By Dianna Cahn
Sun-Sentinel
BOCA RATON, Fla. — He’s a rocket scientist turned detective who sniffed out a child predator and helped expose a ring of Colombian jewel thieves.
He hooked up state-of-the-art polygraph, video and recording equipment for the Boca Raton Police Department, is a police diver and a liaison to the Department of Children & Families.
But Detective Juan Carlos Pijuan sees himself foremost as a student of human behavior, an interviewer who watches body language and listens intently to the mistakes suspects make.
“I am always going into an interview wondering what is going to make them talk,” Pijuan said after receiving the Boca Raton Police Department’s Officer of the Year award. “Looking not just at what they are saying, but their actions. . . Freudian slips are just as important.”
That’s how Pijuan turned a case with no evidence in January into a child predator arrest.
They started with a man suspected of viewing porn at work.
“By the end of the interview, he gave us permission to go to his house in Broward. We got his computer with thousands of files of child ‘erotica,’ ” Pijuan said. “He confessed to an old molestation.”
It all comes down to technique, Pijuan said. You enter an interview room and you find the thing that a suspect connects to, whether family or, with pedophiles, making them believe you understand them.
“There’s no way you cannot be disgusted,” said Pijuan, who trains officers on child abuse investigative procedure. “As a parent you can’t conceive of someone doing that. For me, getting that person to confess is more important than how they make me feel.”
Born in Brooklyn to Chilean parents, Pijuan moved with his family to Chile when he was in high school. He lived there for three years before returning and joining the U.S. Air Force, where he worked on underground missiles.
He got married and after his discharge, he and his wife lived in Chile, returning when she was pregnant with the first of their three children, now 8, 4, and 2.
On Sept. 11, 2001, Pijuan worked at a roof-topping plant and watched with frustration as friends died in the twin towers. Two months later, he was in the police academy.
Pijuan has spent the past four years as a detective studying interrogations of infamous criminals and developing his own style.
Recently, he reaped the benefits when he and Detective Mynor Cruz interviewed a suspect in the May 2008 armed holdup of a jewelry courier outside the St. Moritz jewelry store. The courier opened fire on his four assailants, killing one.
Three got away with $100,000 in jewels. Pijuan and Cruz contacted agencies nationwide, concluding they were dealing with a loose network of international jewel thieves.
When police in Texas said they had a man in custody who might have information, Pijuan and Cruz went there to interview him.
Suspect Oscar Londono had no obvious connection to the Boca heist. They interviewed him in Spanish for hours, learning his love of family. At the end of a long day, he said Londono told them that the man killed was his cousin and Londono was one of the men who got away.
Pijuan also brings his tech-savviness to bear on his work. He installed audio and video equipment in the department’s polygraph, interview and presentation rooms. He also trained officers to use the new Town Center mall cameras after one of the most haunting cases he and others at the department have dealt with: the 2007 abduction and murder of Nancy Bochicchio and her 7-year-old daughter, Joey, whose bodies were found in the mall parking lot.
The killer has not been caught.
“A lot of cases are going to be on your mind forever and that’s one of them,” Pijuan said. “Because that could have been my wife and kid. That could have been anyone.”
Pijuan enjoys his work. Still, his favorite part of the job: “Making the arrest, when everything comes to a conclusion.”
“Making the arrest,” he said, “you really change someone’s life.”
Copyright 2009 Sun-Sentinel