This mistake certainly doesn’t negate all the work that was done to round up this massive gang. Nonetheless, it is an embarrassment, and a big one.
By Scott Glover
Los Angeles Times
LOS ANGELES — As Ramon Huerta stood shirtless and shivering in the front
yard of the Pico Rivera house he’s called home for more than four decades, the 64-year-old retired chef struggled to comprehend the questions being shouted by the heavily armed police who began pounding on his front door some time before dawn.
Where are the guns, they wanted to know. Where are the drugs?
Huerta — a soft-spoken grandfather who retired last year to care for his wife, who is battling colon cancer — said he tried to tell them he didn’t know what they were talking about, that they had the wrong man.
Nonetheless, he was handcuffed and hauled away as part of a massive gang sweep last week that federal authorities touted as the largest of its kind in the nation.
Huerta would spend the next two nights in a federal lockup in downtown Los Angeles before authorities acknowledged that “there exists the very real possibility” that he isn’t the heroin dealer they were looking for.
He was released from custody on Saturday after inquires by The Times.
