Taxi driver Long Ma said he was resigned to die at the hands of three drunken, angry kidnappers, who argued night after night about his fate, a battle that escalated into a fistfight on a motel room floor.

Ma, who speaks only Vietnamese, couldn’t understand what the men – three escaped inmates – were saying. But he figured it was about him. And it wasn’t good.

“In the beginning I was very scared, but by that time I had said, ‘If I die I’m going to be happy not sad because that’s no way to live,’ ” Ma, a 71-year-old independent taxi driver from Garden Grove, said through an interpreter. “If God calls you, you answer.”

For seven days, the escapees from the Orange County Jail held the driver captive, whisking him from one cheap motel to another.

In an interview Tuesday night, Ma said the fugitives hijacked him at gunpoint and used him to cash checks and sign motel registrations. They toyed over and over with killing him, at one point buying rope and marching him to the end of the Santa Cruz Wharf.

But, strangely enough, he said, a kinship began to develop between Ma and one of his captors. A kinship that Ma said he didn’t accept or trust until it was all over.

Ma’s ordeal began around 9:30 p.m. on Jan. 22, a slow Friday night. He had made only $50 in fares when the call came in. It was Bac Tien Duong. He and his friends needed a ride.

Ma didn’t know at the time, but earlier that day, Duong, along with fellow inmates Hossein Nayeri and Jonathan Tieu, cut their way out of the Santa Ana lockup, then climbed down five stories on a rope of hoarded bedsheets. They alighted next to the entrance of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department sometime after 5 a.m.

RELATED: Orange County Sheriff’s Department details timeline from escape to capture

Investigators say a getaway driver picked them up that morning and they went to residences in Westminster, Huntington Beach and Santa Ana, where they received money and checks from friends or family.

On the night of the escape, Duong, Nayeri and Tieu called a taxi in Santa Ana, according to authorities.

Ma said that for the past year he has been using his personal Honda as a taxi cab, advertising in Vietnamese newspapers. Ma was more than happy to pick up the trio at a Santa Ana restaurant.

“I had no clue there was anything abnormal,” he said.

The men offered him $100 to take them to a Wal-Mart in Rosemead, Ma said. Once in Rosemead, they said they wanted to go to Target instead.

While Nayeri shopped inside, the other two men waited in the car. Ma said he talked on his cellphone and paced in the parking lot, growing less patient as the minutes mounted. Ma finally announced that he wanted to go home.

But the men talked him into driving to a coffee shop and to the home of a relative. They never offered an address for their destinations, simply giving Ma directions. All of a sudden, Duong – sitting in the passenger seat – asked Tieu for “the gun” and then stuck it against Ma’s belly, according to the taxi driver.

“I was in a panic. I said, ‘Help me, I’ll do whatever you say,’” Ma recalled, clasping his leathery hands in his lap and rolling his thumbs. “I knew they must be some kind of thieves.”

He said the men took away his cellphone and forced him into the back seat of the car, with Nayeri taking the wheel.

From there, Ma recalls a flurry of motels, where his captors spent each night knocking back bottles of Jack Daniel’s and 12-packs of beer – Bud Light for Duong and Heineken for the other two. They offered some to Ma, but he couldn’t drink because of diabetes.

The escapees, he said, began each bleary morning the same way: watching the Orange County Sheriff’s Department’s news conferences on television and proudly pointing to their pictures. They weren’t afraid, Ma said. They were gloating.

Before heading north, Duong answered a Craigslist ad for a white van and then stole the car during a test drive, according to the Sheriff’s Department.

The escapees – along with the taxi driver as hostage – headed to Northern California in two vehicles, the taxi and the white van, according to a Sheriff’s Department account of the inmates’ eight days on the run.

After the group settled in midweek at the Alameda Motel in San Jose, the nightly arguments between Duong and Nayeri grew more heated and finally erupted into a fistfight. Ma said he watched in fear as Nayeri wrestled Duong to the ground and then pummeled Duong’s face, seeming to break his nose.

It was after that fight that Duong, according to Ma, started whispering about escaping together. The two got their chance when Nayeri and Tieu left on Thursday to get the windows of the white van tinted.

“Let’s go,” Duong told Ma. They left in the Honda, heading for Southern California. During the ride, Ma said, Duong told him in Vietnamese what he had suspected all along – that Nayeri wanted him dead.

Duong also said Nayeri was such a hothead and a mean drunk that he would probably kill him as well, according to Ma. That’s why Duong wanted to escape.

And Duong wanted to give himself up. But he didn’t know how. They finally ended up at the office of a Westminster attorney. But the secretary chased them out, Ma said. So they went to a Santa Ana shop run by a friend of Duong. There, Duong gave himself up on Friday morning.

And there, the taxi driver said, Duong set him free. Ma remembered looking back at Duong sitting near the sidewalk as he drove away in his cab.

Duong was waving goodbye.

Khanh Berg contributed to this report.

Contact the writer: Tsaavedra@ocregister.com