Illegal Alien Now Denies Coercion Was Used in Murder Confession, Police Say

An illegal alien who claimed that he was intimidated by police into confessing to two murders he could not possibly have committed has recanted his coercion accusations, a Los Angeles Police Department spokesman said Friday.

But an attorney for the man, Pedro Barrios Delvillar, said Friday that the police’s new account is “totally stupid” and “insulting.”

Delvillar, 18, was interviewed by Internal Affairs Division investigators on the allegedly coerced confession after his arrest Tuesday on attempted burglary charges in downtown Los Angeles, Lt. Dan Cooke said.

‘He Wasn’t Pushed, Hit’

“He stated without question there was never any physical or even verbal abuse,” Cooke said. “He wasn’t pushed, shoved, slapped, hit. The detective wasn’t even hollering at him.”

However, defense attorney James A. Goldstein said Delvillar told him before his attempted burglary arraignment Friday that he indeed had been “beat up (and) he was screamed at” during interrogations on the murder.

“He’s prone to suggestion,” Goldstein said of Delvillar. “But in terms of a logical explanation for the confession, I think that it is insulting to anyone’s intelligence. . . . How did he obtain the details of the crime? He wasn’t even in the city of Los Angeles at the time.”

The murder charges were dismissed in early December when it was learned that Delvillar was in California Youth Authority custody in Ventura County at the time the two street killings were committed last March. Delvillar was then transported to Mexico by the Immigration and Naturalization Service before authorities could interview him about the circumstances surrounding the confession.

Ruben Avila Trujillo, a second defendant in the case who also made confessions, was also freed because it was learned that he had been in San Diego County Jail on auto-tampering charges when the street killings occurred.

Trujillo, also deported to Mexico, has since been questioned by Los Angeles police at the Tijuana jail about his confession. But police spokesmen have not revealed what Trujillo, 24, told them.

Goldstein, who represented Trujillo in the murder case, has charged that both Delvillar and Trujillo were slapped and otherwise intimidated by Detective James McCann until they agreed that they had committed the murders.

Delvillar “specifically said he was slapped open-handedly across the face and jerked up by the shirt front,” his lawyer in the murder case, Deputy Public Defender Belinda Fischer, said last month. “McCann said to him, ‘I’ll kick your ass if you don’t tell me the truth.’ ”

Cooke, however, said Delvillar, in his interview with police investigators Wednesday, “stated categorically that at no time did Detective McCann hit him, push him, shove him, not even verbally abuse him.”

‘High on Drugs’

According to Cooke, Delvillar told investigators that “he was so high on drugs at the time he was not sure what he was doing” when he was asked why he would confess to a crime he did not commit.

Both the police investigation and a concurrent probe by the district attorney’s special investigations division are continuing. Steven A. Sowders, who heads the district attorney’s unit, said he would not release details about an interview his investigators conducted with Delvillar on Friday afternoon until his investigation ends, probably within one week.

Delvillar, meanwhile, pleaded not guilty Friday at his arraignment for the attempted burglary of a department store at 5th Street and Broadway. A Jan. 23 trial date was set for the defendant, who was held on $2,500 bail.