The Tl;dr.
Man reports his missing father.
Police says his dad is found dead and processed in morgue.
Police detain the man for 17 hours making him miss his medications.
They torture him enough such that he confesses to killing his father and tries to hang himself.
His father
was not dead
as he calls the man's sister and cops are notified.
Then after OOOPS, Police get a warrant to search man's house claiming he assaulted an unknown vitcim. Nothing was found.
https://www.sbsun.com/2024/05/23/fontana-pays-nearly-900000-for-psychological-torture-inflicted-by-police-to-get-false-confession/
Fontana pays nearly $900,000 for psychological torture inflicted by police to get false confession
In my 40 years of suing the police I have never seen that level of deliberate cruelty, says an attorney for Thomas Perez Jr.
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 Perezs father. Investigators didnt 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 didnt 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 dogs now gone, forget about it, said an investigator.
How can you sit there, how can you sit there and say you dont 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.
Suicide attempt
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.
Perezs father wasnt 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 didnt 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, Perezs attorney in Newport Beach.
$900,000 settlement
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.
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?
Why police were suspicious
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 fathers 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 fathers bedroom. And there were small blood stains in the house. Steering later would say the blood stains were caused by the fathers finger-prick diabetes tests.
Perezs lawsuit claims detectives also refused for several hours to retrieve his medication for high blood pressure, asthma, depression and stress.
Father turns up alive
Perezs 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 didnt stop there. Detectives obtained a warrant to again search Perezs house for evidence that he had assaulted an unknown victim, according to Gees summary.
It appears none was found.
The whole "why the Police were suspicious" part shows how Police intuition
is bullshit
and just creates situations where they bullying the innocent.