A Coral Gables police officer is accused of strangling and handcuffing his girlfriend
A veteran Coral Gables police officer was arrested Monday for strangling and handcuffing his girlfriend during a heated argument about infidelity, police said.
Cristino Perez, 56 and a 17-year veteran with Gables police, was taken into custody a day after the alleged battery and now faces charges of false imprisonment, battery, battery by strangulation and tampering with a witness.
The officer, who works traffic homicide and crash details and was honored as officer of the month in Coral Gables in July 2017, was also charged with domestic battery a decade ago. That case was dropped because of inconsistent witness statements, prosecutors said.
Perez appeared in court remotely Tuesday morning, only seen through a rectangular hatch on his jail cell door. He remained there in the afternoon, Miami-Dade Corrections records showed, and hadn’t posted a $5,000 bond. Perez also had no representation at the hearing.
Calls to the Coral Gables Fraternal Order of Police had not been returned by late afternoon.
Coral Gables Police Chief Ed Hudak said in a prepared statement that he placed Perez on paid leave as soon as he learned of the charges and that the agency would conduct its own Internal Affairs investigation into the accusations. The chief said he would re-evaluate the officer’s status depending on how prosecutors move forward.
Hands around a throat and a handcuff around a wrist?
According to police and witnesses, Perez and his girlfriend of three years got into a fight Sunday night regarding infidelity as they lay in bed. The arrest report says the woman — who isn’t named — pushed Perez in the back and left the bedroom to go sleep on the couch.
As she was setting up her bedding there, Perez told her she needed to leave. Then, police say, “a struggle for the blanket” ended with Perez’s girlfriend on the ground. But, the arrest form says, Perez wasn’t done.
“[Perez] then stood over her and began to choke her, at which point the victim was unable to breathe,” and her vision got cloudy, police said the woman told them.
When she kicked at him, he released his grip on her neck. Then, according to the arrest form, the woman went back into the bedroom to retrieve her cellphone, but Perez grabbed it first. When she asked her son to call the police, Perez took the cellphone and headed back into the bedroom. They went to sleep in separate rooms.
The next morning, police said, when Perez refused to give the woman her cellphone and told her the relationship was over and she had to leave, she got angry, police said.
“The victim became enraged and slammed an empty beer bottle on the ground,” police said. “[Perez] goes up to the victim and interlocks his fingers with hers, while twisting her hands and brought her to her knees, causing pain.”
After Perez let go, the report says his girlfriend went into a bedroom and punched a hole in the window. When she came out to the front room, the report says, Perez grabbed her by the robe and “slammed her against the wall.”
She cried. Perez went to the bedroom and retrieved his handcuffs, police said. Then he cuffed her right hand and pulled her into the bedroom, before removing the handcuffs.
When police showed up, the noticed “visible bruising and redness to her right arm and wrist and redness to her neck. Perez, the police report noted, had “visible bruising to his wrist and scratch marks on the right of his neck.” He was taken into custody.
In the case more than a decade ago in March 2011, Perez was accused of punching his six-months-pregnant sister-in-law in the left shoulder as they sat in a car. Police said he also grabbed her wrist and tried to pull her out of the vehicle.
But prosecutors dropped the case two months later after conflicting testimony from witnesses, determining the victim had no visible injuries and after she signed a non-prosecution form the day after Perez’s arrest.
This story was originally published February 1, 2022 at 2:57 PM.
