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Some disappearances hit differently; not because of what’s found at the scene, but because of what isn’t. This is a story about an elderly father who suddenly vanished in 2018 in Fontana, California. When his son reported him missing, authorities were convinced that he knew more than he was letting on.
At 2:30 pm on Wednesday, August 8, 2018, 53-year-old Thomas “Tom” Perez Jr, contacted the non-emergency line for the Fontana Police Department in Southern California, a city that is an hour’s drive east of Los Angeles, to report his 71-year-old father, Thomas Perez Sr, missing.
Tom explained that during the previous night his father had left the house sometime between 9:30 & 10 pm with their Husky-Border Collie mix, Margo, to check the mailbox at the end of their cul-de-sac. However, only minutes later, Margo had come home alone with her leash dangling from her collar while Thomas, who was known to his family as Papa Tom, was nowhere to be found.
Tom indicated that he wasn’t initially concerned since his dad was a very independent man & they often lived separate lives. He was also a very social person who was known to go & visit a friend on a whim without saying something to his son. However, when Thomas still hadn’t come home by Wednesday afternoon, Tom started to grow concerned. At 71-years-old, Tom said that his dad’s memory had been recently faltering; he occasionally struggled to recognize a once-familiar face & the brief lapses in memory seemed to be happening more often. Thomas was also vulnerable because of the limited English he spoke.
When Tom initially called to report his father missing, he was routed to a social services officer, Joanna Piña, who began to draft a missing person report. As she listened to Tom’s explanation, something made her feel unsettled. Not only was his tone exceptionally calm, but he sounded almost detached as he suggested that police check around for an elderly man who might be out wandering. He continued to ramble on to different topics that had nothing to do with the missing person report. As they wrapped things up, he said, Just let me know if you find him. Maybe it’s my dad.
Since Tom sounded very indifferent & distracted during their conversation, Joanna reached out to her supervisor, Corporal Sheila Foley. They decided to pay Tom a follow-up visit at home to get a better grasp of the situation & finish the report there.
As they arrived at the two-story, three-bedroom home that Tom & his father shared within a golf course community, they found a large black pickup truck parked in the driveway snug to the garage door. As Tom greeted the social workers, he wore white shorts & a blue button down short-sleeve shirt & he seemed very calm & casual.
Once inside, they found the home in a very chaotic state with broken furniture, tools & stacks of boxes throughout the house that were piled nearly to the ceiling. When he was asked about the extreme clutter, Tom seemed somewhat ashamed as he explained that he had been working to fix the house up in order to sell it. Because he was backed up with other projects, his own home had fallen to the back-burner which left it in a constant state of disarray. Tom continued to veer off onto tangents, discussing the work he was doing around the house as well as his dog’s diet.
As the officers did a quick look through the house with their body cameras recording their every movement, they found no trace of Thomas. However, upon entering his room, they found it odd that the man’s mattress was missing as well as a shower curtain from one of the bathrooms. Many of his belongings had also been gathered as if they were ready to be thrown out. Tom explained that since they were getting ready to move, they had started paring down & decluttering the home of items they no longer wanted.
Officers immediately noted a hole in one of the walls of Thomas’ bedroom, something Tom chalked up to another construction project. Despite his explanation, the officers didn’t feel that it looked like normal construction work. Not to mention, Tom had scratches & bruises to his body, something he said were construction-related injuries.
With her suspicion growing, when Corporal Foley asked Tom point-blank if he’d gotten into a fight with his father, he faltered in his response & his behavior seemed very erratic. When they asked him about his jumbled train of thought, he chalked it up to being sleep deprived.
Not only did the home look as if a struggle occurred inside, but they also found it strange that Thomas had left his cell phone & wallet behind. Had he gone to visit a friend, they were sure he would have taken these things. Officers were left to wonder if they had been left behind because Thomas was no longer alive.
The more time officers spent in the home, the more they believed that Tom was responsible for whatever happened to his father. When they came across what appeared to be dried blood stains & spatters in various areas of the house, including a dark patch that had hardened onto the cream-colored carpet at the bottom of the stairs, Tom said that it must have been from his dad’s blood sugar checks & random, minor incidents.
After additional units were called in, Tom was taken down to the station on Wednesday evening for questioning. He was initially hesitant about going until he eventually climbed into the back of the waiting patrol car.
Once at the station, Tom was placed in an interrogation room where he was being continuously recorded. As he sat across the table from detectives Robert Miller & Jeremy Hale, they began questioning him about the timeline of his father’s disappearance. He continued to list plausible explanations as to where his father may have gone, saying, Maybe he took a train to his brother’s house. Maybe he went to visit a friend or traveled north to see his daughter (Tom’s sister). Since he was a very social person who knew many people around the area, this wasn’t uncommon.
Officers who remained back at Tom’s house spoke with neighbors who described Tom’s relationship with his dad as volcanic & reported frequent shouting matches in the front yard. On the night of Thomas’ disappearance, one neighbor told officers that they saw Tom quickly back his pickup truck into the garage.
Tom admitted that he & his father had argued before he vanished, something he attributed to the chaotic state of their house that left them each frustrated. After Thomas separated from his wife, they had been living under the same roof as Tom indicated that his father was far too stubborn & difficult to adjust to the strict rules of a senior living community.
According to Tom, because he & his father were often butting heads, they often stayed to themselves, although they did love each other. It was their beloved dog, Margo, who really connected them & Tom lovingly referring to her as our furry baby. They each shared the responsibility of caring for Margo, something that gave them a sense of harmony amongst the chaos.
Since Thomas adored Margo, the detectives couldn’t wrap their heads around what Tom was telling them; that his dad had simply dropped her leash & let her wander off while he’d left to visit with someone.
After search warrants were obtained for the vehicles, computers, phone, home & tools, when investigators utilized BlueStart, they found large amounts of blood through the house that had been cleaned. When a cadaver dog was brought in, the dog froze as it entered Thomas’ bedroom before it alerted, signaling recent human decomposition. With this, Thomas’ disappearance transitioned from a missing person’s case into a homicide investigation.
By Wednesday night, 24 hours after Tom claimed his father had left for the mailbox, investigators felt certain that something horrific had happened to Thomas & they believed that Tom was at the center of it. As they combed over phone & internet records, Tom remained at the station, vehemently denying having anything to do with his father’s disappearance.
After seven hours of questioning, it was Thursday morning & although there was nothing directly tying him to his dad’s disappearance, police continued to believe that Tom was guilty. The first round of detectives, now exhausted, brought in detectives David Yanhosh & Kyle Gattery to take over. They knew that they needed a confession from Tom so they took him out for coffee in hopes of lowering his guard & giving him a sense of normalcy & comfort away from the station. They indicated that they were driving to the train station to check camera footage, but instead, they circled the city, hoping to drive by a location that would trigger a tell from Tom.
As they drove around, they urged Tom to tell them where his father was, but he continued to insist that he didn’t know. They drove him by a charity shop where he claimed to have dropped his dad’s clothes off for donation as well as neighborhoods where Tom said he’d been house-hunting. It wasn’t until they drove by the golf course near his house when Tom suddenly blurted out, Do bodies float to the top or sink? Although this was an alarming statement, the detectives stayed quiet, hoping he would say more.
When they ended their drive at a deserted patch of dirt, Tom became nervous & refused to get out of the car. Since he seemed agitated, the detectives believed that the location had significance, but he continued to deny any guilt.
Tom began to go on a tangent about his own health ailments that included high blood pressure, asthma, anxiety & depression. As the interrogation continued on, he began to complain about feeling unwell & continuously requested his medication from home. According to the detectives, although he seemed tired & agitated, medically, he seemed fine, but he was assured they would get him his medicine.
Authorities believed that Tom was using his medical ailments as a distraction from the pressure as he began to say he needed to go to the hospital for care. However, rather than taking him to the hospital, he was brought back to the station & as hours continued to tick by, the questioning continued.
Tom’s emotions were all over the board; one moment he sat, declaring his innocence while the next, he broke down into tears & with his voice trembling, he asked over & over, Where’s my dad?
Because the detectives believed that there was some relevance to the deserted patch of dirt they’d previously brought Tom to, they took him back a second time, but Tom revealed nothing. With the pressure mounting, the detectives felt in their gut that Tom was likely close to cracking.
Brainstorming a new tactic, investigators thought that Tom might be more likely to open up if he was speaking with someone he trusted. He previously asked if he could speak with his close friend & business partner, Carl. When detectives spoke with Carl, he was stunned as they explained that based on strong evidence, they believed that Tom was responsible for his father’s murder & they needed his help to get Tom to confess. They indicated that blood was everywhere & they had a video of Tom dumping clothing with blood on it. They were also planning on digging up a location where they believe that Thomas had been buried.
Although Carl couldn’t fathom that his friend could be capable of violence, let alone violence against his own father, he agreed. As he entered the interrogation room, Carl & Tom hugged & Carl said, They’re accusing you of murder. Tom shrugged & said, That’s impossible. Carl warned him that police seemed to have enough evidence to make an arrest & when he asked if he was involved, Tom firmly denied it.
After Carl left the station without a confession, detectives came back into the interrogation room & as Tom continued to deny any accusations against him, he asked officers if he could go home to sleep. Not only was he threatened to be arrested & potentially spend the rest of his life in prison, but they also threatened him with up to a million dollars in restitution if the city had to continue searching for his father’s body.
Trying a new approach, officers brought Margo into the station. As she entered the room where Tom sat, her black & white tail began furiously wagging. Tom was flooded with relief at the comforting sight of his dog & after he hugged & rubbed her fur, Margo eventually curled up to lay at his feet.
Detective David Yanhosh point-blank told Tom that not only was his dad dead because of him, but poor Margo had to witness whatever happened to her shared-owner. He urged Tom to look at Margo, saying that she knew exactly what happened, that she was forced to walk through her owner’s blood. They informed Tom that blood had been found on Margo’s paws & because she was so traumatized by what she’d witnessed, she was going to be euthanized. They said that not only was blood all over the house, but it was also in the garage as well as Tom’s truck.
They told Tom that he would have a moment to say goodbye to Margo & as they left the room, he collapsed in a heap next to her, sobbing & stroking her fur. When detectives came back a few minutes later, they took Margo from the room & bluntly told him, She’s gone. Forget about her.
At that moment, something inside Tom snapped & he began punching himself in the head, pulling his hair & tearing his shirt in anguish. He finally collapsed in what detectives believed was guilt, yet, he continued to deny murdering his father. However, as more & more time went on, his defenses seemed to grow weaker.
The detectives told Tom that his father’s body was lying on a gurney at the morgue & they began voicing their own theories as to what happened to Thomas; maybe there had been a fight with a stick & broken bottles, maybe Tom had run his father over with his truck. One of the detectives eventually asked him if he stabbed his dad, possibly with scissors. While seemingly lost in thought, Tom suddenly replied, That’s possible. The detective asked, Possible? Tom said that although it was plausible, he didn’t think that he stabbed him.
28 hours after Tom called the police & nearly two days since he’d last seen his father, in his report of the investigation that was dated August 31, 2018, Detective Janusz wrote,
Thomas said he grabbed a pair of scissors & went over to the couch & stabbed his dad. He said if he was enraged he probably stabbed him a lot. Thomas said after his dad was stabbed, his dad went upstairs to the bathroom. Thomas heard him fall so he went up there & saw his dad lying on the ground of the bathroom not waking up. He said he slapped him in the face a few times, but he still wouldn’t wake. Thomas’ dog came in the bathroom so he tried getting the dog out of the bathroom because there was blood everywhere. Once he got the dog out, he then wrapped his dad’s body in the green shower curtain & transported his body down the stairs & into the garage. He then put his dad’s body in the back of his truck.
While the detectives tried to get more information out of Tom, he said, I don’t know, before vomiting in the garbage can. He was distraught, pulling at his hair, sobbing & ripping his shirt open. He voiced an audible apology to both his dad & his sister saying, I’m sorry, Dad. I had no idea. I love you. I didn’t mean to take your daddy away. I have no idea. I still don’t understand.
After officers left the room, Tom took his leather shoelace & wrapped it around his neck in an attempt to strangle himself. After they rushed in, they placed him in restraints & he was formally arrested. Because he was clearly a danger to himself, he was transferred to the hospital under an involuntary 72-hour hold where he was not allowed to have contact with anyone.
The shock of all shocks came three days later when a nurse entered Tom’s room in the psychiatric unit at the hospital & leaned over & whispered in his ear, I know they said you can’t talk to anyone, but your father is on the phone.
It turned out that Thomas Perez Sr. was alive & there had been no murder.
On the night of Tuesday, August 7, 2018, 71-year-old Thomas left the house with Margo to retrieve the mail at the end of the street. However, rather than turning around & coming back home, he continued walking. When he reached the train station, he boarded a train to see his brother & then later caught a bus to a friend’s house where he spent the night. The next day, he headed to Los Angeles International Airport to board a flight to visit his daughter in Oakland.
Since Tom & his father didn’t have a close relationship, it was typical of Thomas not to mention his plans to his son. Thomas, being of an older generation, wasn’t concerned by the fact that he’d left his cell phone behind.
In the meantime, after he didn’t come home & Tom reported him missing, investigators were convinced that the man had been murdered based on his demeanor, the state of the house, paired with the spots of blood throughout. All the while, Thomas was very much alive & well.
At the start of his interrogation, Tom told investigators that his father may have gone to visit his sister. He passed her number along, but rather than calling her, they began to build a homicide case against him.
After over thirty hours had gone by since Thomas was reported missing, it was 8:45 pm on Thursday when Detective Robert Miller finally called Tom’s sister, who told him that her father was currently at the airport in Los Angeles, waiting for a flight so he could visit her.
As officers rushed to the airport, they found Thomas, who was absolutely caught off guard by the sudden appearance of law enforcement. Although he hadn’t done anything wrong, they placed him in handcuffs, read him his rights & guided him into the back of a patrol car.
While Tom remained hysterical in the interrogation room at the police station, taking his shoelace off in an attempt of ending his life, at that point, officers had been fully aware that Thomas was alive. Two hours earlier, they’d spoken to Tom’s sister, but rather than telling him, he was transported for a psychiatric hold. As Thomas was escorted into the same room later that evening, his son’s blanket was still crumpled in a heap on the floor.
They grilled Thomas about his relationship with his son & told him that the house they shared was being treated as a crime scene. They asked if there had been any violence within their relationship & then they eventually allowed him to leave the station.
As Thomas got back to his home, he broke through the crime scene tape & went inside, finding it in utter disarray. The leather couches had been slashed, stuffing pouring out, the contents of drawers & closets were strewn across the floor & the hot tub had even been dismantled & ultimately destroyed. Meanwhile, Tom remained in the psychiatric facility, completely unaware that his father was fine.
When Thomas learned of his son’s whereabouts, he begged to see him, but this, as well as a phone call to him, were denied. It wasn’t until a sympathetic nurse within the facility slipped the phone over to Tom, who, as soon as he heard his father’s voice, fell to the floor in tears. That same day, Tom was released from his hold & allowed to go home.
Tom was stunned to find out that officers had left him to suffer through unimaginable mental anguish for three days, believing that he murdered his father, that his dog was going to be put down because of him.
One week after his release from the psychiatric unit, Tom was reunited with his father; they immediately embraced with tears in their eyes. Meanwhile, realizing that she wasn’t a stray, the animal shelter found a microchip implanted under Margo’s skin & contacted the Perezes to pick her up. When they brought her home, they saw that she was barely able to walk & realized that she needed surgery for a torn ligament.
Rather than abandoning the case after Thomas was found, the Fontana police pressed on as they remained suspicious that someone had been either hurt or killed inside the house. After they got permission, they placed a tracker on Tom’s truck.
In a statement of probable cause applying for the warrant, blood in the house was referenced as well as how the cadaver dog alerted officers to something. However, it later came out that the dog hadn’t even been a certified police K9, rather it was a volunteer’s pet with no professional training. In regards to the reaction of the chemical, BlueStar, it often gives false positives, reacting to other substances, even some minerals in interior paint.
Evidence photos depicted streaks of blood on a door in Tom’s home, but Tom indicated that the blood had not been there when officers first showed up to his house, something that body cam footage supports. After samples of blood were taken from the sofa where Tom allegedly stabbed his father to death with a pair of scissors, no positive identification of blood was ever made. No officer later testified to seeing a single drop of blood in Tom’s house.
Despite the tracker on Tom’s truck as well as a third search warrant, the case collapsed & no charges were ever filed against Tom. According to Tom, this wasn’t just a simple misunderstanding since he indicated that he’d spoken with a lieutenant that he had a negative history with. It was his belief that this person had it out for him.
After Tom filed a complaint in August 2019, one year later, his hometown of Fontana, California ended up paying him $900,000 in the spring 2024 to settle his claims against police. However, no one from the city has ever issued an apology. The judge who allowed Tom’s lawsuit to proceed felt that some of the police’s actions had gone too far. Tom was a vulnerable person, Judge Gee writing that he was sleep deprived, mentally ill & undergoing symptoms of withdrawal from his psychiatric medications. This, paired with stress, sleep deprivation & 17 hours of intense interrogation, caused him to confess to a crime that hadn’t even occurred.
The city of Fontana continues to deny that any lines were crossed in the handling of the case, indicating that they reasonably suspected that a violent act occurred. They argued that Tom had not been isolated, he’d been given food as well as medication & the investigation stopped once Thomas was found alive. Officers who were involved were later promoted, Michael Dorsey, the lieutenant at the time, was promoted to captain & eventually chief of police of Fontana. Kyle Guthrie was named Fontana Police Department’s 2019 Employee of the Year.
According to retired LAPD Detective Tim Marcia, there is no question in his mind that there are innocent people sitting in prison based on the approach law enforcement took in Tom’s case. Based on a 2024 Los Angeles Times article, about 13% of exonerations since 1989, totaling 458 people, have involved false confessions. A 2016 study by the Innocence Project found that about 50% of the time, the actual criminals were later identified through DNA & had gone on to collectively commit an additional 142 violent crimes.
Because of concerns about the practice, in 2021, the California Legislature passed a law requiring all training for investigators be science-based methods. However, the law was vetoed by Governor Gavin Newsom, noting the potential costs to the state.
Tom indicated that in the wake of the stress of the whole ordeal, he struggles to leave his house & it has taken him years to heal from the trauma. He & his father still share the same home, but they rarely speak of each other’s experiences during the ordeal. Margo sadly passed away in February 2023, leaving a hole in the men’s lives. The father & son feel grateful that they still have each other. Tom said the negative lesson he’s learned from everything is, Don’t call the cops.
References:
- CNN: Police pressured him to confess to a murder that never happened
- Medium: The most disturbing police interrogation you’ve never heard of
- The Guardian: ‘Psychologically tortured’: California city plays man nearly $1m after 17-hour police interrogation
- Los Angeles Times: Cops lie to suspects during interrogations: Should detectives stick to the truth?
