A man convicted of intentionally hitting three bicyclists with a stolen vehicle in Yolo County during a daylong crime spree is back in custody this morning, two days after being mistakenly released from the Sacramento County Jail.
Alamar Cyril Houston, 40, didn’t get very far in the 24-plus hours since he was released. He was found in an undisclosed area of Sacramento late Wednesday night and taken into custody about 12:15 a.m. Thursday, said Krissi Khokhobashvili, a spokeswoman for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.
Authorities returned Houston to the Deuel Vocational Institute in Tracy, where he had been incarcerated since Jan. 12, awaiting transfer to another state prison to serve a 35-year sentence for felony assault, hit-and-run and a host of other offenses.
He was brought to Sacramento from Deuel in mid-May to face unrelated charges of vehicle theft and receiving stolen property, according to a CDCR news release issued Wednesday evening, while Houston was still at large.
That case ended up being dismissed Tuesday. But instead of returning to CDCR custody as called for as part of his active detainer status, “he was mistakenly released by the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office,” CDCR officials said. “Agents from CDCR’s Special Services Unit and SCSO’s Major Crimes Unit were immediately dispatched to locate and apprehend Houston.”
Sacramento sheriff’s spokesman Tony Turnbull chalked up the accidental release to “a clerical error.”
Like other inmates who come and go from the jail on a daily basis, Houston was accompanied by a stack of paperwork that included the CDCR detainer.
“It got missed and didn’t get put into our system,” which is why Houston wasn’t flagged as jail staff prepared to discharge him, Turnbull said. “Obviously we’re going to investigate how that occurred so that it doesn’t happen again.”
It was not immediately clear why the Sacramento County District Attorney’s Office requested Houston’s transfer to answer to the vehicle theft and stolen property charges, which exposed him to a few additional years in prison at most.
The vehicle theft case was one of 16 criminal matters Houston has faced in Sacramento County since 1995, according to Sacramento Superior Court online records. He has five prior prison convictions.
Houston’s Nov. 30 conviction in Yolo County on charges of assault, hit-and-run, vehicle theft and evading police stemmed from his actions on June 30, 2015, which began with a truck theft in Colusa County and ended with a pursuit from West Sacramento to Sacramento.
In between, Houston stole a rental vehicle from Sacramento International Airport, using it to knock a motorcyclist off his bike in Sacramento before mowing down the three bicyclists — Sacramento residents Don Dumaine and 17-year-olds Jonathan Jackson and Taariq Jensen — on South River Road near Clarksburg.
After that, he punched a Walgreens store clerk in the face before police chased him down and apprehended him in downtown Sacramento, where Houston attacked a police dog deployed to detain him.
Jensen suffered a traumatic brain injury in the collision, spending two weeks in a coma and months in rehabilitation as part of his recovery. He testified at Houston’s trial that he continues to suffer lingering effects from his injuries.
The jury that heard his case acquitted him of premeditated attempted murder, as well as charges alleging he was under the influence of methamphetamine at the time of his crimes. Houston at first pleaded insanity, claiming years of mental illness, but withdrew the plea a day after his conviction.
— Reach Lauren Keene at lkeene@davisenterprise.net or 530-747-8048. Follow her on Twitter at @laurenkeene