Posted on 05/24/2024 12:54:03 PM PDT by Drew68
Within hours after Thomas Perez Jr. called police to report his father missing, he found himself in a tiny interrogation room confronted by Fontana detectives determined to extract a confession that he killed his dad.
Perez had told police that his father, 71-year-old Thomas Perez Sr., went out for a walk with the family dog at about 10 p.m. on Aug. 7, 2018. The dog returned within minutes without Perez’s father. Investigators didn’t believe his story, and over the next 17 hours they grilled him to try to get to the “truth.”
According to court records, detectives told Perez that his father was dead, that they had recovered his body and it now “wore a toe tag at the morgue.” They said they had evidence that Perez killed his father and that he should just admit it, records show.
Perez insisted he didn’t remember killing anyone, but detectives allegedly told him that the human mind often tries to suppress troubling memories.
At one point during the interrogation, the investigators even threatened to have his pet Labrador Retriever, Margosha, euthanized as a stray, and brought the dog into the room so he could say goodbye. “OK? Your dog’s now gone, forget about it,” said an investigator.
“How can you sit there, how can you sit there and say you don’t know what happened, and your dog is sitting there looking at you, knowing that you killed your dad?” a detective said. “Look at your dog. She knows, because she was walking through all the blood.”
Finally, after curling up with the dog on the floor, Perez broke down and confessed. He said he had stabbed his father multiple times with a pair of scissors during an altercation in which his father hit Perez over the head with a beer bottle.
He was so distraught that he even tried to hang himself with the drawstring from his shorts after being left alone in the interrogation room. Perez was arrested, handcuffed and transported to a mental hospital for 72-hour observation.
But later that day, the truth derailed the detectives’ theory and their prized confession.
Perez’s father wasn’t dead — or even missing. Thomas Sr. was at Los Angeles International Airport waiting for a flight to see his daughter in Northern California. But police didn’t immediately tell Perez.
“Mentally torturing a false confession out of Tom Perez, concealing from him that his father was alive and well, and confining him in the psych ward because they made him suicidal, in my 40 years of suing the police I have never seen that level of deliberate cruelty by the police,” said Jerry Steering, Perez’s attorney in Newport Beach.
Steering filed a civil rights lawsuit in federal court against the city of Fontana, alleging that police psychologically tortured Perez and coerced a false confession without first determining that the father had actually been slain. The suit was recently settled for nearly $900,000.
Perez agreed to the settlement rather than take the case to trial out of concern that a jury award could be overturned on appeal on grounds of qualified immunity for police. Generally, qualified immunity protects law enforcement officers unless they violate clearly established law arising from a case with nearly identical facts, according to the Legal Defense Fund.
Fontana police did not return an email seeking comment. Three of the involved officers remain employed with the department. One other officer has retired.
So how could this happen?
In court documents and depositions, police say they had reason to believe Perez was lying.
First, they noted he seemed “distracted” and “unconcerned” during the 911 call, according to court records. Officers responding to the call noted the father’s cellphone and wallet were still at the home, which was in disarray. Police saw the mess as a sign of a struggle, but Steering said Perez was renovating the house and had argued with his father about it.
Additionally, a police dog sniffed out the scent of a corpse in the father’s bedroom. And there were small blood stains in the house. Steering later would say the blood stains were caused by the father’s finger-prick diabetes tests.
Perez’s lawsuit claims detectives also refused for several hours to retrieve his medication for high blood pressure, asthma, depression and stress.
Perez became so distraught that he began pulling out his hair, hitting himself, making anguished noises and tearing off his shirt while police encouraged him to confess, according to a summary of the case written by U.S. District Court Judge Dolly Gee.
“He was sleep deprived, mentally ill and significantly undergoing symptoms of withdrawal from his psychiatric medications,” Gee wrote.
At one point during the interrogation, investigators drove Perez to get coffee and then to some housing tracts where he had been looking to buy. Detectives berated Perez, insisting he did not need his medication and that they knew he killed his father, according to the case summary.
“When can you take us to show us where Daddy is?” asked one of the investigators.
Later, during their interview, the detectives told Perez his father’s body actually had been found already.
Asked in a deposition about his line of questioning, one of the detectives said: “I believed at the time if we told him that we had located the body, then maybe he would give us more information about what had occurred.”
Police, in court records, insisted Perez was voluntarily undergoing questioning and was free to go at any time. However, in her case summary, Gee wrote that the “circumstances suggested to Perez that he was not free to leave.”
She also noted that there was “no legitimate government interest that would justify treating Perez in this manner while he was in medical distress.”
Perez’s nightmare ended shortly after police got a phone call from his sister, who said their father was alive and well. He had actually walked to the train station in Fontana and rode the line to Los Angeles County to visit a relative and then took a bus to visit a female friend, Steering said. Perez Sr. later went to the airport to await a flight to Oakland to visit his daughter.
Police picked up the father at the airport and brought him to the Fontana station.
But the investigation didn’t stop there. Detectives obtained a warrant to again search Perez’s house for evidence that he had assaulted an “unknown victim,” according to Gee’s summary.
It appears none was found.
Perez was not released until after the end of the three-day psychological observation period. He then retrieved his dog from Riverside County Animal Services, tracking her down through an implanted chip, Steering said.
While Gee concluded Fontana detectives had sufficient reason to believe an offense had been committed, she criticized officers for their interrogation tactics.
“A reasonable juror could conclude that the detectives inflicted unconstitutional psychological torture on Perez,” Gee wrote in her summary judgment. “Their tactics indisputably led to Perez’s subjective confusion and disorientation, to the point he falsely confessed to killing his father, and tried to take his own life.
...
Perez’s nightmare ended shortly after police got a phone call from his sister, who said their father was alive and well. He had actually walked to the train station in Fontana and rode the line to Los Angeles County to visit a relative and then took a bus to visit a female friend, Steering said. Perez Sr. later went to the airport to await a flight to Oakland to visit his daughter.
"Oops. My bad."
low IQ thugs
These police should have gone to jail.
This sounds like a plot to a TV movie, not something that actually happened.
Callifornia where nothing is real.
Callifornia where nothing is real.
Gestapo, which is what happens when police and prosecutors think their jobs are not about justice, just about making a claim with which the “prosecutors” job (again) is not justice, but just a “conviction”. Much like we’ve seen against DJTrump these last few years.
On the topic of the FBI —
At one point, people were saying, “There are a few bad ones, but most of them are good.”
But I think at this point, thinking people just see the FBI as 100% bad. Too bad if there might be 1 or 2 good ones, but they all need to go.
On the topic of local police —
I think we are currently at the point of saying, “There are a few bad ones, but most of them are good.”
But that viewpoint is going to change.
If the “good” ones know what the “bad” are doing, yet do nothing to curtail it, are they still “good”?
The police, and all levels, are allowed and encouraged to lie. NOTHING a police officer says can be believed. Even under oath, on the witness stand.
If police want to be trusted and respected again, police must CLEAN UP THEIR OWN ACT.
—”low IQ thugs”
And as the defund the police nuts move in, no one wants to be a copper.
To maintain a police presence, recruit standards are lowered.
More retirements, more transfers to better neighborhoods...
Recruit standards are lowered again...
As big cities swirl the drain.
No.
How do you confess to a crime in detail that never happened?
“I stabbed him to death with a pair of scissors.”
“Ooops...he is alive”
“OK who did I stab?”
This sounds like one of the women who accused Trump of rape. “If you want to know what happened in detail, watch this CSI episode”
Don’t talk to the police.
low IQ thugs
These are the smarter ones that made it to Detective. In Homicide, no less.
Have you ever been tortured?
Have you ever been “interrogated” at all?
Some people “break” more easily than others.
Amen!
“I invoke my rights under the Fifth Amendment; I respectfully decline to answer any questions. I wish to speak to my lawyer.” Then STFU. Easy to say; not as easy to do. Vital, however. It should put a stop to the nonsense.
Reporting a missing relative is now grounds to believe in foul play, apparently according to this “judge”. [assuming there are no other important facts than what was reported]
Why do blacks HATE the police I wonder.
Inn9cent people should crap their pants when the police ask a question. And say nothing ever.
They did settle for $900,000 of the taxpayers money.
Abusive cops need to pay out of their own pockets.
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