Police won't chase 330,000
accused felons
YUCAIPA, Calif. – For a time,
the intruder charged with pressing a revolver to Armando Botello's forehead
truly was a wanted man. When he disappeared, the police promised to pursue him
anywhere in the United States.
No longer. Last year, the San
Bernardino County Sheriff's Department notified the FBI that it would pursue
the accused armed robber only as far as the state border, even though
investigators suspected he had long since left California.
In effect, the change meant
that as long as the gunman left the state, he, like thousands of others, was
now free to go.
Nationwide, police and
prosecutors quietly told the FBI they had abandoned their pursuit of nearly
79,000 accused felons during the past year and a half, a USA TODAY
investigation found. They have given up chasing people charged with armed
robbery and raping children, usually without informing their victims. Police in
one county in California reported they would no longer pursue three of their
most-wanted fugitives and a man charged with a murder for which prosecutors
have sought the death penalty.
The authorities had previously
told the FBI – which maintains a vast index of the nation's fugitives – that
they would arrest each of those suspects if police anywhere else in the United
States happened to find them, a process known as extradition. But in each case,
police and prosecutors have since indicated they will no longer fetch the
fugitives if they flee.
So each can now escape the
charges simply by crossing state lines. And FBI records suggest many do.
"That shocks me. I can't
imagine why anybody would take a major felony and say we'll only arrest him
within the state," said Joshua Marquis, the county prosecutor in Astoria,
Ore., and a former vice president of the National District Attorneys
Association. "I cannot imagine a case of sexual abuse or rape or murder
where I would not go to the ends of the earth to get that person back."
In March, a USA TODAY
investigation identified thousands of fugitives who police said they would not
pursue if they fled the state, usually because they did not want to spend the
time or money needed to get them back. The decisions, typically made in secret,
allowed old crimes to go unpunished and offered fugitives a virtual license to
commit new ones, often as close as in the state next door.
Those cases are multiplying. In
just the past year and a half, the total number of fugitives who police won't
pursue beyond a state border swelled nearly 77%, to 330,665. The main reason
was police agencies changing their minds about what to do with people who have
been wanted for years.
In San Bernardino County, east
of Los Angeles, the sheriff's department told the FBI that it would no longer
extradite 1,952 felony fugitives if they are arrested outside California. Among
them was a man charged with sexually assaulting a young relative and others
wanted for armed robberies, according to court records. It also includes the
man police there charged with putting a revolver to Botello's head late one
night in August 2011, Joshua Tillery.
Botello said he was awakened
around 1 a.m. by a woman pounding on the side of the small travel trailer where
he lives, pleading in Spanish for his help. When he opened the door, a man
pressed the muzzle of a small revolver between his eyes, forced him back inside
and sat him on his bed. He sat "frozen like a statue," he said, while
another man loaded up the few luxuries he had accumulated working as a
gardener: a flat-screen TV, a DVD player, his cellphone and his wallet. When
the men left, Botello pedaled his bicycle to the police station to get help.
"My friends told me I
should just leave the issue in peace. But I say no. They were my things, I
worked hard for them, and they should catch him," Botello said through an
interpreter. He said he doesn't wish Tillery ill, "but if he's done
something bad, he should pay for it according to the law."
A spokeswoman for the county
sheriff, Jodi Miller, said that she could not discuss the case to "ensure
the integrity of the investigation." She said any change in Tillery's
status – or that of any other fugitive – would have been approved by the county
District Attorney's office. A spokesman for that office, Christopher Lee, said
officials were "looking into this matter."
Botello said investigators from
the Sheriff's Department told him that they had searched for Tillery but never
found him. They concluded that Tillery had left the state, Botello said. It was
a safe assumption; Tillery had ties to Washington state and was already wanted
there on a weapons charge.
That's precisely where he ended
up. In 2013, Tillery was sentenced to 13 years in prison for shooting an
acquaintance in the head during an argument. That September, prison officials
noted that Tillery has an outstanding robbery warrant in California, a fact
that would ordinarily give authorities there an opportunity to be notified if
he is going to be released.
But the notice from San
Bernardino made clear what authorities intended to do when Tillery is freed:
"NO EXTRADITION."
Southern California is the
epicenter of the surge of newly unwanted fugitives.
In Orange County, south of Los
Angeles, police reclassified 11,860 felony warrants as not extraditable,
including three in cases listed as homicides, according to FBI records. Police
in Los Angeles County gave up on extraditing 3,971 fugitives. And in
neighboring Riverside County, FBI records show police stopped pursuing 3,934
fugitives, including three men the District Attorney still lists among the
county's most-wanted fugitives.
One of those men, Javier
Padilla, was charged with molesting a relative more than 100 times, starting
when she was 7 years old. At officers' request, the girl called Padilla to ask
whether he was embarrassed for touching her when she was so young. As police
listened in, he "responded by apologizing and said he was sorry for
everything," one of the officers wrote in a court filing.
Court records show the District
Attorney's office approved extraditing Padilla when the case was filed in 2010,
but they do not explain when or why his status changed in the national records.
Any changes in officials'
extradition decisions are reflected in the FBI's confidential fugitive
database, known as the National Crime Information Center. Police officers in
all 50 states check that database whenever they pull drivers over for traffic
violations or book them into jail. It tells them whether the person is wanted
for a crime, and if so, how far the agency that wants him is willing to travel
to get the person. USA TODAY identified newly unwanted fugitives by comparing
extradition codes in two copies of that database, one from May 2013 and the
other from mid-October.
In addition to three of its
most-wanted fugitives, that comparison showed the Riverside County Sheriff's
Department indicated to the FBI that it no longer intends to extradite Javier
Hernandez, one of two men charged with pulling a man out of his car in 2004 and
shooting him to death in front of his wife and children. Prosecutors said they
intended to seek the death penalty against the other accused killer if he is
convicted.
Just how many fugitives get
away by crossing state lines is impossible to determine, in part because the
FBI discourages police from notifying out-of-state authorities if fugitives are
found beyond the extradition limit.
But FBI records nonetheless
suggest that a significant number of fugitives have been found by the police
but never returned. Nationwide, more than a quarter of felony fugitives whose
warrants were marked as extraditable in the FBI's database had been located by
the police at least once since they have been wanted, USA TODAY found.
Exactly why police reported
they would no longer extradite those fugitives remains unclear even to some of
the agencies responsible for making the decisions. Police and prosecutors from
Southern California to Boston said they were unaware of the extent to which
their warrants are now listed in the FBI's fugitive files as not extraditable
until USA TODAY contacted them. The FBI said it could not comment on the
changes because they are considered sensitive law enforcement information.
Riverside County sheriffs
officials had no record of having changed the extradition records and would not
have done so without authorization from prosecutors, Sgt. Mike Manning said. He
said the department's own records were "squared away." He said a
"glitch" in the state computer system that transmits fugitives'
information from local police to the FBI might be to blame. The state
Department of Justice, which operates that system, declined to comment. County
prosecutors said the FBI's extradition records should not have been changed,
and they did not know why they were.
The FBI requires law
enforcement agencies to verify the accuracy of their fugitive listings at least
once a year.
Whatever the reason, officials
acknowledged that the non-extradition codes now associated with thousands of
their warrants could result in fugitives going free because police in other
states rely on that information when deciding whether to detain someone. Still,
spokesman John Hall said the county has "no indication or evidence at this
time that anyone was allowed to go free."
After USA TODAY inquired about
10 of those fugitives, Hall said that all "are and should be approved for
extradition," even if that view isn't reflected in the records that the
FBI had as of October.
Riverside County's District
Attorney-elect, Mike Hestrin described the extradition changes as
"ridiculous." Hestrin, a longtime prosecutor, said he didn't know
whether they were made by mistake or as part of an effort to save money. Either
way, he said he would fix it when he takes office in January.
"If this is simply an
error, then we need to correct it. If it is a policy, then I am going to
reverse it," he said.
Advocates for crime victims
said they fear the reasons might be financial. "I'm troubled as to what
might be driving these choices, and if it's solely financial, then what are we
going to do to reverse that," said Will Marling, executive director of the
National Organization for Victim Assistance. "These are dangerous people."
Victims of the crimes involved
said they were troubled by those changes, and by the fact that no one had
notified them. Gina Avilez said police never told her that they would no longer
pursue her former boyfriend, Alfonso Ramirez-Coronoa, who they charged in 2009
with assault for allegedly choking her to the point that "she started to
lose her breath," then keeping her trapped in her bedroom for more than
three hours.
"Why don't they
care?" she asked. "He still has a record of something he's done
wrong. Anywhere he goes, he should be punished. It's just not right at
all."
In addition to giving up on
older cases, police across the country have also added thousands of new
fugitives to the list of people they won't pursue.
Since May of 2013, the total
number of unwanted fugitives more than doubled in 12 states, including
California, Florida, Massachusetts and Texas, USA TODAY found after examining
records police submitted to the FBI. The number of non-extradition warrants for
violent crimes nearly doubled, and the number for sexual offenses more than
doubled, to 6,919.
The FBI would not release
information that could identify any of those fugitives because it said doing so
would violate their privacy. USA TODAY tracked them by reviewing police records
and court cases across the United States.
In one case, for example,
police in Framingham, Mass., charged that Carlos Alvarez raped a girl while
holding a knife to her throat before gathering the telephone cords from her
apartment and using them to tie her to a chair so that she could not call for help.
In another, police accused Ader Mendoza of assaulting and trying to rape a
former co-worker before she punched him off of her. Framingham police told the
FBI they would not extradite either man, or 16 others wanted for sexual
assaults.
"In my opinion, that's not
right," said the woman Mendoza is accused of having attacked, who asked
not to be identified.
Framingham's position, and that
of other agencies, could reflect growing reluctance by the police to spend
their time and money fetching criminals from other parts of the country. But in
many cases, it also appears merely to reflect growing candor about the way
police have operated for years.
The acting head of
Massachusetts' Department of Criminal Justice Information Services, Jim Slater,
said many police agencies had long indicated that they would decline to
extradite some of their accused felons, but that fact was not reflected in the
extradition codes the FBI uses in its database. Earlier this year, he said,
state officials and the FBI updated thousands of fugitives' electronic files to
reflect the decisions prosecutors had already made.
"This has been a historic
problem with all states," Slater said. Now the FBI's records just reflect
just how common that practice is.
In Brockton, Mass., south of Boston,
prosecutors confirmed that they had not approved extradition for a man wanted
for smashing an acquaintance's arm with a baseball bat before driving off in a
car with Florida license plates, another man charged with slashing a man's neck
during a fight over milk and a man accused of cracking two of Jessica
O'Donnell's vertebrae as he choked and kicked her in December of 2011.
"Maybe if I was dead they'd go get him," she said.
O'Donnell's accused attacker,
Dennis Chaplin, could still end up being extradited if police ever find him,
but not because of anything Brockton authorities have done. He is separately
wanted for violating his parole in a breaking and entering case, and parole
officials have promised to retrieve him from anyplace in the United States.
Brockton police referred
questions about those cases to the Plymouth County District Attorney. Assistant
District Attorney Bridget Norton Middleton said prosecutors had not yet decided
whether to approve extradition in two of those cases, even though both have
been pending for more than a year. In the third, she said prosecutors recently
approved extradition, but she did not know whether the FBI had yet been told of
the change. Brockton police list fugitives as not extraditable until
prosecutors tell them to do otherwise.
"If you come here and
commit a crime and hurt somebody, then you should come back here and answer for
that crime," Middleton said. Still, she said it makes little sense to
fetch suspects from other states if the case against them is flimsy,
particularly if the victim has disappeared, too.
That's why she said prosecutors
had not approved extraditing a man charged with raping his girlfriend's mother
there in 2012.
The woman, who asked not to be
identified, awoke on a July morning to a strange hand on her body. She said she
saw her daughter's boyfriend, David Jones, beside her bed, sexually assaulting
her. "I got this wicked feeling that somebody's in my house doing that to
me," she said. She jumped up and chased him out the back door. Once he was
gone, she discovered that he had stolen two televisions from her apartment.
Police charged Jones with
burglary and rape, and a judge issued a warrant for his arrest.
But they told the FBI that they
will retrieve him only if he comes back to Massachusetts. The woman said she
heard he is in Florida. Middleton said prosecutors had not approved the case
for extradition because they had been unable to get in touch with the victim,
who still lives at the address listed in a police report.
"I feel like they let me
down," the woman said when she found out. "It makes me angry that
they let him go, that they won't pursue him."
Contributing: Brett Kelman of
The (Palm Springs, Calif.) Desert-Sun
Follow investigative reporter
Brad Heath on Twitter at @bradheath.
