June 28, 2003.
MISTAKEN ARREST AND NO APOLOGIES
MIAMI, Florida - Virginia Fatima Garcia-Perez, making lunch for her 9-year-old
son Anthony, answered a knock at the door of her Kendall home at 11:30 a.m. June
9. There stood three U.S. marshals with an arrest warrant for Virginia Tirado
Garcia -- conspiracy to distribute cocaine, from a 1993 indictment out of
Dallas.
Garcia-Perez, 36, a Procter & Gamble rep who sells Bounty and Charmin to
independent grocers, was stunned. ''You must have the wrong person,'' she
insisted. Minutes later, they took her away -- in chains, handcuffs and leg
shackles -- while her boy cried.
The marshals showed her a copy of Tirado Garcia's driver license photo. ''Sir,
that's not me.'' She pointed out the different birth dates: Garcia-Perez's is
May 13, 1967; the fugitive's is May 3, 1968. And besides, ''I've never been to
Texas.'' The marshals told her to stop denying it, she says. ' `Things could get
worse for you if you lie.' ''
They booked her. A pretrial services officer conducted an interview. What places
do you frequent, he asked? Barnes & Noble, she replied. At the Federal Detention
Center, corrections officers confiscated her clothes, strip searched her, gave
her a green prison jumpsuit and locked her up. ''Horrible,'' she says.
She remained in custody for two days before U.S. Magistrate William Turnoff let
her out on a $100,000 signature bond -- a promise to appear and a pledge of
assets in case she didn't. She had to call in twice a day and report on
Tuesdays. On June 24, the feds admitted what she said all along -- mistaken
identity. A Dallas federal judge quashed the arrest.
Defense attorney David Edelstein says she's lucky she got out that fast. He
persuaded Dallas federal prosecutors to compare his client's fingerprints to
those of Tirado Garcia, taken by the INS when she arrived from Cuba in the late
'80s. No match.
The marshals relied on info from the Drug Enforcement Administration, the feds
say in court docs. They won't identify the marshals who arrested Garcia-Perez.
A humiliating experience -- and ''nobody ever apologized,'' says Garcia-Perez,
who had no criminal record. Her civil lawyer, Michael Gongora, is pursuing a
false imprisonment claim.