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Once wrongly accused, Wenatchee suspect now 'a free guy'
Wednesday, April 12, 2000
By MIKE BARBER
Manuel Hidalgo carried all he owns in a plastic bag as he stepped into the Seattle sunshine yesterday, a free man for the first time in more than five years.
And he wondered how different life might have been had he not been among those wrongly accused in the discredited 1994-1995 Wenatchee child sex ring investigations.
"I'm a free guy," Hidalgo, 39, said with a small smile as he left the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization detention center in Seattle.
But the pain of five years behind prison walls weighs on him. He says that even though his conviction was overturned, he wants to prove his innocence in court.
"I'm not angry at all at what happened to me," he said. "But all the time I was in prison I thought how it is hard to be in prison and to be an innocent man."
All told, 43 people were charged in 1994 and 1995 with almost 30,000 counts of sexual abuse involving 60 children. Many of the accused were poor, uneducated or developmentally disabled.
THE AFTERMATH
Read the P-I's February 1998 investigation into civil rights violations during the Wenatchee sex ring prosecutions.
Many of their cases in the last 18 months have been overturned on appeal. After state and federal officials failed to act, Innocence Project Northwest, a team of volunteer lawyers and University of Washington law students, took up the appeals.
Hidalgo never tasted a moment of freedom after his conviction was overturned in December. In March, he was ordered released from the Twin Falls Correctional Center near Monroe, but was immediately transferred to the INS detention center while federal authorities tried to sort out his status in the U.S.
Hidalgo now faces deportation to Mexico in part because his legal status as a U.S. resident was thrown into question when his marriage to an American woman deteriorated during his prison stay, said one of his lawyers, Bart Stroupe of Seattle.
"His status with his wife just goes to show the damages he sustained," said Auburn lawyer Robert Van Siclen, who with New York appeals lawyer Robert Rosenthal handled Hidalgo's appeal. 'The argument can be made that if (being charged in the Wenatchee investigations) had not befallen him, perhaps he would not have these problems."
Yesterday, the INS agreed to release him on bail.
"Immigration just thought it was the right thing to do," said Stroupe. "Manuel wants to file to reopen his case. He wants to clear his name and doesn't want to have a child molestation conviction on his record."
About 4 p.m. yesterday, Hidalgo walked out from the confinement area to be greeted by Richard Brudvik-Lindner, a marketing consultant who lives near Gig Harbor. Brudvik-Lindner put up $1,500 to make Hidalgo's bail.
His wife, psychotherapist Lori Brudvik-Linder, got to know some of the Wenatchee defendants while doing voluntee work at the state Corrections Center for Women at Purdy. The couple didn't know Hidalgo but wanted help those wrongly accused.
"I guess we're just naive enough to believe in the American ideal, that there's still some justice in this country, and that we can help when there is injustice," he said.
The Brudvik-Linders are letting him stay at their house while some of his Wenatchee friends find him a place for him. Last night they took him for his first meal outside confinement, a Mexican dinner.
Hidalgo said he just wants to be a productive part of society.
"I want to start a new life. I want to work, anything. Restaurant. Mechanics. In the fields picking apples," he said. "I like this country."
Hidalgo's 1995 child molestation conviction was thrown out in December, after Whitman County Superior Court Judge Wallis Friel found Hidalgo did not get a fair trial.
As he did in other cases overturned in the last 18 months, Friel found fault with the interviewing methods used by the chief investigator, former Wenatchee Police Detective Bob Perez.
The Wenatchee Police Department allowed the detective to act as a foster father to the girls while simultaneously investigating allegations they made against dozens of adults.
Friel also ruled that a recantation of allegations made by Melinda Everett, one of Perez's foster daughters, was believable. Everett said Perez and state social workers had forced her and her sister -- who remains in state custody -- to say Hidalgo and dozens of other men and women repeatedly raped them, as well as scores of other children.
Hidalgo was married to the girls' half-sister. The P-I found one accuser confused him with another man, and had claimed Hidalgo molested her even when he was not in Wenatchee.
Van Siclen said Hidalgo's friends are banding together to help him fight deportation. No date has been set yet for an INS hearing.
"He's not out of the woods yet," Van Siclen said.
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER
As he took his first steps into a world without walls, in new sneakers and clothes bought for him by a supporter from Tennessee, he reflected on how much it meant to own his own freedom.
Manuel Hidalgo, right, wrongly accused in the Wenatchee sex-ring cases, leaves the INS detention center in Seattle yesterday and is embraced by a supporter, Richard Brudvick-Lindner.
Meryl Schenker/P-I
The investigations were the focus of a series of Post-Intelligencer articles in 1998. The series found that state workers responsible for protecting children did more harm than good, and that police, prosecutors, judges and even public defenders permitted civil rights violations.
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