Family Fears for O.C. Man Held in Mexico

The family of a Laguna Niguel man wrongly jailed for 6 1/2 years on charges of molesting boys at a Mexican orphanage pushed for his release Friday, saying they feared for his life in advance of a hearing next week on what they consider a trumped-up drug-possession charge.

An attorney for David Cathcart said he faxed a letter to the U.S. ambassador to Mexico expressing those fears, and that the Tijuana-based U.S. consul visited Cathcart in Ensenada on Friday.

In addition, representatives from Mexico’s Cabinet-level Commission on Human Rights were holding a vigil at the jail to watch for Cathcart’s safety, said his attorney William Bollard.

Meanwhile, in an interview with The Times, one of the boys who recanted the sex charges said Friday that the orphanage’s director threatened to put him on the street when he was 15 unless he told authorities that Cathcart had molested him.

A day after a Mexican judge declared Cathcart, 59, not guilty of those charges, the man’s family in Orange County was hopeful their ordeal would end soon.

“At times, we haven’t kept it together very well, to be honest,” his son, Jeff Cathcart, said. “We’ve all missed out by him not being with us. I don’t know how to describe that. I don’t have the words.”

While his father has languished in a Mexican jail, the 37-year-old son said he has found himself serving a sentence of his own.

Like any prisoner, he has held his emotions in check by burying them deep inside. Still, they seep out.

He spoke of Christmases when his children played around the tree, unaware they even had a grandfather, and of nights in his garage, fixing cars on the side, to help pay to keep the legal fight going. He recalled his anger at the Mexican lawyers who he said have taken the family’s money but done little in return. He said he still spares his frail grandmother in New York, telling her that her son is still deep in Mexico, at a place without phones, feeding the poor.

Now, David Cathcart may be one step away from freedom--or down one more blind alley in his odyssey through the Mexican legal system.

Two prison guards allege they found heroin in Cathcart’s shirt in 1998. Bollard said his client wasn’t charged until this April, days before the molestation case was reopened. Neither the heroin nor the shirt was produced at a hearing Wednesday that lasted from 6 p.m. to 1 a.m., he said.

The next hearing, scheduled for Friday, will be similar to an arraignment, at which a judge will decide if there is sufficient evidence to proceed to trial. Bollard expects his client will be released then.

Cathcart, a travel agent, first went to the Door of Faith orphanage to inspect its books after officials at St. Timothy’s Catholic Church in Laguna Niguel began to suspect that some of the $140,000 that parishioners donated to the home was being diverted.

Cathcart’s suspicions were raised when director Gabriel Diego Garcia pulled up in a new Ford Bronco, although the orphanage seemed in need of repair, said Cathcart’s son Chris, 36.

Garcia ran Cathcart off the property when he asked to see the books, Chris said. Cathcart returned to Orange County. The next day, he was asked to return, told that a child had been hospitalized.

When Cathcart got to the hospital, he was arrested and later sentenced to 12 years in prison.

Recently, the boys recanted and told a Mexican judge said that Garcia coerced them into lying. The boys said they were beaten at the orphanage, deprived of food and locked in a room without food or water.

In an interview Friday, Efrain Reyes Carrillo, now 22, said Garcia threatened him and three other teenagers in 1994 with eviction--and worse--unless they leveled false allegations of sexual misconduct.

Reyes said Garcia took advantage of the fact that “I had no family and nowhere to go.”

“I had lived there all my life. That was the only home I knew,” said Reyes. “We did not make the accusations voluntarily. He made us talk to the authorities.”

Garcia has denied that he threatened the boys or coerced them to lie. Garcia said Reyes and the others recanted after Cathcart’s lawyers promised them money and cars.

“Nobody offered me money or anything else,” Reyes said. “I had to tell the truth. I was forced to tell lies about an innocent man.”

Judge Marta Flores Trejo, who cleared Cathcart of the sex charges Thursday, said the four boys had been sodomized but found no evidence that Cathcart had attacked them.

Flores also said that her investigation found that U.S. visitors were allowed to take children from the orphanage to local hotels for sex.

“The children were physically and sexually abused. Someone has to investigate this,” said Flores. “Children said that foreigners were allowed to take them to hotels at night and sleep with them.”

On Thursday, Flores called for an investigation of the orphanage by Baja California authorities.

Garcia, who hasn’t been charged with any crime, denied that children under his care were sexually abused. He acknowledged that children were occasionally allowed to leave for a few days with American supporters of the orphanage.

“The only people who have taken the children are people who have helped the orphanage,” Garcia said in an interview at his home in La Mision, about 20 miles north of Ensenada.

“These are honorable people,” he said of those supporters. “Some of them took the children to the U.S. for a few days. The judge can say whatever she wants.”

Garcia said Americans would take the children “to places like Disneyland.”

A Yorba Linda couple who are staff members and live at the orphanage said the institution was founded 40 years ago by Von and Agnes Freeze from the Bakersfield area, with sponsorship from the Assembly of God Church.

The couple, who declined to be quoted by name, said the orphanage is now supported by a number of American churches and individuals. Garcia said the orphanage runs on between $8,000 and $12,000 a month sent by Americans.

Because of the millions of dollars he has received from American churches over the years, Diego is a powerful man in Ensenada, Bollard said. Because of that, Cathcart’s family worries about his safety in jail.

During his incarceration, Cathcart’s waist has shrunk from 42 inches to 29. He suffers from severe arthritis in his damp, 5-foot-by-9-foot cell. A single bulb provides light. A crate serves as shelves. A bucket serves as the toilet.

Cathcart has been threatened but has gained some protection by giving inmates haircuts and teaching them English.

Early in Cathcart’s prison stay, one inmate told Cathcart, “I’m going to kill you,” son Jeff Cathcart said. His father ripped open his shirt and replied, “Why don’t you do it now like a man?”

Cathcart’s sons Friday lashed out at U.S. officials who, they said, did little before now to help their father. They said the only assistance their father received from the U.S. Embassy in Mexico was to check on him every three months to make sure he had not been abused and to give him vitamins.

The Cathcarts said that after asking for help, they received only letters of regret from Democratic Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer of California; Rep. Christopher Cox, (R-Newport Beach); President Clinton; Vice President Gore; and others.

What especially angered the family was that neither the embassy nor other government officials offered direction, such as providing a list of recommended attorneys or telling them how to deal with the Mexican legal system.

“The answer we kept getting, was, ‘We can’t help you,’ ” Chris Cathcart said.

His father has lost much along with his freedom. During his imprisonment, five of Cathcart’s seven grandchildren were born. Two of his sons married. Last year, his father died.

But his family and members of his church never gave up working to prove his innocence.

“We’ve always been close as a family,” Jeff Cathcart said. “But everybody’s just frustrated.”

Cathcart estimates his family is out $500,000, and still owes their current attorneys $200,000 in legal fees.

Four previous attorneys hired in Mexico did little, they said.

“We’d get the transcripts of a trial translated and you’d find out that they never even called my dad as a witness, never cross-examined the kids,” Cathcart said.

His children didn’t know what had happened.

Then, last October, at a church fund-raiser for Cathcart’s legal defense, 6-year-old Alyssa put it all together.

“Mommy, why is my grandfather in prison?” she asked. “When am I going to meet by grandpa?”

“Mommy and Daddy,” Cindy Cathcart told her, “are trying to bring him home.”