Freedom at Last for Man Wrongly Held in Mexican Prison

After years of waiting, the end came swiftly.

David Cathcart, a former Laguna Niguel travel agent, enjoyed his first day of freedom Tuesday after 6 1/2 years in Mexican prison on now-recanted charges that he sexually abused four children at a Baja California orphanage.

In an emotional day of reunions, Cathcart traveled from Ensenada to a son’s home in Orange County, where friends and family gathered for a tearful welcome-home party and celebration. Among Cathcart’s greeters were six grandchildren, four of whom were born while he was in prison.

“I don’t think the [Mexican] government officials realize what they’ve done to me, what they’ve done to my family,” Cathcart said after stepping from a van and into the welcoming arms of about 30 relatives and friends. “That needs to be addressed.”

Cathcart arrived at the ribbon-festooned home in a quiet Aliso Viejo cul-de-sac about 4:15 p.m. and spoke briefly with reporters before entering the house for the private celebration.

Earlier, Cathcart anticipated that gathering, saying he would have to struggle to keep his emotions in check.

“I’m going to try not to cry,” he said. “It’s going to be like Christmas morning and we’re going to open presents.”

He cried anyway. Cathcart moved through the group of family and friends exchanging long, emotional hugs and quiet words.

“He got here just in time,” said Kristina Cathcart, 33, a daughter-in-law who is due to give birth to another Cathcart grandchild in three weeks.

Cathcart, 59, had been imprisoned since 1994 on charges that he sexually abused four boys living at La Puerta de Fe, or Door of Faith, orphanage in La Mision, about 35 miles north of Ensenada.

Earlier this month, Baja state Judge Marta Flores Trejo ordered Cathcart freed after his four accusers recanted their statements and said they had been coerced into implicating Cathcart by orphanage Director Gabriel Diego Garcia. Diego has denied pressuring the boys.

Cathcart, however, remained jailed on drug-possession charges filed in April. Those charges were based on allegations by prison guards that they found heroin in the pocket of his shirt in a cell he shared with another inmate in 1998.

Late Monday, federal Judge Gustavo Gallegos Morales dismissed those charges. Cathcart was freed about 10:30 p.m. and spent the night with his lawyers in an Ensenada hotel before being reunited Tuesday with one son in that city and his brother and three other sons at the San Ysidro border crossing. Cathcart met with other relatives and friends at the Aliso Viejo party.

The exuberance of Tuesday’s gathering overshadowed years of frustration and white lies told to grandchildren about where their grandfather had gone.

Family members also delicately danced around the issue with Cathcart’s ailing mother, who lives near Buffalo, N.Y. For years, she was told that Cathcart was doing missionary work deep in Mexico where he did not have access to telephones, even when he missed his father’s funeral in 1999.

Relatives finally told her the truth two weeks ago, when it appeared that Cathcart would be freed and they feared she would learn the truth from news reports.

Most of Cathcart’s incarceration was spent in a prison at the southeast edge of Ensenada, a walled complex of one-story buildings anchored by guard towers. There, he shared an unheated 5-by-9-foot cell with another inmate, and earned money for basic supplies by giving $2 haircuts in the prison yard.

It was a grueling ordeal, Cathcart said Tuesday, that often left him in despair.

“At the beginning I prayed that God would take me,” Cathcart said. “There were times I wanted to die. It seemed hopeless. The harassment I endured began from the moment I opened my eyes to the time I closed them.”

Before leaving Mexico, Cathcart credited local El Cachania newspaper reporter Aida Murillo with sparking interest in his case, which led to his freedom.

“I wouldn’t be going home if it hadn’t been for her stories,” said Cathcart, who paused to say goodbye to Murillo before heading for the border. “She exposed the truth.”

An order for Cathcart’s release had been anticipated for more than two weeks. It arrived, though, seemingly as an afterthought with a late-night notice sent by Judge Gallegos to prison officials.

Cathcart’s American lawyer, William Bollard of Irvine, and his Mexican lawyer, Enrique Gandara, of Mexico City, had already retired to their rooms at the Hotel Coral & Marina when Bollard received a call from prison officials about 10:30 p.m. telling him Cathcart was ready to leave.

The two lawyers rushed in Bollard’s pickup to the prison on the city’s outskirts, off the highway to Tecate. Bollard said he drove up to the darkened prison entrance, where two guards pointed rifles at them.

“We put up our hands and yelled, ‘Abogados! Abogados! [attorneys]’ and that we were there to pick up our client,” Bollard said.

Moments later, Cathcart walked out of the building wearing a yellow jacket and lugging two athletic bags holding his personal belongings.

Cathcart looked up at the sky.

“It was the first time I had seen the stars in almost seven years,” he said. “It was a marvelous feeling.”

The lawyers took Cathcart to their hotel, where he called his son Jeffrey, who was asleep on a couch at his Aliso Viejo home.

“ ‘I’m free; come get me.’ That’s all my dad said,” Jeffrey Cathcart said.

The former prisoner spent his first day of freedom “reflecting and getting used to the real world,” where even such mundane tasks as brushing his teeth in a hotel bathroom seemed special.

“My home for almost seven years was half the size of this bathroom,” he said Tuesday morning.

After breakfast, he accompanied Bollard and Gandara to sign legal documents at the federal courthouse--the same building in which Cathcart appeared handcuffed less than two months ago to answer the now-dropped drug charges.

As he approached the building Tuesday, Cathcart said it felt “absolutely wonderful to enter as a free man.”

When he returned from the courthouse, he stepped gingerly out of Bollard’s truck, troubled anew by a painful degenerating disc in his back that occasionally incapacitated him in prison.

Bollard dashed from the truck to the hotel lobby and just as quickly stepped out. “Dave, prepare yourself for a surprise inside,” he said.

Cathcart walked slowly through the glass doors where Jeffrey was waiting. The two men embraced warmly.

“This,” the son said, “is what we have worked so hard for.”

Reza reported from Ensenada and Yi from Orange County. Times staff writer Scott Martelle contributed to this story.