City Pays $900k To Man Tortured Into Confessing Committing A Murder That Never Happened

Legal Issues

from the thin-evil-line dept

Never underestimate the coercive power of law enforcement. Officers were so convinced Thomas Perez Jr. had murdered his “missing” father, they spent 17 hours torturing him into confessing to a crime no one had actually committed.

Perez Jr. initiated this. He called the police to report his father was missing, mistakenly assuming they’d help him, rather than hurt him. That initiated nearly a full 24-hour day of extreme coercion by so-called “investigators.” Perez was concerned because his father had taken the dog for a walk around 10 pm on August 7, 2018 but had never returned home.

Instead of searching for the missing father, the cops went after Perez. The details of this interrogation — as relayed by the excellent reporting of Tony Saavedra — are horrifying:

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.

The officers not only leveraged the family dog against Perez, they ignored his medical and mental health issues. They refused to allow him access to medication to treat his high blood pressure, asthma, and depression. They actually laughed as they watched him suffer through immense anguish as they threatened to kill his dog and continued to insist he was a murderer.

This is from last June’s decision denying qualified immunity to the police officers:

At one point while they are telling him to confess, he starts pulling at his own hair, hitting himself, making anguished noises, tears off his own shirt, and nearly falls to the floor. During this episode, the officers laugh at him and tell him that he is stressing out his dog.

They also straight up lied to him. They told him his father’s body had already been found. But that would have been impossible because Perez’s father wasn’t dead. It was only after Perez’s sister located their father and informed the police of this fact.

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.

Somehow, that still didn’t end the cops’ interest in Perez. They obtained a warrant to search Perez’s house for evidence of an “assault” of an “unknown victim.” This was apparently justified by the discovery of blood during the execution of another warrant (the blood was later determined to be the result of Perez’s father’s blood tests for his diabetes” and the cops’ dog’s supposed “detection” of the odor of a “corpse” in the house).

Since cops like these ones tend to believe the first or easiest-to-nab suspect must be the guilty party, Fontana (CA) residents will now be paying $900,000 to cover the tab of officers — three of whom are still employed by the PD — who tortured a man into confessing to a crime that never actually happened.

And it’s not as though these cops ever admitted to doing anything wrong, despite the fact that the interrogation was captured on film, making it impossible to deny they did the awful things they did to Perez. Instead, they thought they should be allowed to walk away from this lawsuit because (in their own words) no reasonable officer would understand that torturing a man, accusing him of crimes that never happened, threatening to kill his dog, and denying him access to needed medication might be a violation of his rights.

From last June’s decision, which says things you’d think no one would actually have to say to law enforcement officers:

There is no legitimate government interest that would justify treating Perez in this manner while he was in medical distress, since the FPD already had two warrants to search his person and property, and he was already essentially in custody and unable to flee or tamper with any evidence.

[…]

Perez’s substantive due process right against psychological torture of this nature was “clearly established” at the time of the incident, to a degree that “every reasonable officer would have understood that what he was doing violates that right.”

That’s the only reason the city is paying. And it’s only getting around to it now, after managing to drag out litigation for nearly another entire year. But there was no way putting this case in front of a jury would have ended with an exoneration of the involved officers. So, to save them and their apparently ongoing careers, the city has graciously decided city residents should pay for the sins of city employees.

Filed Under: california, coercion, false confession, fontana, fontana pd, murder, qualified immunity, thomas perez jr.