A Good Guy Gets a Break

When we last left Emilio Meza, in this space in Thursday’s paper, his story was the tale of a good guy fighting a bad rap. A 25-year-old supermarket worker from Tujunga, Meza had pulled over one night 4 1/2 months ago so his girlfriend could go to the bathroom, and had ended up tangled in a Kafkaesque mess.

A mustachioed young man with a clean record, Meza ended up being stopped by Glendale police, who checked his license and informed him that he was wanted for armed robbery in Santa Fe Springs, a place Meza swears he’s never seen. But a series of bad breaks and questionable police work overpowered his protests of innocence.

By the time you read about his plight, Meza was out some $14,000 and his case was scheduled for trial in Norwalk Superior Court--even though the robbery victim had said repeatedly that he wasn’t sure Meza was the culprit and even though Meza had spent the weekend of the crime training with the U.S. Army Reserves.

But that was then. What happened on Thursday is another story, a story that goes out to anyone who wonders whether it’s still possible for good guys to ever get a break. At the behest of the district attorney’s office, the case against Meza was dismissed, not only because of the attention, but because a veteran prosecutor took a hard look at the evidence and marched the case file into his supervisor in disgust.

“The case was a mess,” said Deputy Dist. Atty. Joseph Martinez, who not only called for the dismissal but put a note into the record stressing Meza’s innocence.

“To have this poor guy spend time in jail and go through all this expense when it was completely unnecessary, when this could have been resolved with just some elementary police work,” Martinez said. “I’m telling you, I’m fit to be tied.”

Meza was elated. “It’s a big relief, and I just feel real good,” he said. “I’m real grateful. We’re going to celebrate when I get off work.” It was his day off at the Ralphs market where he is a meat wrapper, but he was moonlighting as a landscaper at his brother’s gardening business to pay the legal bills.

Happy ending aside, the case was one of those that helps explain why a recent Field Institute poll found that only 17% of Los Angeles adults have “a great deal of confidence” in the courts.

The case involved the attempted robbery on Nov. 17, 1996, of a man in a Santa Fe Springs supermarket parking lot. The victim, an immigrant named Woo Sung Ahn, was loading some water bottles into his car at about 9 that night when he felt the barrel of a gun against the back of his neck. The robber demanded money, patted Ahn down when he replied that he had none, then grabbed the trembling man’s car keys and fled. Ahn testified in broken English that he saw the robber very briefly, and acknowledged that he has trouble discerning the faces of young Latinos because “there are too many look-alikes.”

The city of Santa Fe Springs is patrolled by the Whittier police, and shortly after the robbery, they received an anonymous call informing them that the suspect they were after was driving a gold Thunderbird. The caller gave a plate number that traced back to an Emilio A. Meza in Glassell Park. Though that Emilio Meza had a different middle initial and had been born in the 1940s, the detectives involved pulled together a photo lineup that included the DMV photo of the younger Emilio. Confessing his uncertainty, Ahn picked him out.

A warrant was issued for the younger Meza’s arrest, and when the Glendale police detained him in July, Ahn recognized the face from the photo and again chose him.

Prosecutor Martinez said that as a matter of policy, the district attorney almost never files cases based on such flimsy identification. Nonetheless, the matter went to a preliminary hearing and a panicking Meza was bound over for trial.

But those who knew him and his family had other ideas. Pat and Bill Bias, a retired couple from Tujunga for whom Meza’s brother had done some landscaping, wrote The Times, in care of columnist Al Martinez, begging, “Please let people know how unfair this is.” Al was on vacation and passed it to me, even as the prosecutors in Norwalk were beginning to smell a rat.

On Thursday, Meza’s lawyer, Rickard Santwier, thanked the D.A.’s office and the press, and the Whittier police announced that the investigation into the robbery has been reopened, with new leads.

“It’s good to see that nice guys don’t always get beat up,” Santwier said.

Indeed.

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Shawn Hubler’s column appears on Mondays and Thursday. She fills in today for Al Martinez, who is on vacation. Her e-mail address is shawn.hubler@latimes.com.