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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.”
Later, during their interview, the detectives told Perez his father’s body actually had been found already.
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.”
“When can you take us to show us where Daddy is?” asked one of the investigators.
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.
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.
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.
Perez’s lawsuit claims detectives also refused for several hours to retrieve his medication for high blood pressure, asthma, depression and stress.
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.
