Wearing red pants cost Gerardo Cabanillas almost 30 years in prison; South Gate and Huntington Park PDs knew they had the wrong man
LOS ANGELES – Today, attorneys for Gerardo Cabanillas, 48, filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against the neighboring L.A. suburbs of South Gate and Huntington Park, seeking damages and relief for Mr. Cabanillas’s wrongful arrest and the nearly three decades he spent in prison.
Over January and February of 1995, a series of strikingly similar robberies and sexual assaults were committed in South Gate and nearby Huntington Park. One couple robbed on January 18 described one of their assailants as wearing red pants.
At this time, Gerardo Cabanillas was an 18-year-old newlywed with an eight-month-old daughter. Mr. Cabanillas had nothing to do with the crimes, but he did have the misfortune to be standing on a street corner on January 20, wearing red pants, when South Gate police detective Lee Jack Alirez happened to pass by. Alirez accosted Mr. Cabanillas, discovered he had an outstanding traffic warrant, and arrested him.
From there, the complaint contends, Alirez and the other named South Gate police officers fabricated a case against Mr. Cabanillas. They arranged his identification as one of the assailants using manipulated photo arrays shown to the victims. They extracted a false confession from Mr. Cabanillas after hours of interrogation without an attorney, and false promises that he would be released on probation if he confessed.
Because he was innocent, Mr. Cabanillas obviously did not know what to put in the confession, and so officers provided him with the necessary details—repeatedly rehearsing them with him—and even drove him to the scene of one of the crimes. Even with all this prompting, Mr. Cabanillas’s recorded confession was full of misstatements and inaccuracies. To bolster their case, South Gate detectives falsified the paperwork on their investigation to hide their misconduct and implicate Mr. Cabanillas.
Throughout February of 1995, in the weeks after Mr. Cabanillas’s arrest—while he was in custody—the wave of robberies and rapes continued in South Gate and Huntington Park. Huntington Park police eventually arrested another suspect, who was positively identified by victims, and who under questioning confessed to committing crimes in both towns. The crimes the suspect was accused of were directly related to crimes for which Cabanillas had been arrested.
Still, the case against Mr. Cabanillas continued, and he was wrongfully convicted of carjacking, robbery, kidnapping, and rape. Still a teenager, Mr. Cabanillas was sentenced to a minimum of 87 years in prison.
In the decades following, Mr. Cabanillas steadfastly maintained his innocence and fought for his freedom. After a quarter century of unsuccessful appeals and petitions, DNA testing in 2020 finally proved he was innocent of the rape for which he’d been convicted. In 2023, after investigation by the Los Angeles Prosecutor’s Office Conviction Integrity Unit, the Court vacated the convictions of Mr. Cabanillas, dismissed all charges against him, and entered an order finding him factually innocent. He was finally free, having spent more than half of his life wrongfully imprisoned.
Today, Mr. Cabanillas is seeking justice for his wrongful conviction and imprisonment. He has filed a civil rights lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, naming as defendants SGPD detectives Alirez, Pixler, Sekiya, Wells, and Lopez; SGPD officers Sullivan, Reyes, Ayestas, and Salcido; SGPD sergeant and supervisor Van Lierop; HPPD detectives Heintz, Navarrette, Lozano, and Porter; and the Cities of South Gate and Huntington Park.
“Gerardo Cabanillas had nearly 30 years stolen from him, at an age when his life was just beginning,” said attorney Steve Art of Loevy + Loevy, one of Mr. Cabanillas’s attorneys. “Nothing can make Gerardo whole for the loss he has suffered or for the horror of wrongful imprisonment that he endured for so long. But Gerardo is entitled to justice, and he will hold the officers of South Gate and Huntington Park who framed him accountable for their illegal and unethical misconduct.”
Mr. Cabanillas is represented by attorneys Jon Loevy, Steve Art, David B. Owens, Alison Leff, and Roz Dillon of the civil rights law firm Loevy + Loevy.
Earlier this month, Loevy + Loevy helped secure a $50 million verdict for a man named Marcel Brown, who spent 10 years imprisoned for a crime he didn’t commit. That verdict was the largest ever awarded in a wrongful conviction case in U.S. history.
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A copy of the complaint can be found here.
Loevy & Loevy is one of the nation’s largest civil rights law firms, and over the past decade has won more multi-million-dollar jury verdicts than any other civil rights law firm in the country.
