TUCSON, Ariz. — Imagine getting arrested — knowing police think you’re someone else but don’t believe you when you tell them they have the wrong man.
That’s what one Tucson man says happened to him. Now, he’s demanding answers.
It was the beginning of November. Manuel Marquez was driving a friend’s car when he says suddenly he was pulled over by federal agents at gunpoint.
From there, he says a clear misunderstanding led to him spending more than a day behind bars for no reason other than mistaken identity.
“[They] said put your hands up, put your hands up, and all of a sudden I’ve got 12 maybe more handguns and rifles in my face,” said Marquez as he recounted the arrest.
“[They] started asking me, ‘are you Eduardo are you Eduardo, put your hands behind your back you’re being detained."
But Manuel isn’t Eduardo. He says he asked for an attorney, but the questions continued and then the agents called Tucson Police to take over.
He says officers told him they have been looking for him since January of 2022 for a dispute with his spouse. None of the details made any sense to him, but he says they didn’t believe him and took him to jail.
“I asked to speak to an attorney when I arrived at the Pima County Jail. They said, ‘We don’t have that here for you; you won't be getting that here. … What is your name? You’re Eduardo aren’t you?’ I said that’s not my name, that’s not who I am. They said, ‘Well you can keep playing that game with us; we don't have time for you.’”
Marquez was put before a judge later that evening.
“And I told him what was going on, and he said: ‘I’m sorry, I can’t help you. I wish you the best of luck on your next court date,’” Marquez recalls.
He says he was not allowed a phone call and was kept in solitary confinement. Meanwhile, his family filed a missing person’s report with the Sheriff’s Department, which ran a check to see if he was in jail.
“The detective in charge assured my family I was not in the Pima County Jail. I could have been there for 10 years; they would have never found me because I was under someone else’s name.”
Marquez was released and given a December court date, but that day never came because the state prosecutor filed a motion to drop the charges on Nov. 14, after they realized they arrested the wrong person.
The News 4 Tucson Investigators reached out to ATF and TPD about the incident. ATF says the matter is still tied to an open criminal investigation and cannot comment.
TPD said the mix-up is being investigated and that its Office of Professional Standards had already reached out to Marquez.
But Manuel Marquez says that never happened, and in fact, TPD refused to let him file a complaint. TPD did not comment on these allegations, but the same day we questioned them about not contacting him, they told us an officer reached out to Marquez.
“Thanks to you, we’re somewhat getting somewhere,” he says of our News 4 Tucson Investigators.
“If it wasn’t for you, we’d be stuck nowhere because I called twice, two different occasions to initiate two different complaints and check up on the first one, and they said, ‘We’ll get back to you; we’ll get back to you.’”
N4T also requested the body camera footage but after nearly a month, we have not received it.
After completing its investigation into Marquez’s complaint, TPD told us, “Mr. Marquez refused to identify himself to Tucson Police officers or any outside agencies, which resulted in him being charged with refusing to provide his truthful name when lawfully detained.”
“Mr. Marquez was given ample time to identify to law enforcement and was even advised it was illegal for him to not identify himself. Our Office of Professional Standards did look into the matter and conducted an internal investigation. The investigators have closed the case.”
As for the real Eduardo Romo, he was arrested in April. For Manuel Marquez, he just wants to make sure this never happens to anyone else.
“We could have handled this matter if they would have been polite, and had been calm.”
