The dog came back alone. That’s when Thomas Perez Jr. knew something was wrong.​

It was a warm California evening in Fontana, just after 10 p.m. on August 7, 2018. His father, Thomas Perez Sr., 71 years old, had clipped the leash onto Margo, their family dog, and stepped out the front door for what should have been a five-minute walk to check the mailbox at the end of the street. It was their nightly routine, something the old man did every evening without fail.​

But this time, only Margo returned, the leash dragging behind her.​

Thomas Jr., who’d been living with his father following a separation from his wife, didn’t panic right away. His dad was friendly, the kind of man who’d stop and chat with neighbors for an hour if given the chance. Maybe he’d wandered into someone’s yard. Maybe he was having coffee with the couple three doors down. Thomas told himself his father would walk through that door any minute, probably apologizing for worrying him.

But the minutes stretched into hours. Then the hours stretched into the next day.

By the following afternoon, with still no sign of his father, Thomas picked up the phone and called the Fontana Police Department. It was a simple call, the kind any concerned son would make. He wasn’t asking for a full-scale search. He just wanted to know if any patrol officers had seen an elderly man walking around the neighborhood, perhaps confused or lost.​

“I just want to know that if there’s an old man walking around the neighborhood or maybe he got disoriented… let me know, that could be my dad. That’s it,” Thomas would later recall telling the dispatcher.​

It seemed like a reasonable request. A wellness check. A few questions. Maybe some guidance on what to do next.

Thomas had no way of knowing that this phone call would lead to the most traumatic experience of his life—seventeen hours that would break his mind, shatter his sense of reality, and force him to confess to a murder that never happened.​

When Concern Becomes Suspicion

When two community service officers arrived at the Perez home that afternoon to follow up on Thomas’s call, they noticed things that didn’t sit right. The house was in disarray—boxes stacked everywhere, belongings piled up, furniture moved around. To trained eyes, it looked like someone trying to hide something. Or destroy evidence.​

And Thomas himself seemed off. He didn’t appear worried enough, they thought. When asked about his missing father, Thomas kept veering off topic, talking about unrelated things, jumping from subject to subject without the kind of focused panic you’d expect from someone whose elderly parent had vanished.​

What the officers didn’t know—or didn’t consider—was that Thomas and his father were in the middle of preparing to sell their home. The mess wasn’t sinister. It was moving day chaos. And Thomas’s scattered conversation wasn’t guilt. It was how some people process stress.​

But in the eyes of law enforcement, these details painted a different picture entirely.

When Fontana Police Department detectives arrived, they asked Thomas if he’d be willing to come down to the station to answer a few more questions. Thomas agreed immediately. Why wouldn’t he? He had nothing to hide. His father was missing, and he wanted to help find him. He climbed into the patrol car that evening, believing he was doing the right thing.​

He had no idea he wouldn’t leave that building for seventeen hours. And when he finally did, he’d be convinced he was a murderer.​

The Search That Changed Everything

At first, the questions were routine. Detectives wanted to know about Thomas Sr.’s habits, his health, whether he had any medical conditions that might cause him to wander off. Thomas answered everything honestly. His father was getting older, sure, but he was still sharp. Still independent. Still walked that dog every single night.​

Then, about 24 hours after his father’s disappearance, police obtained a search warrant for the Perez home. And that’s when everything shifted.​

Inside the house, investigators found Thomas Sr.’s wallet. His cell phone. Two items an elderly man would never leave behind if he’d planned to go anywhere. Even more alarming, they discovered what appeared to be blood stains in various locations throughout the home.​

Then came the cadaver dog. The specially trained K-9 unit alerted to the scent of human remains in the bedroom. To the detectives, the evidence was damning. They had a missing person. They had blood. They had a dog signaling death. And they had a son who didn’t seem upset enough about any of it.​

Thomas Perez Jr. was no longer a concerned family member. He was their prime suspect.​

What followed would later be described by a judge as psychological torture that violated constitutional rights. But on that night, as Thomas sat across from Detectives David Janusz and Kyle Guthrie, he still believed he was helping. He still thought this was about finding his dad.​

He was wrong.

The Breaking Point Begins

The interrogation officially began late on the evening of August 8th, nearly two full days after Thomas Sr. vanished. Thomas Jr. hadn’t slept much in that time. He’d been up worrying, searching, waiting by the phone. Now he was answering the same questions over and over, sitting in a small room under fluorescent lights that made everything feel cold and sterile.​

Detectives Janusz and Guthrie weren’t interested in finding an old man who’d wandered off. They were building a murder case. And they had a toolkit of interrogation techniques designed to extract confessions—techniques that are legal in California and most of the United States, no matter how psychologically damaging they might be.​

As the night wore on and the sun began to rise on August 9th, the detectives took Thomas’s DNA sample. In their notes, they wrote that while he wasn’t under arrest, he was the primary suspect. Around 5 a.m., after Thomas had been awake for nearly 48 hours straight, the real pressure began.​

Janusz and Guthrie loaded Thomas into their car and drove him around Fontana for hours. They took him to construction sites. Empty lots. Stretches of desert on the edge of town. At each location, they’d stop and tell Thomas this was where he must have buried his father. They demanded he show them the body.​

“All day long, they just made me go to fields looking for the body… They brainwashed me. They kept asking, ‘Where’s your dad, where’s your dad, where’s your dad?'” Thomas would later recall.​

But there was no body. Because there was no murder. Thomas kept saying he didn’t know what they were talking about. He kept insisting his father had simply disappeared. He suggested maybe his dad had been confused, maybe he’d gotten lost, maybe someone had picked him up.​

The detectives didn’t want to hear any of that.

The Psychological Assault

When they weren’t driving Thomas around town on a macabre scavenger hunt for a corpse that didn’t exist, Janusz and Guthrie interrogated him in the car. They told him his mental health medications—Thomas was being treated for depression and anxiety—might have caused him to kill his father without remembering it. They planted the idea that he might have blacked out, that he might have done something terrible in a fugue state.​

They were using a technique called the Reid Technique, a controversial interrogation method that has been linked to numerous false confessions. The strategy is simple: convince the suspect that you already know they’re guilty, that the evidence is overwhelming, that denial is pointless. Then offer them a way out—a narrative that makes the crime seem less intentional, more forgivable. It was an accident. You didn’t mean it. Your medications made you do it.​

For people who are innocent, this approach is devastating. It creates a no-win scenario where continuing to proclaim innocence is seen as obstruction, while accepting the interrogator’s version of events—even a false one—is seen as cooperation.​

Thomas asked for medical attention. He was exhausted, emotionally destroyed, and his mental health was deteriorating rapidly. The detectives refused.​

When they finally brought him back to the police station that afternoon, Thomas was a shell of himself. He hadn’t slept in more than two days. He’d been interrogated for hours on end. He’d been driven around town and accused of murder at construction sites and vacant lots. His mind was fracturing under the pressure.​

And then the detectives made their biggest move. They told him definitively: Your father is dead. You killed him. We know you did.​

It was a lie. At that moment, Thomas Perez Sr. was alive and well. But his son didn’t know that. And after everything he’d endured, Thomas Jr. was beginning to lose his grip on what was real.​

The Friend Who Couldn’t Save Him

Desperate for help, Thomas asked if he could see his friend and business partner, Carl Peraza. He thought maybe Carl could help him make sense of what was happening. Maybe Carl could vouch for him, could tell these detectives that Thomas would never hurt his father.​

The detectives agreed to let Carl visit. But it wasn’t an act of kindness. It was another tactic.​

When Carl arrived, the detectives pulled him aside. According to Carl’s testimony years later, they told him exactly what they needed: Get Thomas to confess. Help us figure out where he buried the body. Make your friend admit what he did.​

“The police told me what they needed me to do was try to pinpoint the exact location where Thomas buried his father and get him to confess,” Carl would later state in court documents.​

Carl refused to play along. He knew Thomas. He knew this whole thing was insane. But his presence didn’t help. If anything, it made Thomas feel more isolated. Even bringing in his closest friend had been turned into another weapon against him.​

After Carl left, Detectives Janusz and Guthrie resumed their interrogation. And they weren’t done. They had one more card to play—the cruelest one yet.​

The Cruelty of Margo

It was late afternoon on August 9th. Thomas had been in police custody for nearly seventeen hours. He’d given DNA samples. He’d been driven around town searching for a body he’d never buried. He’d been told his father was dead and that he’d killed him. He was running on no sleep, no food, and his mental state was collapsing.​

That’s when they brought in Margo, the family dog.​

The detectives carried the small dog into the interrogation room and placed her in front of Thomas. Then they told him Margo would have to be euthanized. Since his father was dead and Thomas was going to prison for murder, the dog had no owner. She’d be put down. It was policy.​

“Say goodbye to your dog,” they told him.​

Video footage from the interrogation shows Thomas collapsing emotionally at this moment. He buried his face in his hands. His body shook with sobs. He pulled at his hair. He tore at his shirt.​

“You know you killed him,” Detective Guthrie said, pressing harder. “You’re not being honest with yourself… How can you sit there and say you don’t know what happened? Your dog is sitting there looking at you. She knows you killed your dad. Look at your dog. She knows, because she was walking in the blood”.​

None of it was true. There was no murder. There was no pool of blood that Margo had walked through. But Thomas was so far gone, so broken down, that the boundaries between reality and the nightmare he was living had completely dissolved.​

“I don’t see colors anymore,” Thomas would later describe that moment. “I started seeing people in black and white, and I started experiencing physical pain, like I was getting shocked. The pain would start at my head and go down to my toes”.​

He was in the middle of a complete psychological breakdown. And still, the detectives kept pushing.​

The False Confession

By the time the seventeenth hour arrived, Thomas Perez Jr. was no longer functioning as a rational human being. He was ripping hair out of his head. He was sobbing uncontrollably. He was vomiting into trash cans. He kept repeating, “I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know,” but the detectives wouldn’t accept that answer.​

They told him he could face a million dollars in damages for wasting city resources if he didn’t help them find his father’s body. They told him he was a murderer. They told him his dog would die because of what he’d done. They’d been telling him for hours that his father was dead, and somewhere in Thomas’s shattered mind, he began to believe it.​

More than 36 hours after he’d first reported his father missing, after 17 hours of continuous interrogation, Thomas Perez Jr. broke.​

“I’m sorry, Dad,” he said. “I didn’t know. I love you”.​

The detectives took this as a confession. Finally, they thought, we’ve got him. But when they pressed for details—how did you kill him, where is the body, what did you use—Thomas had no answers. He just kept saying, “I don’t know.” He vomited again. His eyes were vacant.​

When he was given access to a phone to call his sister, Thomas said something that should have been a red flag to anyone listening: “I didn’t mean to take your dad away from you. I don’t know. I still don’t understand”.​

Those aren’t the words of someone confessing to a crime they committed. Those are the words of someone who’s been psychologically tortured into accepting a reality that doesn’t exist.​

But to the Fontana Police Department, it was mission accomplished. They had their confession on tape. Never mind that there was no body. Never mind that Thomas couldn’t explain any details of the supposed crime. Never mind that he was clearly in the midst of a mental health crisis.​

They left him alone in the interrogation room. And that’s when Thomas tried to kill himself.​

The Suicide Attempt

Late on the evening of August 9th, after the detectives had finally left the room, Thomas Perez Jr. was alone with what he now believed to be true: he had killed his father. He couldn’t remember doing it. He didn’t know how or why. But the police had convinced him it was real, and the guilt was unbearable.​

He took off his shoelaces and tried to hang himself.​

When officers discovered what was happening, they rushed in and stopped him. Thomas was immediately transported to the psychiatric unit of a local hospital, where he was placed under observation. He would remain there for three days, living with the crushing belief that he was a murderer, that his father was dead by his own hand, that his life was over.​

But there was something Thomas didn’t know. Something the Fontana Police Department knew and chose not to tell him.​

His father was alive.

The Man at the Airport

While Thomas was being admitted to the psychiatric ward late on August 9th, his father was at Los Angeles International Airport, waiting for a flight to Oakland.​

Thomas Perez Sr. had not been murdered. He had not been buried in a construction site or a desert lot. He had not been the victim of a violent crime committed by his son in a medication-induced blackout. He had done something far more mundane and, under different circumstances, far less traumatic: he’d gone to visit his brother, then stayed with a friend for a few days.​

He’d left his phone at home by accident. He hadn’t thought to check in because he didn’t realize anyone would be worried. In his mind, he’d just stepped away for a bit. Thomas Jr. knew he was fine. Right?​

Wrong. And by the time Thomas Sr. realized there was a problem—when his daughter called him in a panic to say police were looking for him—his son had already been psychologically destroyed.​

Thomas Sr.’s daughter had called the Fontana Police Department early on the evening of August 9th to report that she’d found her father. He was safe. He was at LAX. He’d be flying up to Oakland to visit her shortly. Airport personnel escorted the elderly man to a police substation at LAX, where he gave a statement confirming he was fine, explaining where he’d been, and expressing confusion about why everyone was so worried.​

The Fontana Police Department had this information by early evening on August 9th. Thomas Jr. would not be told for three more days.​

Three Days in Hell

For 72 hours, Thomas Perez Jr. remained in the psychiatric ward, believing he was a murderer. The hospital staff didn’t know the truth. His family wasn’t allowed to contact him. The police had blocked all calls to protect their “investigation”.​

“They let me stay in mental anguish for three days, and then they blocked my phone so I couldn’t take any calls. I had to live through that for three days,” Thomas later recounted.​

Even after Thomas Sr. gave his statement confirming he was alive and well, the police continued to treat the situation as if a crime had been committed. They interrogated the elderly man about his relationship with his son. Had Thomas Jr. ever been violent? Had there been abuse? Was Thomas Sr. afraid of his own son?​

The answer to all of these questions was no. But the detectives seemed determined to salvage something from their case, even though the “victim” was alive and the “crime” had never happened.​

For days, Thomas Sr. was not permitted to see or speak with his son. No one was allowed to tell Thomas Jr. that his father was alive. The young man lay in a hospital bed, sedated and suicidal, living in a nightmare that the police knew was false.​

“They didn’t let me talk to him,” Thomas Sr. would later say. “Nobody could tell him I was alive. He was suffering mentally, and they just let it continue”.​

The Phone Call That Changed Everything

Finally, on the third day, a nurse at the psychiatric facility helped Thomas make a phone call to his father. When Thomas Sr.’s voice came through the line—alive, real, unchanged—Thomas Jr. collapsed.​

“I just sat on the floor and cried,” Thomas said.​

He’d spent three days believing he was a murderer. Three days believing he’d destroyed his own family. Three days wishing he’d succeeded in taking his own life. And now, with one phone call, that entire reality shattered.​

He was released from the hospital later that day and reunited with his father in person. Thomas Sr. described that moment with heartbreaking clarity: “When we saw each other, Thomas just stared at me and said, ‘Dad, is that really you? They told me you were dead'”.​

The two men embraced and wept. But the damage had been done.​

The Aftermath of Innocence

In the weeks and months that followed, Thomas Perez Jr. struggled to return to normal life. He’d been traumatized so profoundly that he was afraid to leave his house. He experienced severe anxiety, flashbacks, and a complete loss of trust in the institutions meant to protect him.​

“I was hurt. I was terrified. I didn’t want to leave my house after that interrogation in 2018,” Thomas said in later interviews.​

The Fontana Police Department never apologized. They never acknowledged wrongdoing. In fact, when Thomas filed a federal lawsuit against the city approximately one year after the incident, the department defended the actions of Detectives Janusz and Guthrie.​

Detective Guthrie, in his deposition, defended the interrogation tactics, stating: “I didn’t think what we were saying to him would cause him any emotional distress because you could see that he wasn’t bothered by it. He wasn’t even reacting to us saying that his father was gone”.​

Guthrie characterized their approach as “ruses”—acceptable tricks used to elicit confessions—and insisted he didn’t believe those tactics were the reason Thomas confessed.​

But the courts disagreed.

A Judge’s Ruling

When Thomas’s case went before a judge, the ruling was clear and damning. The interrogation tactics used by the Fontana Police Department were found to have violated Thomas’s constitutional rights. The judge noted that detectives had subjected Thomas to psychological torture while he was in a vulnerable state—sleep-deprived, mentally ill, and in desperate need of medical care.​

The tactics used—lying about evidence, fabricating a death, threatening to kill his dog, driving him around for hours searching for a nonexistent body—had created a level of psychological distress so severe that it led to a false confession and a suicide attempt.​

The court found that Thomas’s confession was coerced and had been given while he was in a state of extreme mental distress and confusion, to the point where he no longer knew what was real.​

Five years after that terrible night in August 2018, the city of Fontana agreed to a settlement. They would pay Thomas Perez Jr. $898,000 in damages.​

But even with the settlement, the city refused to admit any wrongdoing. In the legal documents, Fontana maintained that its officers had not violated any laws during the interrogation of Thomas Perez Jr..​

To this day, Detectives Janusz and Guthrie have not faced any disciplinary action for their role in what happened to Thomas.​

Why This Happens

The Thomas Perez Jr. case is not an isolated incident. It’s an extreme example of a much larger problem in American law enforcement: the use of deceptive interrogation tactics that are designed to secure confessions, even from innocent people.​

In most U.S. states, it is perfectly legal for police to lie during interrogations. They can claim to have evidence they don’t have. They can say witnesses saw things that never happened. They can tell suspects that cooperation will lead to leniency, even when prosecutors have made no such promises.​

These tactics are based on the assumption that innocent people won’t confess to crimes they didn’t commit. But decades of research and hundreds of documented cases have proven that assumption wrong.​

People confess to crimes they didn’t commit for many reasons: exhaustion, mental illness, fear, confusion, or the belief that confessing is the only way to end unbearable psychological pressure. Young people, people with intellectual disabilities, and people experiencing mental health crises are especially vulnerable to false confessions.​

In Thomas’s case, every risk factor was present. He was sleep-deprived after more than 40 hours without rest. He was on psychiatric medications. He was grieving what he believed to be the death of his father. He was subjected to relentless pressure for 17 consecutive hours. And he was told, repeatedly and convincingly, that he had committed a murder he couldn’t remember.​

Under those circumstances, his mind sought relief in the only way it could: by accepting the story the detectives were telling him, even though it wasn’t true.​

The System That Allows It

What makes the Thomas Perez Jr. case particularly disturbing is not just what happened, but how easily it could happen again. The tactics used against him are taught in police academies across the country. The Reid Technique, despite its documented links to false confessions, remains one of the most widely used interrogation methods in American law enforcement.​

Some states have begun to reform their interrogation practices. Illinois, for example, became the first state to ban deceptive tactics when questioning minors. Other states are considering similar legislation. But in most of the country, what happened to Thomas Perez Jr. is still perfectly legal.​

Defense attorneys and civil rights advocates have been sounding the alarm for years, pointing to cases like Thomas’s as evidence that the system needs fundamental change. They argue for mandatory recording of all interrogations, limits on interrogation length, requirements for breaks and access to food and water, and prohibitions on lying about evidence.​

But change is slow. And in the meantime, people like Thomas continue to be broken by a system that prioritizes confessions over truth.​

Life After the Settlement

Today, Thomas Perez Jr. is trying to rebuild his life with the settlement money and the knowledge that, legally, he was vindicated. But no amount of money can undo what happened to him in that interrogation room. No court ruling can erase the memory of being told he’d killed his father, of saying goodbye to his dog before she was supposedly euthanized, of trying to end his own life because the guilt was too much to bear.​

His relationship with his father remains strong. Thomas Sr. has been a constant source of support, and the two have only grown closer through this ordeal. But the scars remain.​

“I can’t forget what they did to me,” Thomas Jr. has said in interviews. “I can’t forget how they made me feel. I can’t forget believing I was a murderer for three days”.​

He hopes that by speaking out about his experience, he can prevent it from happening to others. He wants people to know how easy it is for innocent people to confess under pressure. He wants police departments to change their practices. And he wants justice—not just for himself, but for everyone who’s been chewed up and spit out by an interrogation system that treats suspects as guilty until proven innocent.​

The Detectives Today

Detectives David Janusz and Kyle Guthrie remain employed by the Fontana Police Department. Neither has faced criminal charges or significant professional consequences for their role in Thomas’s interrogation. In depositions and court documents, both have maintained that their tactics were appropriate and that they did nothing wrong.​

The Fontana Police Department has not changed its interrogation policies in response to Thomas’s case. They have not issued public statements acknowledging that their officers made mistakes. The settlement they paid came with no admission of liability—just a check and a desire to make the lawsuit go away.​

For many observers, this is the most troubling aspect of the entire case. Without accountability, without consequences, without systemic change, there’s nothing to prevent this from happening again.​

The next Thomas Perez Jr. could be going through his nightmare right now, in an interrogation room somewhere in America, being told he did something he didn’t do, slowly losing his grip on reality under the relentless pressure of detectives who are convinced they’re doing their jobs correctly.​

What We Can Learn

The story of Thomas Perez Jr. and his father is, at its heart, a story about the limits of human endurance. It’s about what happens when the people we trust to protect us become the ones who harm us. It’s about how easily truth can be twisted, how quickly reality can become unmoored, and how fragile our sense of self really is when subjected to extreme psychological pressure.​

It’s also a story about resilience. Despite everything he endured, Thomas survived. He fought back through the legal system. He won his case. He reclaimed his narrative. And he lived to tell people what happened, so that maybe—just maybe—the next person won’t have to go through what he did.​

But most importantly, it’s a story that should never have happened. An elderly man went for a walk and forgot his phone. That’s it. That’s the entire “crime” that set this nightmare in motion. Everything else—the accusations, the interrogation, the false confession, the suicide attempt, the three days of believing he was a murderer—all of it was created by a system that valued closing a case over discovering the truth.​

Thomas Perez Sr. is alive and well. He walks his dog every evening, just like he always did. The difference now is that his son watches the door more carefully, and they both know how quickly a normal night can turn into something no one should ever have to experience.​

When they hug each other now, it means something different. It means: I’m real. You’re real. We survived this. We’re still here.

And for Thomas Jr., every time he sees his father walk through that door, it’s a reminder that truth, eventually, does emerge—even when everything in the system seems designed to bury it.​

The question is: how many others aren’t so lucky?