Harold Allen has been arrested more than a dozen times since 2000, but he said he has never “been in jail this long.”
This time around, Allen is being held at the Clark County Detention Center without bail on six felony charges, including murder, grand larceny and reckless driving. He is accused of stealing a car from a Walmart parking lot, crashing it and killing 37-year-old Benito Saragosa, who was sleeping inside.
Allen spoke with a reporter at the jail on Wednesday while awaiting a trial set for February. He disputed allegations that he intentionally stole the vehicle.
“I wasn’t just looking for trouble,” Allen, 55, said. “I was impaired, and I jumped in the wrong car. He was also impaired. It could have went either way.”
Prosecutors did not respond to requests for comment.
In June, Allen underwent competency evaluations and was found to have “sufficient mental ability to understand the nature of” his charges.
In 2021, Allen was convicted of grand larceny and given probation after completing a specialty court program to address drug addiction. He relapsed shortly thereafter and began using PCP again, a hallucinogen that can cause agitation and delusions.
Police arrested Allen seven more times on charges including battery, theft, trespassing and fraud, before the April 11 crash involving Saragosa.
That morning, Allen said, he smoked PCP before going to the Walmart at West Charleston Boulevard and South Arville Street. He said he had been waiting in the parking lot inside a dark sedan while his girlfriend went into the store to buy cellphone accessories.
Surveillance footage from the store showed Allen entering in a black ankle-length fur coat, T-shirt and pants, with socks and sandals. Another clip showed him sitting in the optometry department and speaking with a staff member before being escorted to the back of the office. He later exited through another entrance carrying a white shopping bag.
Allen said he searched the parking lot for the car, hoping his girlfriend had finished shopping. He walked down an aisle of parked vehicles before getting into the passenger seat of an idling black Hyundai Sonata, which he said he believed was the car he had arrived in.
He said he noticed someone in the passenger seat but assumed it was his girlfriend.
“We had the same type of car she had,” Allen said, referring to Saragosa’s mother, who had left her son inside the car as she shopped.
“I jumped in the wrong car, and didn’t realize until I started pulling off,” Allen added. “(Saragosa) kind of snatched the wheel. My foot was on the gas, and the pedal got stuck.”
After the crash, Allen said Saragosa was outraged. He said that he saw paramedics give Saragosa medication to calm him down before taking him to the hospital.
Saragosa later died of complications of aspiration of gastric contents, alcohol intoxication and a motor vehicle crash, according to the coroner.
“He had so much alcohol in his system,” Allen added. “It was a freak accident. In my eyes. I don’t think I killed him.”
Saragosa’s relatives could not be reached for comment.
His mother, Deborah Requena, testified to a grand jury in June, saying that her son had long-lasting health problems, including heart failure and major swelling in his legs.
Requena said every day she would help him shower, make him breakfast, and clean his apartment at the Siegel Suites. On the morning of the crash, she said she took him to Walmart because his fridge was empty.
She said when they arrived, he asked to stay in the car because his feet were bothering him. When she came back an hour later, she paced the parking lot looking for her car before realizing it had been in a crash at a nearby intersection.
The mother said her car never had issues with the gas or the brakes.
”And I went to the hospital, and they put us in a room to tell us that my son was dead,” Requena said. “And they try hard to revive my son.”
Contact Akiya Dillon at adillon@reviewjournal.com.
