Dropped Charge Ends Officer’s Ordeal

He was called a corrupt cop--forced to surrender his badge and gun and endure a three-year ordeal during which he was accused of betraying his oath by participating in a holdup.

Then prosecutors discovered that it was all a case of mistaken identity. A neighborhood grocer had wrongly picked 28-year-old policeman Arcenio Cruz out of a lineup back in 1995.

“Was it embarrassing? It was very embarrassing,” Cruz said Monday after being reinstated to the force.

The nightmare has been all the worse, Cruz said, because the partner he rode with for a year and trusted--Alex Sierra--is charged in the robbery. Two witnesses have cleared Cruz while implicating Sierra.

“I was very shocked,” Cruz said. “In the car, he was a very good police officer. You think you know somebody.”

He added: “You wonder, can you ever trust anybody again?”

The ordeal began when Cruz was asked to stand in a lineup. He wasn’t worried at first, since officers frequently act as stand-ins.

“But when they started taking longer than the normal time--then you start to think,” Cruz recalled. He stayed at the detective headquarters for 12 grueling hours.

A West Side grocer had picked him out as one of the holdup men who took $700 in cash and $800 in fireworks from his store at gunpoint in 1994.

The next day Cruz was pulled off the street and stuck with a new job, answering phones and filling out reports. As months went by, friendships with other officers eroded. He became increasingly depressed, ballooned to 200 pounds and lost his girlfriend.

County prosecutors declined to press charges against Cruz, but in 1997 a federal grand jury indicted him and Sierra on charges of conspiracy to commit robbery. A witness had reported license plate numbers on the getaway car that were similar to those on a license registered to Sierra.

The Police Department suspended Cruz and moved to fire him.

The indictment may have been the low point for Cruz. Accompanied by his family, he was beset at the courthouse by lights, cameras and shouted questions.

“They were all over my family on the sidewalk in front of the building,” Cruz said. “I was just like, I don’t believe this. This is the worst thing that could ever happen.”

The misery ended abruptly Feb. 2 when a fax machine in the office of Cruz’s attorney, Richard Brzeczek, a former Chicago police superintendent who often represents officers in trouble, spit out a message from the FBI.

Two suspects in federal custody had confessed to being the real robbers, officials said. The two told the FBI that Sierra was in on the crime but that Cruz knew nothing of it.

“We dismissed the charge as soon as we found out,” said Randall Samborn, a spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office.

Brzeczek called his client to give him the good news.

“Let’s put it this way--I had a glow about me all day long,” Cruz said.

He got his badge and gun back Monday. His next stop will be the Police Academy for a refresher course.

His former partner goes on trial next week.

Cruz said that from now on, when he cruises the streets in his squad car, four words basic to American justice will stick in his mind--innocent until proven guilty.