California police pressured him to confess to a murder that never happened

By Rachel Clarke and Shimon Prokupecz | CNN

Fontana  — Tom Perez called the local police non-emergency line to report his elderly father missing. Thirty-six hours later, Perez was on a psychiatric hold in a hospital, having been pressured into confessing he killed his dad and trying to take his own life.

His father was alive and there had been no murder.

No one told Perez. Instead, police continued investigating him, looking for a victim who did not exist.

That was six years ago, in August 2018. His hometown of Fontana, California, paid $900,000 to settle his claims against the police, but Perez says no one from the city has ever apologized. Nor is there any indication there was an internal investigation into why detective after detective, supervisor after supervisor, allowed the questioning of Perez to continue for hour after hour.

Since then, many of the police officers involved have been promoted. And Perez feels there has still been no explanation for why he was treated so badly.

RELATED: California city officials defend police in 2018 interrogation of man characterized as ‘psychological torture’

CNN became aware of this story when the settlement was publicized. We obtained some interrogation videos and spent weeks poring through records and interviews, many of which have not been made public because of a protective order, to try to ascertain what led to what one expert in policing called “one of the most disturbing things I’ve seen.”

Perez and the city of Fontana reached their settlement this spring after he filed a civil suit accusing the police of false imprisonment and due process violations, among other offenses. The suburban city, about an hour’s drive east of Los Angeles, admitted no wrongdoing in the settlement and “vigorously denies” that any state or federal laws were broken.

Both Tom Perez and his father — who has the same name and is nicknamed “Papa Tom” — sat for exclusive interviews with CNN. The police officers who interrogated the younger man for 17 hours have not responded to CNN’s requests for comment.

Police responded to the Perez home and soon became suspicious

The Perez father and son live together in a three-bedroom, cream-colored house with a tile roof in a cul-de-sac of homes built around a golf course. Back in 2018, they were planning to sell the property and were packing up their things and completing some improvements. A contractor, the younger Perez was doing most of the work himself.

The two men had ended up sharing a house after Perez split from his wife and his father, also separated, found he wasn’t suited to the rules of a senior citizen community. They muddled along together, getting on each other’s nerves, but never for too long. Both held real estate licenses, they said, though they lived largely separate lives, with their own interests and friends. But they both adored their dog — a fluffy Husky-Border Collie mix called Margo — cooking her special meals and sharing her care.

For the Perezes, the trauma is still so raw that they have trouble talking to each other about what happened. “We haven’t reached that point,” the younger Perez said.

On August 7, the father, then aged 71, left the home with Margo to check the mailbox down the street, or so his son thought. A few minutes later the dog came back. The older man did not.

Perez, then 53, said he wasn’t overly concerned as his fiercely independent father knew many people around the area, where they had lived for years, and would often make visits without saying where he was going. But when he still hadn’t come home by the following afternoon, Perez called the non-emergency police line in case someone reported seeing his father.

“I just want to know that if there’s an elderly man walking in the neighborhood or sometimes he maybe got disoriented … let me know, it may be my father. That’s it,” he told CNN.

The community service officer who took the call, Joanna Piña, said she felt something was off.

“He didn’t seem very worried about his father missing and he kept rambling off to different topics that was not about the missing person report,” she recalled four years later in a legal deposition taken for Perez’s civil case for damages.

Piña and her supervisor, Cpl. Sheila Foley, went to follow up at the Perez home, where both seemed taken aback by the state of the house, according to footage from body cameras. They saw possessions piled up and construction work going on.

“You didn’t do it in a manner that would be somewhat normal,” Foley said to Perez when he described removing a wall unit from the older man’s room. She followed up: “Are you sure you didn’t argue with your dad?” On body camera footage, Perez told them he was tired as he stumbled over some of his words and tried to explain why he kept on working after his dad had left and why his dad’s possessions were in a messy heap.

The officers called for reinforcements, first a sergeant and then detectives. More questions were asked, and Perez agreed to go to the police station to try to help figure out where his dad might be.

At this stage, no one is alleging the police had done anything wrong. An elderly man was missing. His son called for help but often veered into tangents, talking about the work he was doing in the house, or the dog’s diet. The police needed more information.

It was what happened next that became more and more disturbing.

While detectives questioned Perez, police sought a search warrant

Det. Robert Miller asked Perez to accompany officers to the Fontana Police Department, a single-story building in a downtown municipal campus dotted with palm trees. There, in the early evening, Perez first entered the interrogation room, what he now calls “their little box of horrors.”