May 8, 2008 4:16 pm US/Pacific
New Details Exposed In I Street Bridge Death
SACRAMENTO (CBS13) ―
Twenty-year-old Robert Rodriguez was with his friend when he fell off the I Street Bridge and drowned last month. CBS13 now knows the moment when the friend of a man found dead in the Sacramento River turned from friend to suspect.
A lie detector and a series of interviews with Robert Rodriguez's friend Richard Froemke, including one pivotal question where detectives asked Froemke if he pushed Rodriguez off the bridge.
"During an interview Froemke showed deception on a polygraph exam when asked if he pushed Rodriguez off the bridge," says one official.
That telling revelation detailed in an eleven page summary, outlining a series of interviews police had with the suspect, Richard Froemke, starting four days after his friend Robert Rodriguez disappeared.
Rodriguez and Froemke met wile attending classes at Wyotech in West Sacramento, an automotive technical school.
Froemke told police on the afternoon of April 10th, "Me and Robert were drinking Coke and whiskey. We shared the drink and sat down under the bridge for a couple of hours. Around 7:30 p.m. as the sun was going down, we were walking across the bridge on the car walk. I made it across the bridge and when I jumped off the cat walk onto the tracks I looked back and saw Robert fall forward and bounce off the cat walk and roll off the bridge. He fell 20 feet into the water."
Froemke originally told detectives," he spent hours looking for him," but when pressured about inconsistencies he changed his story.
Police say he changed his original story and said that he 'blacked out' as soon as he reached the end of the bridge and Robert Rodriguez fell into the river.
When detectives came here to the scene with Froemke, they found the words 'Robert is gay' written on a concrete post. They asked him if he wrote that about Robert, he said no.
However, a polygraph "showed deception during an exploratory chart regarding the relevant question of whether he wrote 'Robert is gay."
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