Inmate testifies health
worries prompted escape
Inmate Albert Batalona said he fled Halawa Correctional Facility partly because he was dying from a gastrointestinal illness due to insufficient medical care.
But he acknowledged he didn't go to an emergency room or seek any medical attention once he escaped.
Batalona, serving a life term without parole for shooting at a police officer during a 1999 bank robbery, took the stand in his defense yesterday. He is charged with breaking out of Halawa Correctional Facility on April 4 with two other inmates.
He is also charged with robbing a man of his car and another of his cellular phone at the nearby Stadium Mall before driving to the Windward side, where the escapees holed up for six days before being recaptured.
On trial with him is fellow escapee Warren Elicker, charged with second-degree escape. A third escapee, David Scribner, pleaded guilty in June.
Batalona said he doesn't really know what he suffers from and continues to suffer because he hasn't been properly examined. He said he is constipated and unable to digest his food properly.
"I eat rice, it comes out rice. That's not normal," he said during questioning by Deputy Prosecutor Jean Ireton.
He denied threatening the owners of the car and cell phone, but later admitted he took their property without their consent because the escapees were in a hurry.
He said he was trying to persuade them to lend them money or give them a ride to a friend's house when Scribner discovered the car keys in the ignition and started up the car. Batalona said he jumped into the passenger side and they drove off.
He said he later took some items from the car, such as a radio with a headset and the car's rear-view mirror, before abandoning the car, even though he knew the items weren't his to take.
Batalona said that during their six days on the run, he subsisted on granola bars and beef jerky he had bought from the prison store and wild fruit and mountain water. When his attorney, Nelson Goo, asked him how his medical condition was affected during that time, he smiled weakly.
"I dunno, I got the runs from the water," he said.
Batalona acknowledged he gave two TV interviews following his capture and wrote a letter to a newspaper reporter detailing his escape. But he doesn't recall telling reporters that among the reasons he escaped was because he "feared for his life" due to lack of medical treatment.
"That's not my only problem," he said.
He testified, however, that he would do anything to get out of Halawa "rather than die there."
While hiding in the mountains above Hauula, Batalona said they saw police armed with machine guns, dogs and helicopters looking for them but couldn't turn himself because he couldn't trust them to help him get medical treatment.
He said police were part of the "corrupt system" that he had fled in the first place.
Batalona's defense rested without calling any other witnesses. Elicker is expected to take the stand tomorrow.
