“What happened to me wasn’t just a mistake,” he said in a written statement. “It was a violation of my civil rights. It was excessive force.”

At a news conference Wednesday, Retes, who is 25 and the father of two children, said he had been on his way to his job as a security guard at Glass House farms on July 10 when “I got caught in the middle between protesters and [U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement] agents.”

Retes had been focused on his 3-year-old daughter’s upcoming birthday party and didn’t realize that Glass House, one of the largest legal cannabis operations in California, was being raided by scores of heavily armed immigration agents.

Officials with the Department of Homeland Security later said they detained more than 360 people in the raid, including numerous undocumented immigrants who had been charged with crimes. As agents moved through the company’s greenhouses, many workers fled in a panic. One worker, Jaime Alanis Garcia, 56, died after he fell three stories while trying to evade capture.

Protesters and family members of workers, meanwhile, massed at the Glass House gates on Laguna Road, squaring off against federal agents, who deployed chemical agents and less-lethal ammunition.

Retes said he had worked at Glass House as a contractor for the security firm Securitas for seven months. He said he unwittingly headed straight into that melee as he drove down Laguna Road to report for his afternoon shift.

“I had no clue about it,” he said. “When I pulled up, I saw all the cars, I saw all the traffic, and I was just trying to make my way through.”

He did not get to work. Instead, he said, agents smashed his car window, pepper-sprayed him and dragged him out at gunpoint.

“I let ICE agents know that I’m a U.S. Citizen, that I’m American,” he said. “They didn’t care. They never told me my charges. They sent me away.”

Retes, who served in Iraq, said agents never told him why he was being detained at the federal Metropolitan Detention Center in downtown Los Angeles. He was packed off, without a phone call, access to a lawyer, or even a way to clean the pepper-spray residue off his clothes and face, he said.

While in custody, Retes said, he became so distressed that he was put on suicide watch, but he was still not allowed to contact an attorney.

His wife and sister meanwhile gave tearful interviews to local television stations, pleading for information as to his whereabouts.

“We don’t know what to do,” his sister Destinee Majana told KABC-TV Channel 7 last week. “We’re just asking to let my brother go. He’s a U.S. citizen. He didn’t do anything wrong. He’s a veteran, disabled citizen. It says it on his car.”

“I just don’t know where he’s at. I’ve been up since 6 a.m. trying to call the sheriff’s, the police department, Oxnard, Camarillo, Ventura,” added his wife, Guadalupe Torres. “They say they don’t know.”

Finally, on Sunday, Retes said, guards came to his cell and told him he was going to be released.

“An officer walked me downstairs,” he recalled. “I signed a paper to get my stuff back. That was it. They let me go.”

In a statement, officials at the Department of Homeland Security said: “George Retes was arrested and has been released. He has not been charged. The [U.S. attorney’s office] is reviewing his case, along with dozens of others, for potential federal charges related to the execution of the federal search warrant in Camarillo.”

Retes said he is home in Ventura now, spending time with his children and “enjoying being free. I took that for granted.”

He recovered his car, which he said still has a smashed window, numerous dents and a sharp tang of pepper spray.

But he said he plans to file a lawsuit against the government over the way he was treated.

“What they did isn’t right,” he said. “I’m here speaking for everyone who doesn’t have a chance to speak.”

The post Army vet calls for investigation after being detained for three days in ICE raid appeared first on The Hemet & San Jacinto Chronicle.

Officers threatened to kill the dog of Thomas Perez Jr as they pressured him to falsely confess to killing his father, who was alive

A California city has agreed to pay $900,000 to a man who was subjected to a 17-hour police interrogation in which officers pressured him to falsely confess to murdering his father, who was alive.

During the 2018 interrogation of Thomas Perez Jr by police in Fontana, a city east of Los Angeles, officers suggested they would have Perez’s dog euthanized as a result of his actions, according to a complaint and footage of the encounter. A judge said the questioning appeared to be “unconstitutional psychological torture”, and the city agreed to settle Perez’s lawsuit for $898,000, his lawyer announced this week.

The extraordinary case of a coerced false confession has sparked widespread outrage, with footage showing Perez in extreme emotional and physical distress, including as officers brought his dog in and said the animal would need to be put down due to “depression” from witnessing a murder that had not actually occurred.

The incident began on the evening of 7 August 2018 when Perez Jr’s father, Thomas Perez Sr, whom he lived with, left the house with their dog to get the mail, according to a summary of the case written by Dolly Gee, a federal judge. The dog returned a few minutes later, but Perez Sr did not; the next day, his son called the police and reported him missing.

Officer Joanna Piña, who took the call, reported Perez Jr’s demeanor as “suspicious”, claiming he seemed “distracted and unconcerned with his father’s disappearance”. She and her supervisor, Cpl Sheila Foley, went to Perez’s house, and then brought him back to the police station for questioning. Police then searched his house, where they claimed they found “visible bloodstains” and that a police dog smelled the presence of a corpse. Jerry Steering, Perez Jr’s lawyer, said there had been no blood in the home, and police appeared to have been claiming miscellaneous stains were blood.

Perez Jr sat for hours of initial questioning while officers obtained additional search warrants allowing them to access devices they had seized. At one point, two officers took Perez out of the station and drove him around to different locations “purportedly to investigate his father’s disappearance”, the judge wrote. The officers berated him, insisting he killed his father and did not remember it, and telling him he did not need his medication as Perez begged for medical attention.

“Where can you take us to show where Daddy is?” one said.

“We’re not going to go to the hospital, because that’s not going to help you,” another added.

The officers eventually returned to the station, where Perez Jr faced further questioning, the judge said.

Video of the interrogation revealed hours of two officers accusing him of murder while Perez was distraught and crying, said the judge, who noted Perez was “sleep deprived, mentally ill, and, significantly, undergoing symptoms of withdrawal from his psychiatric medications”. The officers at one point brought in his dog, with one of them saying: “It did happen … you killed [your father], and he’s dead … You know you killed him … You’re not being honest with yourself … 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? Look at your dog. She knows, because she was walking through all the blood.”

During the interrogation, Perez Jr started pulling out his hair, hitting himself and tearing off his shirt, nearly falling to the floor, at which point the officers laughed at him and told him he was stressing his dog, the judge summarized. The footage showed him at one point lying on the floor holding on to his dog. Officers also said he would be “charged” $1m in restitution if he did not lead them to his father’s body.

Eventually, detectives falsely told Perez his father’s body had been located, that he was in the morgue with stab marks, Perez’s complaint says. Perez then falsely confessed and was left alone in the room, where video captured him trying to hang himself.

“[Perez] was berated, worn down, and pressured into a false confession after 17 hours of questioning. [The officers] did this with full awareness of his compromised mental and physical state and need for his medications,” the judge wrote. “[The officers’] conduct impacted Perez so greatly that he falsely confessed to murdering his father and attempted to commit suicide in the station.”

Perez was then transported to a hospital on an involuntary psychiatric hold and, for the first time, read his Miranda rights indicating he had a right to remain silent, the judge said. That night, one of the detectives received a call from Perez Sr’s daughter, who confirmed that her father had been located and was alive.

Steering, Perez Jr’s lawyer, said Perez Sr had left their home to visit a friend, which is why he had not returned, and that his daughter informed the police that he was at the airport on his way to visit her in northern California. Steering said police did not, however, inform Perez Jr that his father was alive and instead kept him isolated in a psychiatric hold for three days while he believed both his dog and father had been killed.

Steering said detectives took the dog to a pound, but that Perez Jr was eventually able to track him down due to the dog’s chip and rescue him.

Fontana police spokespersons and lawyers for the city did not respond to inquiries on Friday and have not said whether any officers faced disciplinary action. Lawyers for officers David Janusz and Jeremey Hale, who conducted parts of the the interrogation, did not respond to inquiries. A third officer involved in the interrogation, Kyle Guthrie, who was not a named as a defendant, could not be reached.

“Between 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,” Steering said in a statement.

In an interview, the lawyer said watching the footage laid bare how officers can force people to make false confessions: “This case shows that if the police are skilled enough, and they grill you hard enough, they can get anybody to confess to anything.”

The post ‘Psychologically tortured’: California city pays man nearly $1m after 17-hour police interrogation appeared first on The Hemet & San Jacinto Chronicle.