Original subtitles

We have a paid attendance tonight, 27,458.

That is the second drive...

All of life is "What if?"

I don't know that any of us can identify what that critical role is

that we bring to the lives that we share in common.

Right, in the case of People versus Juan Ignacio Catalan...

Is that your true name?

Yes, ma'am.

Um, let's see...

Well, I was born in Los Angeles, in 1978.

My dad bought a house in a suburb, about 15, 20 miles north of L.A.

My brother, Mario, started hanging around with the wrong crowd.

I always looked up to him, 'cause he was my big brother.

And I just remember seeing him coming home

with stereos and all types of different car parts.

And that, I guess, intrigued me.

They used to break into the cars and I would be the driver.

That was the first time I ever got arrested.

I definitely wanted to make that trip my last trip ever to jail.

The second run that he's allowed to...

Well, it was August 12th of 2003.

Me and Alma, we had broken up. We were having some problems.

I called her up and I asked if she could come and sleep over at my house.

It was maybe midnight,

and he asked me, "What are you doing?" I said, "Trying to go to sleep."

She didn't want to, but... you know, I'm a very persistent guy.

That night, I had a weird dream.

I had a dream of UFOs or aliens or something.

And that I was being taken away.

I kid you not.

Woke up, any other day,

and we're driving to work,

that's probably about 7:30 in the morning.

We pull into our shop parking lot,

and my dad was there, of course. He was always the first one there.

Five, six in the morning.

We pulled into the parking lot.

I notice a truck, kind of close to us.

And that's when it all happened.

As soon as I open the door,

he jumps out of the car, and he's just like...

The only thought I had was I was dead.

I was completely surrounded within 30 seconds.

They walked up to me, threw me on the floor,

face down on the asphalt.

My dad opens the door, and I remember, he poked his head out,

out the door.

And I just remember looking at my dad, and he's like...

He looked at me, and I go, "Dad, look..."

I go, "Dad, look..."

I said, "Dad..."

I'm Detective Rodriguez, partner to Detective Pinner, okay?

Hey, what's going on? That's all I want to know.

We're hoping that you're going to talk to us.

Are you willing to talk to us about what's going on?

What's going on?

Next, one of the detectives showed up to the house.

State your full name for the record, sir.

It's Juan Rodriguez.

He says, "Well..."

He's like, "He was arrested."

And I said, "I get that. Why was he arrested?"

And he's like, "Because the murder of Martha Puebla."

And I said, "Excuse me?"

And I think that I was speechless for like five minutes.

Juan was in jail,

charged with the May 12, 2003 murder of 16-year-old Martha Puebla.

The young woman had testified in a separate case

in which Juan's brother was a co-defendant.

Everyone makes mistakes.

Just some people make bigger mistakes than others.

And they're not easily undone.

My brother had been arrested for a murder.

And we went to his preliminary hearing.

When we were in court, they did ask us to provide our driver's license or IDs.

One thing I remember very clearly is Martha Puebla was a witness.

They wanted her to point out the shooter in court.

But she never said anything. She goes, "I didn't see anything."

And I never thought anything of it.

I...

took it as we were watching someone testify.

Do you solemnly state

the evidence you shall present in this matter

shall be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth,

so help you God?

I do.

You are going to take away my life

for this fucking bullshit?

The bullshit is this. You killed somebody.

Wait a minute. Those are very strong words right there.

I did not kill nobody, I would never kill nobody.

I'd never do anything to hurt anybody.

Convince us otherwise.

I remembered my cousin.

He would always brag about this kick-ass lawyer

that he was a filing clerk for.

Las Vegas. It's a great place to go and have fun!

We went there to uncover

some of the sneaks, cheaters, and sore losers,

and they were all caught on tape.

When I first met Juan, I was in a criminal defense practice,

as I had been for probably ten years.

Naturally, I asked him about the facts of the case.

I got this story...

that I wasn't expecting.

Detective Pinner, what time did the 911 call go out

with respect to this murder on May 12th?

22:43, that's 10:43 p.m.

I didn't know what the evidence was, how many witnesses they claimed they had.

I didn't know anything.

At the time that the defendant was arrested,

- did he have any facial hair? - Yes.

And what did the facial hair look like?

He had a mustache and a... He was slightly unshaven,

with a small piece of hair below his bottom lip.

They showed me the sketch and said that was me.

Male Hispanic, black hair, very short,

5'7" to 5'11",

19 to 25 years old.

Stocky build, medium mustache...

Hair below his lip? I've never had nothing under my lip.

- What's there right now? - I haven't shaved!

Okay, so you didn't shave this day either.

Why wouldn't I shave my mustache then?

I don't know. 'Cause you think you're cool.

Because you think there were no witnesses.

But there were witnesses.

I asked him, "Was the death penalty mentioned?"

Yes, death penalty was mentioned.

They had a paper with my picture on it,

and they're like, "Yeah, this is him."

That's all they would say: "This is him."

Please, you guys can't do this to me, dude.

I swear to God, man, on my two daughters that I love so much, man,

I did not do this.

People identified you. The composite is you.

You see, the pictures don't lie.

I mean, I just had a gut feeling,

there's just no way this kid could have committed a murder.

I mean, it just seemed completely out of his character.

And so I told him, "I'm gonna get you outta here."

Well, did you investigate Juan Catalan in any way, shape, or form

before you had him arrested on August 12th?

- Yes. - What did you do?

I wanted the chronological log that the detectives are supposed to follow

every time they do something on the case.

We showed his picture to the witness.

And?

We verified that he had an apparent motive.

Then I started to ask him, "All right, do you remember where you were?"

♪ And the home ♪

♪ Of the brave ♪

May 12th, I said, "That's around Mother's Day."

I'm like, "You know what? Juan, you were at a Dodger game."

He had bought some tickets for his mom to go to the Dodger game,

knowing full well she probably wouldn't go.

Yeah, I did.

I got those tickets, you know,

trying to pull them off as a Mother's Day gift.

If we can prove you were at the game,

get the case thrown out, easy!

Uh... not so easy.

First of all, I wasn't supposed to be at that game.

We are pleased to welcome

more than 2,000 City of El Segundo employees, families and friends

to tonight's game.

I didn't know who to take because it was such short notice,

so I thought of my daughter, of course.

You know, she was six.

And she doesn't get into the games,

but just her being there, she gets excited.

I took my cousin Miguel, who's also a sports fan,

and a good friend of mine, Ruben.

Didn't think much of it, just another Dodger game.

According to the eyewitnesses and the police reports,

Martha Puebla was at her residence.

She had come outside to talk to a couple of other young adults,

right around ten o'clock at night.

We have a paid attendance tonight, 27,458.

They were going back and forth...

During the time that these four or five people

were just outside of Martha's house,

they saw a Chevy Malibu drive slowly around the block several times.

It was a tie, going into the ninth inning,

and I'm like, "We're not going nowhere."

Éric Gagné comes in and he would go into Mike Kinkade's spot.

The person driving the car came out the car and came up to Martha.

That's a strike.

He came in, and I was like, "We got this.

You know, he's going to nail this ninth inning,

we're gonna come up and hit the game-winning hit."

Marcus Giles, with runners in scoring position, is hitting .355.

Martha says, "Hey, it's Martha, you remember me."

And the shooter says something to the effect of, "No, you don't."

Pulls a gun out of his sweatshirt, and then shoots Martha in the head.

Ground ball up the middle! Cora can't block it!

And the runner's gonna come in. Furcal scores,

Giles scores, and the game has come apart on Éric Gagné.

Oh man, they rocked them for like seven runs.

A 4-4 tie became an 11-4 game,

and I'm like, "Oh, dude." It's over, let's get out of here.

Having just witnessed an execution-style murder,

the main and only eyewitness in this case dropped his cell phone

and ran as fast as he could.

I grabbed my daughter's hand and we're walking towards the exit

and I see a stand of baseball cards, so I had to stop, I had to stop.

Police talked to the owner of the cell phone.

He looks at tons and tons of photos

and eventually gives a sketch of what he thinks the person looks like

that killed Martha.

We opened up the packs, and that was it.

That was the night, nothing else.

First of all, we had an eyewitness who identified him,

and cooperated with a composite artist within days of the homicide,

and came up with a composite

that was strikingly similar to the defendant in appearance.

The prosecutor they assigned to the case

had never lost a murder case ever before in her career.

She was murdered because she did testify,

and the day that she testified, which was May 1st of 2003,

Juan Catalan was present in the audience during his brother's preliminary hearing

when this girl testified.

Her nickname was Sniper,

because she likes to pick off people with the death penalty.

Do you think Juan Catalan has any kind of a legitimate alibi at all?

No.

I asked Alma to find the tickets, but not to touch them.

We turned the apartment upside down.

Couldn't find the tickets...

I'm going to show you three tickets here.

... until finally, I found a Dodger envelope.

Which of these tickets was the one that you possessed?

The next thing that I did was I contacted Sam Fernandez.

Senior Vice President, General Counsel for the Dodgers.

I don't really know what was going through my mind

when I received that call.

"Well, here's another interesting day at the office," if you will.

He came to the stadium and we walked down to the seats.

I wanted to take photos of the seats,

where they were in relation to the Dodger dugout.

I mean, I am standing in Dodger Stadium.

I was shackled up

and put into a individual cage in the jail bus.

I definitely felt...

that it had just become...

That... it just became real.

I saw a county bus. I was coming home from work.

Uh...

And I just had this weird feeling inside of me,

and I just broke down crying by myself in the car.

Juan got his phone call later on that evening,

and calls me and tells me, "Alma, I saw you on the freeway."

I'm like, "No way!"

He's like, "I saw you on the freeway."

He's like, "I saw you. You were about to get the 5 to go home,

and we kept going the opposite way."

He's like, "I wish I could have jumped out of that window

and go home with you."

Really, what he was looking for was some way

of trying to identify the people

who may have been sitting around his client,

who could actually testify that his client was there.

They are season tickets that Juan got from somebody.

Because someone's a season ticket holder doesn't mean they were at that game.

So we tracked down people as far west as Hawaii,

and as far east as Chicago.

Everybody we talked to: "You know, I really didn't see them well enough

that I would feel comfortable testifying."

They transferred me to supermax, which is maximum security,

with the hardest criminals there.

You really don't know what fear is

until you hear a grown man screaming for help.

There's another set of cameras called Dodger Vision.

Dodger Vision is what you see on the big video screens at the stadium.

Our in-house filming.

I painstakingly went through the videos,

trying to find Juan among 40,000 people.

A staggering number, yes.

Since I knew where Juan was,

it was very easy to see the block of seats and count the rows down.

Every time a right-handed batter came up to bat,

I was looking for Juan or his friends in the background.

I felt that I was getting framed.

I know you hear these stories of people being exonerated

25, 30 years later.

And that would play in my head over and over and over.

I was putting everything on super slo-mo.

It took me an entire day to go through a three-hour game,

because I could not afford to miss anything.

I was able to find Juan sitting in those seats.

But the resolution wasn't high enough.

Talking to the kids was really tough,

because they wanted to know when I was coming home.

And I didn't have an answer.

Did I explain to you that we have to tell the truth in court?

- Do you remember that? - Yeah.

And if I told you that this pen was blue,

would that be the truth or a lie?

A lie.

And if I told you that this microphone was white,

would that be the truth or a lie?

A lie.

You promise to tell us the truth from what you remember?

Yeah.

Did you go to a Dodger game with your daddy?

- Yeah. - This year, last year?

Yeah.

Did your daddy buy you anything during the game?

- Yeah. - What did he buy you?

Um...

Oh...

Ice cream.

And, um... candy.

And, um...

and some Dodgers... um... cards.

Some Dodger cards?

Where did he buy the Dodger cards, do you remember?

If Juan had the alibi, the Dodger game, why didn't he mention it

when the police were interviewing him the night he was arrested?

You would have to ask him that.

What were you doing on the 12th?

Well, I'm going to remember,

and that's hopefully going to clear me up, dude.

You know, these guys are telling me that I killed some 16-year-old girl.

Like, the date was...

Like... It was irrelevant to me at that point.

I asked Juan some details about the game.

Juan has a fantastic ability to recall games, plays, details...

He says, "I think they may have been filming something there."

I've been to hundreds of Dodger games,

and never have I seen them film anything there.

And this particular day, they were there.

All he remembered were security personnel blocking the aisle

and this man walking up and down the stairs

for the different takes.

So I went back to Dodger Stadium,

walked with Sam to the Media Relations Department.

The person that was there pulled out this big calendar book.

I watched her start flipping. April, May...

And all these pages are blank.

She turns to May 12th,

and damn if there isn't an entry on May 12th.

It had some kind of obscure production company name,

I didn't recognize it, but it had a phone number.

I called it up, and they answered, "HBO."

I get a cold call from a guy, "This is Todd Melnik, I'm a lawyer,"

and he tells me this crazy story.

He says, "Well, we don't usually release any pre-production footage.

You'll have to wait until it airs."

My first thought is, "This guy's nuts."

And secondly, "There's 56,000 people at this game.

How could this guy possibly be on camera?"

I said, "I need to find anything.

I need to place my client at Dodger Stadium on that night."

In the meantime, I talked to Larry,

and I'm like, "Larry, there's this guy that says, you know, his guy's in jail,

and he's a lawyer and... they remember camera crews being there,

and they think it's us."

Uh... What's that song?

What is that song?

Curb Your Enthusiasm was a comedy that was on HBO.

Starred Larry David, the creator of Seinfeld.

At the time, the name Larry David didn't ring a bell to me.

I had no idea that he was this mega-huge Hollywood star.

He's right, of course, in referring to me as a mega-huge star.

That's totally accurate about me.

So he said, "Okay, when can you come down?"

I said, "Tomorrow?" He says, "Okay, tomorrow."

Just hearing that he was going to go down there

and see this, you know, these outtakes,

it just lifted my spirits instantly.

This episode was called "The Carpool Lane."

It was the seventh episode of season four.

You should see the traffic. The only thing moving is the carpool lane.

I'll never make it. I'm going home.

The episode was that I picked up a hooker in the carpool lane

and took her to Dodger Stadium.

Hey, Daddy. You want a date with Momma?

Monena. I got a red snapper that'll talk to you, Daddy.

Get in the car.

I'd never seen the show, heard of the show,

I didn't have HBO, so I didn't have any exposure to the show.

I was a runner, I was a PA.

You know, "Go deliver this here, go pick this up,

bring it back to the office," sort of thing.

So I had no clue what I was getting into.

I knew that we were going to have to find a baseball stadium

and fill it with thousands of extras,

and, of course, he wanted to do the Dodgers, since it's L.A.

That right there was a huge uh-oh.

We are part of the entertainment community in Los Angeles,

and we do want to cooperate.

They came back and said, "All right, here's what we could do."

We showed up, I believe it was in the late afternoon,

four or five o'clock was the call time.

Now, I didn't understand, I was like,

"How are we going to shoot at a real game? This is crazy."

I know the seats ain't way the fuck up here.

Got a problem with the seats?

You said we had good seats, club seats and shit.

We shot in two sections.

I don't know if they call it a grandstand at Dodger Stadium,

the upper deck...

It's very arbitrary, where we were placed.

I never saw the cameras at the Dodger game.

I don't know if people even knew people were filming.

We had a very, very long lens.

The whole thing was we needed to be almost invisible.

I had to be in bad seats and then see Bob Einstein.

He played Marty Funkhouser on the show.

So I went to the Curb Your Enthusiasm studios

in Santa Monica,

and I get put into an editing bay.

They had an engineer that was putting in these beta tapes one by one

and playing them for me.

I just remember it being chaos, to be honest with you.

You've got two or three people

trying to hold back thousands of people.

Midway through the game, my daughter asked me for, I don't remember,

ice cream, popcorn, candy, something...

There was about eight tapes

and we're putting in tape after tape after tape.

We went up to the concessions stands, and I bought her what she wanted.

We start to roll the scenes

and, you know, there's some shots of Bob Einstein.

- Hey, Larry, I see you got a ticket! - Yeah, the seats really stink though.

When I got back, there was a camera crew right on our aisle.

We weren't supposed to stop people walking up and down the aisle,

but if they didn't want to be on camera, we would say, "Can you wait one minute?"

- Can I join you? - No.

Why not?

I grabbed my daughter's hand and I tried to walk down the stairs,

but I was stopped.

- You won't let me sit there?! - Not even for a minute!

These are paying customers. We can't hold them for too long.

There's only about maybe six minutes a tape

on each of these beta tapes,

and we're already on tape number five or six.

And I'm getting disheartened.

Oh no!

The same guy who stopped me, he looked over at me,

and then he was just like, "Hey, you know what? Just go ahead."

And nobody was being let in.

Thanks.

I probably didn't even know we were rolling the camera.

And if I did, I was probably a shitty PA and let them through anyway.

- I literally jumped out of my chair. - He literally sprung out of his chair.

And there was this gasp.

And there he was.

Pretty cool!

Is that them right there?

Wow.

We roll it back, confirm yes, it is him,

we keep playing the tape,

and he's on two more cassettes.

I thought, "Wow, this is fantastic,

I'm going to be able to prove that he was at the game."

I said, "Todd, what happened?"

And he said, "Dude, you're on the tape."

And I was just like... I think I let the phone go.

I think I let the phone go.

Then I asked him about, "When was this shot?

Do you guys know what time of the game this was shot?"

We shoot with time code, which is time of day.

The stamp that's put on the video tape that you can't see, it's electronic.

So we knew exactly what time he was being shot at.

The first scene was at 8:55, the last scene was at 9:15.

Of course, it was really... It was pretty exciting, to tell you the truth.

I looked at this video as being the holy grail of Juan's defense.

Except the murder took place at 10:32.

Crap.

What else do we need? You know?

I'm on the video the day they're saying that I killed this girl.

Isn't that enough?

At 10:43 at night,

our defendant, by his own evidence, his own witnesses,

is on the same street as our victim, dropping off his cousin, Miguel Catalan,

about 100 to 150 yards away from the murder scene,

at the time of the murder.

So the HBO tape, in your opinion, is good only for what?

Nothing.

So the prosecution is gonna contend that you could have left early

and had time to go and commit that murder.

And... dude, that just brought me back down.

I said, "I've got to figure out a way

to place you at Dodger Stadium even longer."

Did you buy something there?

And I'm like, "Yes, I bought a lot of things."

He goes, "Did you use a credit card?" I'm like, "No."

Then we started talking about cell phones.

There's a call at 10:11 in the evening,

for 49 seconds, an inbound call.

- Whose phone number is that? - My friend.

And did you call Juan from her phone?

Yes, I did.

I kept calling Juan and calling Juan, and I'm like, "Is the game over?"

I said, "We're walking out of the stadium right now."

And that was maybe about 10:10, I want to say.

- Do you recognize that number? - That's my number.

But I don't remember if he called me or I called him.

You have to remember every little detail of your life.

You always think it may not happen to you, but...

Only in the movies, only on TV...

I knew, from being involved as a commentator

on the O.J. Simpson case,

when he was doing his slow-speed chase,

that the police were able to find out which cell towers

were pinging off of his cell phone when the call was transmitted.

That's how they found him.

The very first phone call I got from Todd was after the subpoena was released.

We basically released phone records, wire taps

for, you know, law enforcement agencies, and different types of entities.

And I just happened to get that case just by the luck of the draw, you know.

What's the first number that you recognize?

Mine.

Due to the nature of the case,

Todd was very, very persistent.

It was one of those situations where it had to go above and beyond

because we had the ability to see

what cell tower the actual phone calls were pinging off of.

It's going to show exactly where a person is at a certain time period.

The cell tower Juan had used

was right across the street from Dodger Stadium,

and the radius for that particular one is a mile.

So I knew Juan was at Dodger Stadium at at least 10:12.

Which cell tower was used to receive that call at 10:11 at night?

10:11 at night, the cell site was NCA 6581...

Rather than giving me a diagram of whose phone number was whose,

I was listening to numbers, trying to record numbers and times,

and I was really befuddled.

All I knew about the case

was the defendant was possibly looking at a death sentence

if he were ultimately convicted.

And that frightened me... beyond words.

In a preliminary hearing,

am I going to send this person on to a jury trial,

or am I going to make the decision to dismiss it?

I was always aware of the pressure of time.

I would go into the court with Todd, sit down...

Ten, fifteen minutes max, they would talk back and forth in lawyer jargon

and stuff I didn't know what they were talking about.

Okay, see you next date, and next date, and on, it went like that.

I agreed, to save time,

that I would take the interrogation audio tape home with me.

I knew that I could listen to it as many times as I wanted to,

which I did.

You guys are making the biggest mistake.

This night, you made the biggest mistake of your life.

No. No.

You guys are going to remember this,

because you guys are trying to pin somebody that had nothing to do with this.

I listened to that tape over and over and over again.

I made my children listen to it.

And I kept asking them, as I was really asking myself,

"Is this the voice of a guilty man?"

I was waiting for Todd to come in to brief me.

I remember, he told me that, as soon as I walked in that door,

not to look over to the audience side, which was on the left side.

Martha's family was in the seats.

I remember being anguished by this case.

I couldn't get it out of my mind.

And I vacillated,

trying to determine how I was going to rule.

Martha Puebla was at stake for me.

This man would be facing the death penalty

if he hadn't, by the grace of God,

gotten Dodger tickets from someone the day before

and invited these people,

got caught on video from that HBO show...

You heard the tape of the interview with Detective Pinner.

It is clearly a one-witness ID case.

However, the one witness in this case is extremely credible,

has no motive to lie,

and made a composite drawing with a composite artist

that is strikingly similar to the defendant's appearance.

I don't have any doubt that eyewitness attempted to be credible,

but he observed this murder on a darkened residential street

under obviously the most traumatic of circumstances.

She started talking and talking,

and talking...

And I didn't understand one word she said.

Todd's sitting to my left, and he leans over.

And then he says, "It's over."

And I said, "What?"

And then...

- We're gonna get in trouble! - Oh, my God!

Go over and give your daddy a hug!

Hi!

Everything's over.

Sorry, Todd.

- Thank you, Todd. - You're welcome, man.

- I owe you, dude. - It's all right.

You owe him your life!

- I owe you. - All right.

Todd gave me one last hug and just...

It seemed like he just rode off into the sunset, like a...

As he should.

And, you know, left me there with my family and...

I got into the car and they said...

You know, they were all super excited and happy, as I was,

and they're like, "Okay, okay, what do you want?

We'll buy you whatever."

And I was like, "All I want...

All I want, honestly,

is a Coke.

I didn't have...

You have no soda, no nothing in there, dude.

All I wanted was a Coke, that's all.

Do you know what incriminating evidence is?

- Yes. - All right.

Were you asking Mr. Catalan questions

to try to obtain an incriminating response?

Yes.

Did you try to trick Juan Catalan after he was arrested,

with the circle around his picture?

Yes, sir.

That was... dishonest, right?

We're going to begin the press conference

with the United States attorney, Deborah Wong Yang.

The indictment alleges that several members of the gang

murdered a 16-year-old girl,

who had witnessed the gang's wrongdoings

and was cooperating with police.

Maybe, I don't know, every few years,

somebody will bring it up or something, and I'll tell the story.

Maybe I'll tell it at a party, how I got a guy off of a murder.

You know, um...

Impress a date with it, I don't know.

♪ Take me out to the ball game ♪

♪ Take me out to the crowd ♪

♪ Buy me some peanuts and crackerjacks ♪

♪ I don’t care if I never get back ♪

The thing that keeps repeating in my head, over and over

and over and over,

is imagine he would have stayed home to watch that game.

Who were they going to believe? His mom? Me?

My daughter? "Oh, my daddy was here."

How, how do you prove...

It's just crazy.

It's a dangerous thing to do,

to go around viewing life from the "What if?" perspective.

What if we hadn't done the deal with Larry David?

What if the camera crew hadn't gone to that aisle on the field double?

What if his daughter had decided that she didn't want to go to the ball game?

What if he hadn't made the phone call?

What if, what if, what if...

All of life is "What if?"

The next couple of minutes is a "What if?"

...you can now be sure that we're gonna see John Smoltz.