Wanted: Arrest Damages : Law enforcement: A bartender seized after he was mistaken for a suspect featured on television’s ‘America’s Most Wanted’ sues the LAPD, the FBI and the TV show.

Robin John Delgado happened to look out the window of his Silver Lake apartment last February when a bunch of men clad in street clothes and carrying shotguns jumped out of a van and a car, and rushed the place.

The 29-year-old bartender took one look and panicked. “It scared me to the point I jumped two stories out my back window. I wanted to get out of there.”

So began a case of mistaken identity that stemmed from a tip called into the “America’s Most Wanted” television show on the whereabouts of Armando Garcia--an ex-Miami cop on the FBI’s 10-most-wanted list.

Acting on the anonymous tip, the Los Angeles Police Department and FBI arrested Delgado, thinking he was Garcia, and he ended up spending three days in jail. Delgado maintains he does not look like Garcia and lost his job because of the notoriety surrounding his brief arrest. Recently he sued the LAPD, FBI, and “America’s Most Wanted” for assault and battery, false imprisonment and emotional distress.

Spokesmen for the police agencies and the show had no comment on the case, citing the pending litigation. Anne Corley, a spokeswoman for 20th Century Fox, which produces the true-crime show, believes the mistaken arrest resulting from the show’s tipster was unusual: “I’m not aware of this ever having happened,” she said. “But even if I were, I wouldn’t be able to comment given the nature of the situation.”

News accounts, however, indicate that three mistaken arrests have occurred in Georgia, Arizona and New York. And three years ago, an actor dining out in Los Angeles was mistaken by restaurant employees for a murderer who had been featured on “America’s Most Wanted” and Oprah Winfrey’s show. After employees alerted police, the actor was briefly detained.

The show proudly boasts, however, that 231 out of the 521 fugitives profiled on the 4-year-old program have been captured, and sends out press releases extolling its success stories.

To Delgado, Feb. 4 is a date “I’ll never forget.” Born and raised in Los Angeles, he had never been arrested before, he said, and even watched “America’s Most Wanted.” “I guess you’d say I was a fan. I never thought I’d be a victim of it.”

Delgado is 5 feet 11 inches and weighs 160 pounds, while the FBI describes Garcia as 5 feet 9 inches, 180 pounds and with a burn scar on his right cheek. Delgado has no such scar, but at the time of the arrest, he wore a mustache, like Garcia.

Early in the afternoon of the day he was arrested, he walked to the window to watch a friend back his car out of the driveway, Delgado recalled. When he saw the van, and then a car, pull up and then saw all the occupants rush up the driveway, he thought at first “that the people in the van were running after the people in the car,” he said. “I just wanted to get away.”

After jumping out the window, he vaulted over a fence and ran to the open back door of a house on the next street, where an 83-year-old woman lived. He begged her to let him in, and although she did not know him, she did.

“I told the old lady, ‘I don’t know what’s going on, but I didn’t do anything,’ ” Delgado said.

What the woman remembers most clearly now is the fear on Delgado’s face as he suddenly appeared in a doorway that she normally keeps closed and locked. “I don’t know why I was not afraid, perhaps it just was a matter of being surprised,” said the woman, who asked that her name not be used. But instead of forcing his way inside, she added, he fell to his knees and pleaded for her help.

The pair heard helicopters overhead, and the woman saw officers with police dogs in her driveway. Delgado used her phone to call 911. “They hung up on me,” he said. “I called back, and they put me on hold. I called back a third time and said, ‘I’m Robin Delgado.’ ”

The authorities outside were seeking Garcia, a former Miami police officer accused of stealing large amounts of cocaine and plotting to kill government witnesses. Delgado does not know whether the emergency operator, as he frantically asked for help, realized he was the man officers thought was Garcia, but said she told him to go outside and “just do whatever the police say.”

Delgado went out, facing several guns and officers “up in the trees, and on the side and behind cars. They were everywhere,” he recalled. “One is telling me to go left and one guy is telling me to go right. The little old lady is saying, ‘Don’t hurt him, don’t hurt him.’ They came up and put handcuffs on, really tight, enough to where it cut me.”

The officers fired questions at him, he said, apparently looking for distinguishing features that Delgado lacked. “They said, ‘Where are your tattoos, where’s your pierced ear? Where’s the scar?’ ” he recalled. “They kept calling me Armando, and I’m going, ‘Who the hell’s Armando? They keep saying, ‘You’re Armando.’ ”

Then Delgado became aware of several television cameras, which he believes belonged to “America’s Most Wanted” and local news organizations alerted to the impending arrest. “I don’t know where they came from. I turned my face away, because I didn’t want my mom to see this. Then one of the guys (police officers) takes my hair, pulls me back and says, ‘Come on, Armando, let America see you.’ And makes me look at the cameras.”

Delgado was taken into custody but never charged with any crime. “I was so humiliated, so angry,” he said. Even when he proved his identity, “There was never an apology.” He was kept in jail for three days for reasons that are still unclear to him. He claims he immediately paid a $2,000 fine for an outstanding speeding ticket, and that family and friends quickly posted bail. “But they couldn’t find where I was,” he said. “I was being moved around a lot.

“They were the three longest days of my life,” Delgado said. On being released from the downtown Los Angeles County Jail, he found himself standing outside in a drizzling rain. Instead of waiting to claim his wristwatch or cross necklace he had been wearing when arrested, Delgado said: “I just ran, ran all the way back to where I live--in the rain. I just kept running, like when you let a horse loose. I couldn’t believe I was finally free.”

His problems, he said, were still not over. Delgado’s boss, whom he declines to identify, was unwilling to take him back at his bartender job. For a long time, Delgado felt he was confronting lingering doubts among several acquaintances that maybe he was Garcia, who has not been found. “People ask questions, look at you strange. . . .”

He also worried that police were still investigating him, and became fearful of going back to work as a bartender. “You serve drinks to people you don’t know who you’re serving,” Delgado said. He stopped paying his rent, left his apartment three months later to live with friends, and has not worked since, he said.

Delgado’s attorney, Manuel Miller, said he commends efforts by the public to help police solve crimes. “But somebody’s got to protect these look-alikes,” Miller said. “This is the end result. If they had taken a few steps to make sure what they were doing, we wouldn’t be here.”