–Provide the arresting police officer with your full name, date of birth, home address and telephone number.
But apparently nobody shared that elementary criminal tidbit with Sergio Ramirez Flores.
According to Orange County court records, a handcuffed Flores gave his arresting police officer accurate personal identifying information before he was locked in a patrol car in April 2008.
]
His crime: Possession of 715 milligrams of methamphetamine outside the El Hidalgo Bar in downtown Santa Ana.
At some point while the office wasn't paying attention, a 30-year-old Flores kicked out a rear passenger window and successfully escaped.
Given that the cops knew where Flores lived, it didn't take long to find him.
But, in a desperate attempt to avoid prosecution, Flores and his family concocted an alibi: he couldn't have committed the crime because he was at a birthday party hundreds of miles away near the U.S.-Mexico border.
They also accused the arresting cop, Brandon Sontag, of fabricating his contact with Flores.
A jury didn't buy it and Superior Court Judge Carla M. Singer sentenced him to serve two years in prison.
This week, a California Court of Appeal considered Flores' cries of innocence.
In a four-page ruling, the appellate justice quickly dismissed his argument and determined that the prosecution had been righteous.
Now, Flores must be kicking himself.
–R. Scott Moxley / OC Weekly
CNN-featured investigative reporter R. Scott Moxley has won Journalist of the Year honors at the Los Angeles Press Club; been named Distinguished Journalist of the Year by the LA Society of Professional Journalists; obtained one of the last exclusive prison interviews with Charles Manson disciple Susan Atkins; won inclusion in Jeffrey Toobin’s The Best American Crime Reporting for his coverage of a white supremacist’s senseless murder of a beloved Vietnamese refugee; launched multi-year probes that resulted in the FBI arrests and convictions of the top three ranking members of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department; and gained praise from New York Times Magazine writers for his “herculean job” exposing entrenched Southern California law enforcement corruption.
