California police defended their use of “psychological torture” during a 17-hour interrogation in which they got a son to confess to murdering his father, even though his father was still alive.
Fontana officers used legal tricks to get Thomas Perez Jr. to make the false confession in August 2018, claiming they had recovered the body of his missing father, which they said was in the morgue, and saying his pet dog the family was “depressed” by what they had witnessed and would need to be put down.
They also persuaded Perez to allow them to take photographs of him to document any non-existent injuries he may have suffered in a fight with his father, while giving him suggestions as to how he may have murdered the elder Perez. Los Angeles Times reports.
Finally, Perez said in a 2022 statement that he “began to assimilate this false belief that they created and I am accepting it as truth.” I simply allowed other people’s beliefs to dominate me.’
He then confessed to killing his father, as police had suggested, prompting him to attempt suicide, although his father would be found alive preparing to board a plane at Los Angeles International Airport just hours later.
Police in Fontana, California, subjected Thomas Perez Jr. to a 17-hour-long interrogation in August 2018, as they suspected he had murdered his father.
The ordeal began when Thomas Perez Sr. disappeared on August 7, 2018, while out for a late-night walk to pick up mail with the family dog.
The pet returned alone, with no sign of his father, whom locals affectionately called Papa Tom, according to the LA Times.
At first, the younger Perez thought his father might have met with a lady, but when there was still no word from him the next day, he called the Fontana Police Department to report that his father, then 71 years old, was missing.
The dispatch officer who took the call later told her supervisor that the exchange made her suspicious, saying that Perez seemed distracted and not overly concerned about his father’s well-being, prompting the officers to show up at the home he shared with his father to talk to him in person.
Responding officers said they later noticed some signs of foul play, and Police Chief Michael Dorsey explained in a recent social media post that the elder Perez’s cell phone, wallet and keys were still in the house.
He said the house was in disarray, particularly the father’s bedroom, and claimed that Perez told responding officers that he removed his father’s mattress and some clothes and cleaned the room with bleach.
When a neighbor described Perez as mentally unstable and described his other alleged activities, police obtained a search warrant when he was brought in for questioning.
They brought in a cadaver dog that officers said sniffed out human remains in the father’s bedroom, but the dog was not an official police canine but belonged to a sheriff’s department volunteer, the LA Times reports.
Officers also used a liquid known as Bluestar, which is designed to pick up blood stains.
However, it is known to give false positive results on dietary fibers and minerals found in household items such as paint. It just so happened that the Perez house was under construction at the time.
Still, police claimed Bluestar conclusively found large amounts of blood inside the home.
That evidence was never confirmed by a laboratory and no officer would later testify to seeing blood.
Perez Jr (pictured) had called the police department to report that his 71-year-old father had not returned home after going for a late-night walk to pick up the mail.
After an intense interrogation in which the police claimed that they already had his father’s body and threatened to euthanize his dog, Pérez confessed to murdering his father.
When officers first suggested that Perez might have killed his father, he reacted with disbelief.
‘I’m shocked. I’m upset. I can’t understand. “I am left speechless,” he said in his 2022 statement.
Even so, the agents continued trying to force Pérez to confess, taking him to places in the city where he could have murdered his father.
He was then taken back to the station when he failed to guide police to his father’s body, ignoring his pleas to be taken to a local hospital because he was starting to feel sick.
After a while, Perez said he “started to lose control.”
“I had been able to defend myself and, you know, turn on them and whatever,” he said in his statement, according to the LA Times.
‘But now they are assuring me that my father is dead and I don’t remember him, and because of my medication, I erased him. And they have been trying to help me and they already recovered a body,’ he explained about his decision to confess.
He then attempted to hang himself with his shoelace from the interrogation room desk, according to a civil lawsuit he would later file.
Just a few hours later, officers would find Major Perez at LAX. He then told police that he had indeed gone to visit a friend without telling his son and that he was on his way to visit his daughter.
Still, police recommended that the son be committed to a psychiatric facility, and he claimed in court documents that police told hospital staff that he was not allowed to receive phone calls, leaving him unaware that his father and his dog were still alive.
has done it since he told CNN The assignment left him so traumatized that he couldn’t work or answer a phone for a while.
“It got to a point where I was afraid to even go get the mail,” he said. ‘I was afraid to go out. I said, “I don’t know who could be there.”
The elder Perez was later found boarding a plane at Los Angeles International Airport.
California Judge Dolly Gee finally ruled in June 2023 that evidence in the case would convince jurors that the interrogation amounted to “unconstitutional psychological torture.”
He claimed the officers left Perez “sleep-deprived, mentally ill and, significantly, with withdrawal symptoms from his psychiatric medications.”
“Their tactics unquestionably led to Perez’s subjective confusion and disorientation, to the point that he falsely confessed to killing his father and attempted to take his own life,” the judge wrote at the time.
In May, the police department decided to reach a $900,000 settlement with Perez, calling it a “business decision recommended by a federal court mediator to save the city additional time, effort and expense.”
The settlement did not include any admission of wrongdoing by the police department, realizedsaying, “If Mr. Perez had requested an admission of wrongdoing, the case would never have been resolved.”
And in a social media post Thursday, Police Chief Dorsey defended the department’s actions.
“At the time we were urgently searching for a missing man and there was good reason to suspect that some harm may have come to him,” he said. published in X.
‘Unfortunately, situations like these can and often do end in homicide investigations. “We are very grateful that this was not one of them,” he said, telling the community that he was coming clean about what happened in the interest of “transparency, accountability, fairness and maintaining the trust of the community.”
Police Chief Michael Dorsey defended the department’s actions in a social media post Thursday.
Dorsey went on to explain why police believed there was evidence that Perez, the father, was murdered, noting that at one point during the lengthy interrogation, Perez was taken to a local golf course, where he stared into a pond and allegedly asked : “Don.” Do bodies float?
Dorsey also argued that a federal judge who oversaw the lawsuit stated that a reasonable jury would have concluded there was enough evidence to suggest a crime had been committed.
As such, Dorsey said, it is “acceptable and perfectly legal to use different tactics and techniques, such as ruses, to obtain information from people suspected of possible criminal activity.”
‘Were we perfect in the way we handled the situation? No one ever is,” the police chief wrote.
“We are sorry for what the son went through and are grateful to know that he and his father have been reunited and their relationship has improved.”
Attorney Jerry Steering, who represented Perez in his lawsuit, told the Orange County Register he found that post to be “unapologetic.”
“I think they should be ashamed of themselves,” he said of the police officers involved. “I don’t think they have a moral compass.”