Manuel Diego Soza had no idea the trouble ahead when he tossed his old Texas license plate in the trash at an AutoZone store earlier this year.
Months after throwing away the old plate and putting his new Colorado plates on his silver Subaru Forester, police officers showed up to Soza’s Denver apartment and took him to jail on theft charges.
Their investigation hinged on the expired Texas license plate. A Hispanic man had walked out of a Walmart store with a stolen $199 speaker and climbed into a vehicle bearing that license plate. A Westminster police detective said Soza, who is also Hispanic, was “clearly” the thief.
But the thief had a neck tattoo; Soza does not. And the thief’s vehicle was a different model and color than Soza’s Subaru.
Westminster police botched the investigation and missed several red flags that should have alerted authorities that they were looking at the wrong suspect, Soza said. The criminal case against him was officially dropped last week after a request from the prosecutors in late June.
“I was lucky enough, fortunate enough to be in a position to hire an attorney, challenge the charge,” Soza said. “But how many other Hispanic males are also being brought up in that court, not being able to (fight) it, losing jobs over it, losing opportunities? It just makes me really upset.”
Westminster police Sgt. Ray Esslinger said Thursday that the department was reviewing the case and he could not comment further.
Andy Le, communications manager for the city of Westminster, deferred comment to police when asked about the city’s prosecution of Soza.
The case began on April 18 at the Walmart on Sheridan Boulevard in Westminster. A store employee watched a man walk out without paying for a $199 speaker and called police. The man got into a black Subaru Outback outfitted with Soza’s expired Texas license plate.
The man drove away when a police officer walked up to the driver’s side window, and officers didn’t chase the car. The case was assigned to Detective Morgan Arrick, who ran the expired Texas plate and found it had been registered in Soza’s name.
However, the expired Texas license plate was registered to Soza’s silver Subaru Forester, not a black Subaru Outback. Soza had a separate, active Colorado vehicle registration for the silver Subaru Forester, police records show.
Arrick then pulled up a picture of Soza, who moved to Colorado in 2021 and works as an attorney, and compared it to a surveillance photo of the man who stole the speaker. She concluded the two Hispanic men were one and the same.
“The suspect who stole the merchandise is clearly Manuel Diego Soza,” she wrote in a report.
But that conclusion was flawed, Soza contends. Beyond the neck tattoo, the man in the photo was believed to be between 18 and 25 years old, with a height of about 5 feet, 3 inches; Soza is 5 feet, 8 inches tall and 32 years old.
“He had a neck tattoo, he didn’t look anything like me,” Soza said. “He was just another Hispanic male. I assume (the detective) saw my name and was like, ‘Hispanic male, this matches somehow.’”
Soza said he felt deeply embarrassed when he was handcuffed at his apartment complex, walked to a police car and taken to jail, where he spent about six hours behind bars before being released on bail. He was forced to hire an attorney and has spent about $6,000 defending against the bogus theft charge, which was filed in Westminster Municipal Court.
Even after he and his attorney presented evidence that he was not the man in the photo, the Westminster city prosecutor’s office continued to pursue the case until June 29, when it filed a motion to dismiss, saying it did not believe it could prove the case beyond a reasonable doubt.
Soza had hoped that the case would be dismissed with an acknowledgment that he is factually innocent. He’s worried that the charge will impact his career as an attorney, particularly when he applies to be licensed in other states. He will need to proactively disclose the arrest, he said, even though it was based on false evidence.
“I had to do all that because someone couldn’t look into this a little bit deeper at the beginning,” he said. “And even when we provided all the info to show that was a completely different person, that I was in a different location… they still continued to pursue it until a week and a half ago. It just seems like a lot of time and expense and worry for something that could have been resolved very easily.”
He said he’s considering filing a lawsuit over the arrest, both to recoup his costs and, he said, to see how many other people have been arrested on flimsy or flawed evidence and funneled into Westminster Municipal Court.
“At a municipal court level, there is less oversight and it creates the kind of conditions for an unjust system,” he said. “It’s targeting poor and minority people, and it makes me really upset.”
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