He didn’t bomb anyone

By Timothy Pratt (contact)

Friday, May 18, 2007 | 7:19 a.m.

Omar Rueda Denvers was eating lunch Saturday when his cell phone rang.

A friend asked him how he could have set off a bomb in a Las Vegas casino garage, killing a man.

It was a good question, because Rueda Denvers was sitting in a restaurant in Panama City, Panama.

Nearly choking on his roast pork, he ran to a corner pharmacy and bought a copy of a daily newspaper.

His name splashed across the front page, next to the photo of another man.

"I was frustrated ... I thought, 'That's not me,' " Rueda Denvers, 42, said by phone from Panama.

"What do I do? Sue the newspaper?"

Instead, he wound up sitting down at the newspaper's offices later that afternoon, making sure his version of events would reach as many countrymen as possible in Sunday's version of El Siglo, a tabloid.

This is what he said :

Rueda Denvers recognized the man in the photo.

He was Guatemalan immigrant Alexander Perez. The man who had allegedly killed the suitor of his former girlfriend with a bomb in a cup had worked for Rueda Denvers three years earlier.

Rueda Denvers recalled his wife placing a classified ad in late 2003 seeking a nanny for his then 4-year-old daughter. A young Guatemalan woman named Karen Tapia answered the ad. She started working at the family's Panama City home in November. Tapia said her boyfriend, Perez, was handy.

Rueda Denvers hired the man to fix his porch and do some work at one of the three businesses he owns.

Within a few months Tapia revealed that she was pregnant. Rueda Denvers decided that it was better for her to go home. His wife called the girl's family, who said they would be glad to have her back - but not Perez. The Rueda Denvers family paid for Tapia's trip home and sent her off with a basket of baby goodies, including diapers and clothes.

Rueda Denvers neither saw nor heard from either of them again - until last Saturday.

Now he looks back on the two. "She was very quiet, never talked much," he said of Tapia.

Then he flashed back on the old national ID card he had lying around the house, one of those that Panama had replaced with a more sophisticated version in 1997. Sometimes, he said, Perez would take the old ID with him to cash checks used for buying materials.

Rueda Denvers now thinks that he was a victim of identity theft, a crime he says is unusual in his country.

Starting Monday, the Panamanian's effort to clear his name filled headlines in the rest of Panama's major newspapers and on TV news. Reader forums on Web sites buzzed with the scandal, because Panamanians had been hearing for a week before then about the spectacular Las Vegas homicide caused by a fellow countryman.

"I knew no Panamanian would be capable of setting off a bomb like that!" a reader wrote in after the real Rueda Denvers stepped forward.

Others chalked the whole affair up to Panama's porous border that "allows foreigners without documents to enter the country" - posing an ironic parallel to the opinions of many Las Vegas readers who had followed the news here.

Rueda Denvers and his lawyer spent the next few days talking to the U.S. Embassy in Panama, the FBI and Metro Police. He supplied those agencies with his birth and marriage certificates and his current national ID.

The U.S. Embassy didn't answer calls or e-mails, and Bill Castle, a Metro official, said he couldn't comment on the case, although he did say, "we certainly appreciate him coming forward."

Rueda Denvers looked back on the identity theft gone terribly wrong, ending in a bizarre homicide case thousands of miles away.

"To think I had an enemy so close to me and my family..."

Then he added, "I've never even been in the U.S. I'm scared of flying!"