more than 600 marijuana plants and firearms.
“He wasn’t cultivating a small amount,” Deputy U.S. Marshal Cruz Moya, who has led the long-running case, told ABC7 News. “It was a pretty big operation that he was running.”
There are few details about his escape, and FCI Dublin is a low-security female prison today. The facility housed actresses Lori Loughlin and Felicity Huffman in recent years for their role in the college admission scandal. The facility became all-women in 2012, and, before that, housed men.
When Harvey escaped, officials had little clue where he went. That was until this year when a new lead earlier this year helped his team track Harvey to Nevada City, a small town roughly 150 miles from the prison – where he had been leading a normal life.
“It does happen,” Moya explained. “There are some people who are better than others at absconding justice and just going on the run.”
Harvey had been living there since October with a woman named DeeVee Brown, who told ABC7 News she dated Harvey briefly 35 years ago. Brown claims she had no idea Harvey was a fugitive and said she even checked with the Nevada County Sheriff’s Office monthly to ensure there were no warrants out for his arrest.
“I was very shocked, of course,” Brown said by phone. “He had his own room. He paid rent every month to me.”
On Thursday, Harvey was taken into custody in Nevada City.
He still faces about four years of his original sentence and may receive additional prison time for escape and evading authorities. The average sentence for an escape charge is an additional year in prison, according to federal data.
Where he spent the years between his 1994 escape and his recent arrest remains unclear.
Despite the decades-long gap, Moya says the U.S. Marshals never gave up.
“One thing about the Marshal Service is that we will find you, no matter how long it takes,” he said.
