Mar 31, 2009 7:13 pm US/Eastern
"Charlie Free" Freed In Miami-Dade
Lived Life On The Run For 32 Years
Past Was Secret Even To Wife
MIAMI (CBS4) ―
Jack Hazen walked out of a state prison in South Miami-Dade County Tuesday morning and for the first time in his adult life did not have to look over his shoulder. Borrowing his attorney's cell phone, he called his wife. "I'm out. I'm looking at the sky," he told her, eyes tearing. "I'm looking at the sky, and it looks beautiful."
Hazen, aka Charlie Free, was delivering a closing to a story that began 34 years ago, and saw him live for more than three decades with an assumed identity and a past that he shared with no one.
It was in April of 1975 that Hazen, a troubled Vietnam war veteran, walked into a Pompano Beach 7-Eleven store and shoplifted a pocketful of candy bars. When the clerk confronted him he brandished a knife. Police found him in the car he was living in, eating the candy bars. He was sentenced to seven years in state prison. But just months later, at the age of 29, Hazen walked away from the North Florida prison work camp where he was assigned. He made his way to Las Vegas and assumed a new identity, "Charlie Free." Free embarked on a career in construction, met and married his wife and had children. He kept his secret, even from them.
"I didn't talk about it," Free told
CBS4's Gary Nelson. "If I needed a police officer, I wouldn't even call one. I was always afraid I would get caught. I stayed away from my old acquaintances and started a new life. I wanted to live a good life, and I did...until somebody knocked on my door about a year ago."
It was federal agents who knocked on Free's door in Las Vegas in January of last year. They had been sent by a "cold case" squad from the Florida Department of Corrections that had managed to track him down, 32 years after his escape from the Florida prison camp.
"It was unbelievable. It was like my worst nightmare," Free said. "It about knocked me down when the agent came to the door." Free said the officer showed him his mugshot from the 1975 arrest. "He asked me, 'Is that you?' I said, yes."
After creating a new life and family and rising to an executive position with a home-building firm, Free's past caught up with him. He was extradited to Florida to resume serving the six years still left on his original sentence. He was 61 years old.
Free's plight caught the attention of Tallahassee attorney Donald Pumphrey, Jr., who happened to learn of it while on a trip to Las Vegas. He took Free's case pro bono - at no charge - after meeting with him in the Union County, FL prison where he was being held.
"He told me, 'I did something wrong, I need to admit to it, I need to repay my debt and make this right'," Pumphrey told
CBS4's Nelson.
After more than a year, Pumphrey was able to persuade the Florida Parole Board to let Free go.
"This is a man who self-paroled for 32 years," Pumphrey said. "He wasn't a problem to society, he was a zero threat, and that's what sold them."
The parole board also considered Free's advancing age and declining health. Capture did bring a "blessing," Free said, in that it renewed his relationship with children he had from a previous marriage, children he had not seen or spoken to since his escape from Florida.
"I now have my two daughters and I have grandchildren I had never met. My daughter, Jackie, was 9 or 10 years old the last time I saw or spoke to her. Now she's 45."
Free says his previous family, and the family he formed in Nevada, have forgiven him his secret and the "foolish moment" of 34 years ago.
As for regrets?
"I regret having left the way I did," Free said. "But as far as my life goes, I've got a beautiful family out there in Nevada and I'm going to be back with them now. So, I couldn't ask for a better life than I've had. I've had a good life."
(© MMX, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.)
Super Bowl Ad: Snickers & Betty White
Click to enlarge
Stumble It!
Reporting
Comments