Family Worries as Wrongly Jailed Man Faces Hearing

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

An attorney for David Cathcart said that 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 keeping vigil at the jail to look out 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 that the ordeal would end soon.

“At times, we haven’t kept it together very well, to be honest,” his son Jeff 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.”

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

Two prison guards allege that they found heroin in Cathcart’s shirt in 1998. Bollard said his client was not charged until last month, days before the molestation case was reopened.

Neither the shirt nor any heroin 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 go to trial. Bollard expects that 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, while the orphanage seemed in need of repair, said Cathcart’s son Chris, 36.

Garcia ran Cathcart off the property when the American 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. He was later sentenced to 12 years in prison.

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

In an interview Friday, Efrain Reyes Carrillo, now 22, said Garcia threatened him and three 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,” Reyes said.

“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 said 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,” she said.

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

Garcia, who has not been charged with any crime, denied that children under his care were sexually abused.

He said 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 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.”