Inmate’s Release Blamed on Error

A murder suspect was mistakenly released from the Men’s Central Jail--and then recaptured a day later in Fontana--in the latest embarrassing gaffe for the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.

Pedro Quezada, 21, was released from jail Tuesday afternoon and captured at a home 50 miles away, sheriff’s officials said. It was at least the 15th time this year that an inmate had been accidentally released by the Sheriff’s Department, which maintains the county’s overcrowded jail system.

Sheriff’s officials blamed a mistake by a department clerk for the release of Quezada, who had been arrested Aug. 3 in connection with a 1991 killing in Los Angeles.

Sgt. Ronald Spear, a spokesman for the Sheriff’s Department, said the snafu is still being investigated, but appeared to have originated in conflicting sets of legal documents handed to a department clerk.

“Some paperwork came in from the court,” Spear said. “There was a slight ambiguity in the paperwork. This should have alerted our clerk to check with the court, but the clerk did not.”

Quezada was released at 1:15 p.m. Tuesday and officials became aware of their mistake before dawn Wednesday, long after the inmate had walked out of the downtown Inmate Reception Center. Scrambling to recapture the suspect, sheriff’s investigators placed several residences under surveillance in Fontana, where Quezada had been arrested by police this month. The fugitive was rearrested Wednesday afternoon.

Spear said Quezada’s release resulted from a mix-up between juvenile and adult charges filed against the suspect. “He was being tried as a juvenile. The court then dismissed the adult case, and remanded him on the juvenile case,” Spear said. “By the time those two pieces of paper came together, he was gone. . . . The clerical error was on our part.”

Ironically, the accidental release was announced on the same day that representatives of the Sheriff’s Department, the district attorney’s office, the Superior Court and other agencies held their first official meeting on accidental releases and other problems with the county jail system. The meeting was called in the wake of another embarrassing mistaken release.

Juan Espino, now 19, was inadvertently set free last month, just days after being convicted in a two-week trial of the 1994 shooting of a Hollywood drug dealer.

Like the Quezada case, there was confusion surrounding the Espino case because of his involvement with both the juvenile and adult justice systems.

The Probation Department, which had initially housed Espino in Juvenile Hall, informed the Sheriff’s Department of pending robbery charges against the suspect when it turned him over to county authorities last December. Probation officials, however, never informed the sheriff about the murder charges Espino faced.

So when the robbery charges against Espino were dropped, the Sheriff’s Department accidentally released him because it never received paperwork on the murder charges. Espino remains at large.

In another high-profile mistake, Anait Zakarian, 23, of Glendale, who was charged with killing a rival travel agent, was released in July 1995. Officials said a sheriff’s clerk confused her name with that of another inmate.