As Ramon Huerta stood shirtless and shivering in the frontyard of the Pico Rivera house he's called home for more than four decades, the 64-year-old retired chef struggled to comprehend the questions being shouted by the heavily armed police who began pounding on his front door some time before dawn.
Where are the guns, they wanted to know. Where are the drugs?
Huerta -- a soft-spoken grandfather who retired last year to care for his wife, who is battling colon cancer -- said he tried to tell them he didn't know what they were talking about, that they had the wrong man.
Nonetheless, he was handcuffed and hauled away as part of a massive gang sweep last week that federal authorities touted as the largest of its kind in the nation.
Huerta would spend the next two nights in a federal lockup in downtown Los Angeles before authorities acknowledged that "there exists the very real possibility" that he isn't the heroin dealer they were looking for.
He was released from custody on Saturday after inquires by The Times.
According to an indictment unsealed last week, a Ramon Huerta was identified as an alleged heroin dealer with connections to the Varrio Hawaiian Gardens street gang, which authorities began investigating four years ago after one its members murdered a Los Angeles County sheriff's deputy.
The indictment said the man was captured in wiretapped telephone conversations speaking in coded language about heroin and conspiring to sell the drug on several occasions.
A search warrant affidavit seeking permission to search the alleged drug dealer's residence described Huerta's Pico Rivera home in detail. His house was raided early Thursday as part of the Hawaiian Gardens gang case, dubbed "Operation Knock Out."
Thom Mrozek, a spokesman for the U.S. attorney's office, said officials now believe there had been a misidentification regarding Huerta and were "continuing to look into" how it occurred. Prosecutors drove to a federal magistrate's home Saturday in order to have the charges dismissed, he said.
In an interview Sunday, Huerta sat surrounded by family members in his living room as he described the ordeal, which began some time between 4 and 5 a.m. last Thursday.
He said he and his wife, Myrna, 63, were fast asleep when they heard a pounding on their metal security gate that was so forceful "it felt like the whole house was shaking."
