Pedro Carvajal embraces his mother, Alejandrina Salazar Miranda, as she reminisces about her late son, Jesus Carvajal, on Tuesday, June 15, 2021. Jesus Carvajal was wrongfully jailed in 2018 and accused of raping multiple women by pretending to be a police officer. Charges were later dropped and he was released when police apprehended a different suspect. However, his life and reputation never recovered.
Sunday, June 20, 2021 | 2 a.m.
The devastation made Alejandrina Salazar Miranda’s voice so shaky that her son Pedro Carvajal couldn’t make out the words.
She was either laughing maniacally or crying, Carvajal said. Then, he realized why she was calling earlier this month.
“All I heard was ‘brother,’ ” Carvajal said. “She didn’t have to explain. I knew what happened.”
The June 2 call was to inform him that his hero and brother, Jesus Carvajal, was dead. After desperately trying to contact her son for three days, Salazar Miranda went to his apartment and found him unresponsive.
Salazar Miranda held her “gentle giant” in her arms, pleading for him to wake up, but “he couldn’t because he was already dead,” she said last week while sobbing loudly and burying her head into her surviving son’s chest.
“He couldn’t take it anymore,” Salazar Miranda said in Spanish.
Jesus Carvajal, 36, lived a joyful life until the day Metro Police falsely accused him of raping four women, whom the suspect had allegedly coaxed by pretending to be a law enforcement officer.
On Aug. 10, 2018, Metro raided Carvajal’s house using flash bangs. They hauled him off to jail. He lost the house he rented, his car and his job as a warehouse supervisor. His credit, his girlfriend and his sizable group of friends, here and in Southern California, followed.
Turns out, they had the wrong guy.
Still, Carvajal spent three weeks behind bars and additional time on house arrest. He was never able to get his lifestyle back.
As of Thursday, the Clark County Coroner’s Office had not ruled on Carvajal’s cause of death. Salazar Miranda said her son told her he wasn’t doing well when they last spoke on May 31.
• • •
The nightmare should have ended two months after his arrest, when Metro proved Carvajal innocent with the arrest of Tommy Lee Provost. The Clark County District Attorney’s Office dropped Carvajal’s charges, and Provost faces 46 charges, including sexual assault, kidnapping and impersonating an officer.
For the innocent Carvajal, the horror had just begun following his release, he told the Sun in 2019. Job interviews were unexpectedly canceled, and he was always wondering who continued to see him as a monster.
“People believe in the news,” he said. “You tend to believe that.”
Longtime friends, and even family, distanced themselves after the arrest. Pedro Carvajal said it was nearly impossible to get people who knew him for decades to write letters testifying to his good character to use in his brother’s case.
It was the “most horrible eye-opener ever to realize how many people would turn on you,” Jesus Carvajal told the Sun.
On Tuesday, Pedro Carvajal scrolled through dozens of sympathetic comments on his phone replying to a social media post. Numerous people have reached out to apologize, he said.
His mother and siblings were there for him all along. Had they known their loved one was responsible for such horrid acts, they would’ve turned him into police themselves, they said.
“I think you know if you had a serial rapist next to you,” his brother said. “It wasn’t my brother.”
Jesus Carvajal’s booking photo and name spread widely across the internet after Metro announced his arrest. The news even reached Mexico, where his family was left to explain to a niece, with whom he was close, that her uncle was not a rapist.
It was up to Carvajal to clear his name. He reached out to media organizations telling them he’d been proven innocent. Unlike the Sun, most didn’t run follow-up stories.
“He was trying in life, (but) with what happened to him,” his brother said, “rapists are viewed lower than murderers, thieves, you call it.”
To make matters worse, Metro didn’t announce Provost’s arrest the way they had for Carvajal, only acknowledging it when asked.
During that time, Metro said that “additional evidence” investigators probed led to determine Carvajal’s innocence. The District Attorney’s Office said it initially had “sufficient probable cause” to charge Carvajal for the crimes, but that “credible information” received later from Metro led to the charges being dropped.
Carvajal filed a lawsuit last year seeking compensation for his car, which was auctioned off by Metro. More importantly, though, he wanted an apology from both Metro and the District Attorney’s Office.
The DA said Thursday it could not further comment on Carvajal’s case because it was no longer in its system. Metro said it doesn’t comment on pending litigation.
Carvajal’s family, in continuing with the lawsuit, wants that apology to be public and far-reaching.
The case broke Jesus Carvajal, and is to blame for his death, they said. He withdrew, installed cameras at his home and in his car. He thought he was being chased by police and took license plate numbers from cars parked outside.
“He wasn’t happy,” his brother said. “The guy self-quarantines himself just to avoid these things. It’s not a way to live ... constantly looking over your shoulder. Why? Because somebody else made a mistake.”
“It was tough to see my brother like that,” he added. “It completely changed him. He was no longer a happy person.”
Carvajal had to find odd jobs and at one point rented a living room space after living in a three-bedroom house with a backyard.
“Even if it’s the last thing I accomplish in my life, even if I have to drag myself through the ground, I need to see (that apology),” Salazar Miranda said in Spanish.
There is a “war drum beating in my chest,” his brother said. “I can’t listen to it, can’t do nothing about it. This is what we can do.”
• • •
Asked to describe Jesus Carvajal on Tuesday at his attorneys’ office, his mother and brother immediately broke down in tears. They consoled each other as they began speaking about the respectful, fun and kind man.
“He was a beautiful, smiling child,” his mother said in Spanish.
Salazar Miranda raised two sons and two daughters. She remembers how much the boys liked to jump on her back and pretend she was a horse. She taught her boys respect for women at a young age. Before entering their sisters’ room, they had to knock and ask permission to go inside.
When they drove by someone struggling to cross the street, Salazar Miranda would have them help out.
“He was always an obedient boy,” she said.
He grew up playing volleyball, basketball and football. He wanted to join the Army, but those plans were derailed when he was hurt playing football. He also spoke about wanting to be a police officer.
But when his mother moved to Las Vegas from California in 2010, it wasn’t long before Jesus Carvajal followed. He missed her too much, she said he told her.
Pedro Carvajal, three years younger than Jesus, always emulated his brother. They wore the same football jersey number. They did everything together.
“Your hero,” their mother interjected.
Through tears, Pedro Carvajal said, “He’s my older brother, man, what can you say?”
Mother and son spent this past Thanksgiving Day and Christmas together. He got her to dance and secretly recorded her, then posted the video on social media. They laughed and laughed.
For his upcoming 37th birthday on June 26, they planned to eat seafood at one of their favorite restaurants and then go watch a movie.
“Now I won’t be able to celebrate his birthday with him,” Salazar Miranda said, breaking down. “There will be no more Thanksgiving days, no more Christmases. There will be nothing more.”
“The guy was loved, he was loved a lot more than he knew,” Pedro Carvajal said. “That’s what makes it sad to see. ... It sucks, and it hurts like hell to know that my brother is gone, but it also makes me happy to know that he’s no longer hurting.”
The family is raising money for funeral services and to continue with Jesus Carvajal’s lawsuit. Those interested in donating can do so by searching for “Pedro Carvajal” on gofundme.com. As of Friday, it was about a quarter of the way to its $20,000 goal.
