The US town of Fontana, California will pay $900,000 to settle a federal civil rights lawsuit after police falsely accused a man of murdering his father, interrogated him for 17 hours, threatened to have his dog euthanized, and withheld medication from him, eventually leading the distraught man to give a false confession and try to commit suicide in the police station, reports Reason.

His father, Thomas Perez Jr., was alive the whole time.

In 2018, Perez reported to the Fontana police that his 71-year-old father, Thomas Perez Sr., had disappeared the previous day while taking the family dog out for a walk. The dog had returned without the elder Perez.

Perez Jr. agreed to go to the police station to talk to detectives. While there, the police obtained a search warrant for the family's house, and based on small blood stains around the house and an alert from a corpse-sniffing dog, their suspicions turned to Perez Jr.

Video of Perez Jr.'s interrogation showed that Fontana police told him, falsely, that they had already found his father's corpse and that there was evidence pointing to him as the murderer. According to his lawsuit, he was kept in police custody for 17 hours, during which detectives berated him, refused to let him sleep, and wouldn't let him retrieve his medications for depression, stress, asthma, and high blood pressure.

Detectives in fact brought Perez Jr.'s dog into the interrogation room so he could say goodbye to it. Perez then confessed to stabbing his father with a pair of scissors.

After confessing, while he was left alone in the interrogation room, Perez Jr. tried to hang himself with his shoelaces. He was taken from the police station and temporarily committed to a psychiatric hospital.

While the younger Perez was in the hospital, police located the elder Perez alive and well at Los Angeles International Airport, where he was flying to Oakland to see his daughter.

Perez Jr. filed a lawsuit against Fontana in 2019, alleging that the Fontana police violated his due process rights, as well as his constitutional rights against unreasonable search and seizure and excessive force.