The Truth Comes Out -- 8 Months Late

The 12-year-old girl sat in the witness stand of a Santa Ana courtroom tearfully recounting how a homeless man had attacked her and choked her nearly to death.

“He grabbed my hair and then he started pulling me,” she told jurors. “And that’s when I screamed. I tried to go away, and then my friends were trying to help me, and that’s when he started choking me. And then I turned all purple.... I couldn’t breathe, and I felt like I was going to black out.”

Her horrifying account was so compelling that even the defendant was moved.

“I believed she was attacked,” said Eric Nordmark, who spent eight months in jail awaiting trial on seven charges of assault and child molestation. If convicted, he could have received up to five years in prison.

“I just knew it wasn’t me,” he said.

This week, Nordmark, 36, was freed after the riveting tale proved to be a lie.

The girl and two friends made up the story last summer because they were late coming home from school and feared being punished by their parents, authorities now say. After testifying during the first day of trial a week ago, the girl confessed to her mother, who later told the prosecutor in the case.

“Everybody was duped by these girls,” said Orange County Deputy Dist. Atty. Heather Brown, who asked Superior Court Judge William Evans to dismiss all charges Monday.

“Her conscience was eating at her,” Brown said of the girl who gave the tearful testimony. “And here I was thinking she was crying because she was traumatized.” The list of those fooled by the middle school students includes a veteran Garden Grove detective and seasoned investigators from the Orange County district attorney’s office.

“Cops are supposed to expect the unexpected,” said David Swanson, Nordmark’s defense attorney. “Now they are getting duped by 11-year-olds?”

Garden Grove officers were called to an apartment complex May 16. Three girls, two of them age 11 and the other 12 at the time, all students at Woodbury Elementary School, had told their parents they were attacked by a homeless man near a park.

The girls told a complex and detailed story, according to police reports and court records. One of the girls said she saw a homeless man lying near a bush in the park. She said the man motioned for her to come closer.

During the trial, the girl, identified only by her first name, Catili, testified that “I told my friends, ‘Let’s run.’ ”

Catili, then 11, said she noticed that one of her friends, identified in court papers as Yolanda, the other 11-year-old, was not with them. The girls turned around to see her struggling with the purported attacker.

“She fell down,” Catili said in court. “That’s when he got her.”

Yolanda told police officers that the man threw her to the ground and pulled her hair from side to side, according to pretrial testimony by one of the officers who interviewed the girls.

Yolanda “bent over and started shaking her head side to side” to demonstrate the attack, Officer Pete Garcia testified. “She felt somebody grab her arm and realized it was Catili. The subject then turned his attention to Catili and grabbed her hair.”

A third girl, identified in court papers as Aurora, was not attacked, the girls told police, but helped her friends escape.

“She was just the bravest little girl,” Brown said of Aurora during her opening statement. “She ran up and she kicked the defendant right where the sun don’t shine and knocked him down, to the point where her friend was able to get away.”

The next day, officers stopped Nordmark based on the description given by the girls: a white man, possibly a transient, about 6 feet tall, 190 to 200 pounds, and wearing a black hooded sweatshirt and white sneakers. Nordmark generally matched the description, police say.

Authorities say they had extra reason to be concerned: Two brothers, 10 and 12, who also attended Woodbury and lived in the same apartment complex as the girls, had reported being harassed by a homeless man two days before the alleged attack on the girls. Their description of their alleged attacker was similar to that of the girls’, police said.

Police now say they believe that the incident with the boys happened, but that Nordmark was not involved.

“We were very concerned obviously,” said Garden Grove Police Lt. Mike Handfield. “We thought we had a sexual predator on the loose and we needed to act quickly.”

Officers showed Nordmark to two of the girls when they stopped him on the street, according to police reports and court records. Catili identified him as the attacker, but Yolanda said she didn’t think it was him because her attacker’s skin was more yellow.

The two girls saw Nordmark separately while sitting inside a patrol car, Handfield said.

Nordmark had been arrested by Anaheim police two days earlier for public drunkenness and released after spending a night in city jail. Anaheim police created a photo lineup using Nordmark’s mug shot and those of five other men of similar appearance -- a common police practice, Handfield said.

The Garden Grove detective assigned to the case showed the photos to Yolanda, who took 45 seconds to pick out Nordmark, according to court papers and police reports.

Then she offered to go get the other girls, Handfield said. Police now believe she may have coached the others to point to Nordmark.

Catili identified Nordmark, but Aurora said she couldn’t tell, according to police reports. The two boys from the previous alleged attack also picked out Nordmark.

Authorities said they could not discuss how the alleged ruse was pulled off because the investigation is continuing. Catili may face perjury charges, and Aurora and Yolanda may face charges of filing a false police report. Brown said the case had been forwarded to prosecutors in the district attorney’s juvenile division.

Catili’s mother declined to comment when approached at the family’s apartment Thursday. Aurora’s parents did not return calls to request an interview, and Yolanda’s parents could not be reached.

Based on the identification of the two girls and the two boys, Nordmark was arrested May 20. He said he spent his time in jail doing crossword puzzles and playing chess with other inmates, who nicknamed him Harry Potter.

“I thought to myself, I can bang my head on the wall about how wrong and unfair it is and all I would get is a sore head,” Nordmark said during an interview. “It is scary how powerless you are when you are faced with something like this.”

A self-described drifter, the North Dakota native said he moved to San Diego from Seattle two years ago to escape the winter. He planned to do odd jobs and work his way north by the summer.

“I just wanted to have a stress-free life,” he said. “The last couple of years have been a struggle.”

If he had been convicted, Nordmark would have been forced to register as a sex offender when freed from prison. On Thursday, he filed a complaint with the Garden Grove Police Department, usually a precursor to legal action. He also retained a civil attorney.

Swanson, Nordmark’s defense attorney, said the case shows the pitfalls of police lineups.

He said he too initially believed that the girls had been attacked, but he had planned to argue that Nordmark was the victim of misidentification because of sloppy police work.

Swanson now says that if Garden Grove officers had been more careful, they would have uncovered the lie. He suggests that the photos in the lineup should have been shuffled before being shown to each of the girls so that they couldn’t conspire to point to the same man. He had planned to show U.S. Department of Justice guidelines that recommends the practice during the trial.

Handfield said his Garden Grove officers and detective acted properly and followed regular police practice.

“I think you have to put the blame on the girls,” Handfield said. “Who could imagine that 11-year-old girls would have the sophistication to pull something like that?”