A man who escaped Tuesday from Washington State Department of Corrections’ custody while being transported through Seattle-Tacoma International Airport was arrested in Tacoma on Wednesday afternoon.
Authorities took John Nino, 20, back into custody around 4 p.m. after they followed a vehicle from King County where he was spotted in the passenger seat, DOC spokesperson Chris Wright said in an email.
Nino escaped custody while being taken through the airport just before 8 p.m. Tuesday, the DOC said.
Two DOC officers were leading Nino over the skybridge to the parking garage when he escaped Tuesday night, Wright said.
Nino was cuffed at the wrists and not at the ankles, Wright said. He was on his way to the South Correctional Entity, a multijurisdictional jail in Des Moines.
This is at least the third time this year that a person in custody has escaped at the airport.
The 20-year-old has a lengthy criminal history in King County. He was convicted of second-degree robbery in 2018 when he was 13 and has active warrants for two firearm possession charges from 2024. He was also charged with second-degree escape after he removed a GPS device in June while he was on electronic home detention in connection with his firearm charges, according to court documents.
The DOC issued a warrant for Nino after his escape in June because he also failed to report for a meeting with his community corrections officer for a second-degree robbery conviction in Thurston County in 2024, Wright said. He was arrested in New Mexico several days ago and was being returned to Seattle.
Nino was on the fourth floor of the parking garage when he fled toward the light rail station, then across the pedestrian bridge on the east side of the station before heading toward International Boulevard, airport spokesperson Perry Cooper said.
Airline policy requires people in custody not to be cuffed by the ankles during flight, Cooper said, but there is no such requirement while in the airport. That decision is up to the transferring agency.
Escapes like these are rare, Wright and Cooper said. None have happened on the DOC's watch in recent memory, going back at least a decade, Wright said, while Cooper could not remember any escapes at the airport besides this year's three in his 18 years there.
Of the more than 61,000 federal criminal cases referred to the U.S. Sentencing Commission last year, 287 involved escape of some kind, the commission reported. That's less than half a percent of all cases. The commission could not say how many of those escapes happened at an airport.
Three months ago, another man escaped custody at Sea-Tac before he was arrested over a month later in Seattle’s First Hill neighborhood.
During the check-in process at a ticket counter, Sedric Stevenson ran away from two employees of Prisoner Transportation Services, a private company the Warren County sheriff’s office in Kentucky contracts to transport people facing warrants. He fled toward the light rail station and boarded a northbound train before exiting at the Capitol Hill station.
Stevenson was also restrained by the wrists, but not by the ankles.
In July, a man from El Salvador escaped immigration agents while being transported through Sea-Tac. The man had opened a car door and ran off near the airport's car rental facility before he was caught few hours later near the rideshare pickup area, KOMO reported.
Seattle Times staff reporter Caitlyn Freeman contributed to this report.
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