An American reportedly received US$898,000 in compensation after being psychologically tortured for 17 hours by the police of a city in California, to the point of confessing to the murder of his father… although he was still alive.
“In my 40 years of prosecuting police, I have never seen this level of deliberate cruelty on the part of the police,” Jerry Steering, Thomas Perez Jr.’s lawyer, lamented in a press release on Friday. according to The Guardian.
It all started in August 2018, when her father, Thomas Perez Sr., allegedly disappeared without a trace after going to get the mail with the family dog in Fontana.
After seeing the dog return without his father, it was the son himself who contacted the authorities to warn them of the disappearance the following day, according to the British media.
Except that very quickly, the suspicions of the investigators would have turned to Thomas Perez Jr., who seemed “distracted and indifferent to the disappearance of his father”, according to the officers, who would then have carried out a search on the scene, continued The Guardian.
It was then that they allegedly called the man for an interrogation that lasted 17 hours, during which the police accused him of having killed his father, insisting that he did not remember it and preventing him from having access to his medication.
In passing, the police allegedly told him that his dog would be euthanized because of his actions and claimed that they had found his father’s body after his dog had walked in blood.
At the end of these long hours, Perez Jr. allegedly began pulling out his hair, hitting himself and ripping off his shirt, before confessing to the murder he never committed. He then allegedly tried to take his own life, before the police took him to a psychiatric hospital.
“(He was) sleep deprived, mentally ill and, significantly, experiencing withdrawal symptoms from his psychiatric medications…(The officers’) conduct had such an impact on Perez that he falsely confessed the murder of his father,” noted judge Dolly Gee, according to the British media.
In the meantime, Thomas Perez Sr. was reportedly found safe and sound, having simply gone to a friend’s house without warning his son. He then allegedly ran out of battery in his phone.
Despite this, Perez Jr. was reportedly kept in a psychiatric wing for three days without being informed that his father was alive.
Given the case of “unconstitutional psychological torture”, the City of Fontana would have agreed to offer US$898,000 to Perez Jr. in compensation, his lawyer announced this week, according to The Guardian.
“This case shows that if the police are competent enough and they question you hard enough, they can get anyone to confess to anything,” the lawyer said in an interview.
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