The Los Angeles homeless man who was fatally shot by police was a convicted felon who had dreams of becoming a Hollywood actor — but it turns out he was living in the US illegally after he “fooled” authorities into thinking he was a law-abiding Frenchman, officials said.
A law enforcement official who wasn’t authorized to speak publicly said Tuesday that the man who was killed by the LAPD on Skid Row on Sunday had been identified by his fingerprints as Charley Saturmin Robinet, 39, a convicted bank robber.
But French authorities said there was just one problem: The real Charley Saturmin Robinet is “alive and well in France.”
“He fooled a lot of people,” Axel Cruau, the French consul general in Los Angeles, told the LA Times. “Including us — years ago.”
“The real Charley Robinet is in France apparently living a totally normal life and totally unaware his identity had been stolen years and years ago,” he explained.
The homeless man who was killed during the altercation with police on Sunday had stolen Robinet’s identity in the late 1990s, used it to acquire a French passport — and then flew to the US to pursue his dreams of becoming a movie star, officials said.
Police have no idea who the man actually is — and what little they do know doesn’t explain how a violent and mentally disturbed criminal could fall through the cracks so easily.
When his fingerprints were run through the system, authorities discovered that he had been wanted for violating probation terms for a prior arrest.
Using the name Robinet, the man was identified as a French national in 2000, when he was convicted of robbing a Wells Fargo branch and viciously pistol-whipping a bank teller.
His excuse: He needed the money to take acting classes at the Beverly Hills Playhouse.
“Several guys broke into a bank and left with a stash of money,” his lawyer at the time, Steven Cron, told the Telegraph. “If I remember rightly, he said that he needed the cash to pay for his acting lessons.”
While the reasoning behind the smash-and-grab sounds innocent, a former federal prosecutor who handled the case says she remembered it specifically because of how brutal the attack on the bank teller was.
“The clerk had a lot of stitches,” Cheryl O’Connor recalled to the LA Times, adding that the man had denied his involvement in the crime despite being found with wads of cash in his pockets — and later confessing to investigators.
“His defense was preposterous,” she said.
Once he was convicted, Robinet was sent to federal prison in Rochester, Minnesota — where he was assigned to the mental health unit.
The medical staff there determined that he had “a mental disease or defect” which would require him to receive treatment in a psychiatric hospital. After spending 13 years locked up and six months in a halfway house, the man was released in May 2014, said Ed Ross, a spokesman for the Bureau of Prisons.
Foreign nationals are supposed to be deported after serving criminal sentences, but as he was nearing his release from prison, officials managed to find the other Robinet — who had the same exact birth date as the one in the US. This forced French authorities to deny his return because he technically wasn’t a French citizen, Cruau said.
Since the US Supreme Court ruled in 2001 that immigration authorities could not detain people indefinitely because no country is willing to take them, once the man’s sentence was up, he was allowed to go free.
Dozens of LA residents rallied Tuesday in protest of Sunday’s shooting as authorities still tried to piece together what happened. Despite having multiple videos of the incident and footage from two officer-worn cameras, exactly what unfolded remains unclear.
LAPD officials said Monday that the shooting had been sparked after the homeless man grabbed an officer’s gun.
With Post Wire Services