The Great Hot Tub Escape

Paul Stroede
Paul Stroede

Like Steve McQueen in "Papillon," Tim Robbins in "The Shawshank Redemption" or the chickens in "Chicken Run," Arturo Valenzuela bided his time, and when saw his chance to break for freedom, he took it. An inmate at the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department station in Lomita, Calif., Valenzuela found the "soft spot" in the jail (they all have a soft spot), and when the moment came, he went over the wall and ran into the surrounding residential community.

Most of the time, when an escapee is "hot," they're looking for a cool place to lay low. Not Arturo. As he fled through the neighborhood backyards, he spotted a nice Jacuzzi and climbed in.

And that's where police found him, three hours later, soaking away the stresses of incarceration.

It's possible Valenzuela was gambling that the spa was a hot tub time machine, and that intra-dimensional travel might whisk him to another decade, but no luck. The police that found him were from the same old time-space continuum as he had always lived in, and they brought him back to jail.

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