Tom Grossman, 71, sipped a cup of coffee in a small Palm Springs apartment ringed by cardboard file boxes overflowing with legal papers, court motions and depositions. This is the bittersweet clutter of a hard-earned victory, but Grossman wonders if the whole mess could have been avoided.

An apology would have ended it before it even began, he said.

“The three-and-a-half-year lawsuit was worse than what happened to me in that hour,” Grossman said. “The hour was just an hour – it was terrifying because it kept spiraling worse and worse – but at least it had a finite end.”

Grossman, a real estate lawyer who has lived in Palm Springs for 40 years, was recently paid a $175,000 settlement by the city for a strange incident in which he was detained by police officers who were investigating the murder of a woman who didn’t exist. The cops had been duped by a phone scammer, but even after it became clear the murder was fake, they held Grossman responsible, putting him on a psychiatric hold for about an hour before realizing their mistake and letting him go.

WANT MORE? Get the full story of the Palm Spring's fake murder scam

On Wednesday, in his first interview about the incident, Grossman said Palm Springs had a chance to settle his lawsuit for a significant lower cost this summer, but rejected the deal at the last minute. Better yet, the city could have avoided the entire lawsuit if police had just been willing to apologize in 2014.

The fake murder call was the Palm Springs Police Department’s first encounter with “SWATing,” a dangerous trend in which cybercriminals use fake 911 calls to send cops blitzing to the house of innocent people. In a statement, city attorney Edward Kotkin said the department now has “greater awareness and updated knowledge” on SWATing technology, but still presumes all emergency reports are authentic until they are given a good reason to suspect otherwise. The department has received at least two more SWATing calls since the Grossman incident – another fake murder and a false bomb threat – neither of which led to a controversial incident or a mistaken arrest.

COLD CASE:He was a brazen killer. She was a battered girlfriend. If she talked, she'd die.

The strange events that led to Grossman’s lawsuit began on March 14, 2014, when Grossman received a call at his home from a man with a thick accent who claimed to be from the IRS. The caller said Grossman owed back taxes and would be arrested if he didn’t pay up.

Grossman realized the call was a scam, so he cursed the scammer out and hung up. The scammer then called Palm Springs police, pretending to be Grossman, saying he had just stabbed his wife to death. (Grossman has no wife and lives alone.)

“I had an argument with my wife and I got – I got angry on her and I put a knife on her stomach,” the scammer said, according to a transcript of the call.

“Is she still breathing?” a police dispatcher asked.

“No, she died.”

Seven police officers then rushed to Grossman’s house and the attorney was handcuffed on his doorstep. Inside the apartment, police found no blood and no body. Grossman tried to explain that someone had set him up, but police presumed he was delusional and decided he had likely called 911 on himself using a fake accent.

One cop at the scene, Merritt Chassie, sent a text saying Grossman needed a "lobotomy," according to police documents.

The cops then gave Grossman a choice – go to jail for making a false 911 call or go to the hospital on psychiatric hold. Grossman picked the hospital. He was detained for about an hour at Desert Regional Medical Center before police realized they had been fooled and took him home.

The next day, Grossman called the police department’s complaint line, leaving a message after no one answered.

A few days later, a police sergeant called him back.

“I said, ‘I really just want to know if I can get an apology. I don’t want to sue anybody,’” Grossman said. “And he said he would get back to me in a couple of weeks. I never heard a word from him again.”

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Grossman never got that apology, so nine months later he filed a lawsuit against Palm Springs police claiming false arrest, violation of his civil rights and intentional infliction of emotional distress. Grossman argued that police were justified when they came to his home to investigate, but once it became clear no one had actually died, it was unreasonable to assume he was responsible for the false report on himself.

Palm Springs attorneys later tried to use Grossman’s apology request against him in court, arguing that he could not have suffered emotional distress if the matter “could have been resolved with an informal apology.”

The lawsuit nearly ended this summer, when attorneys negotiated a different settlement for $110,000, according to federal court documents. The Palm Springs City Council rejected that during closed-door discussion in July. Kotkin, the city attorney, declined to explain why that settlement was turned down, but the decision ultimately proved costly.

With no settlement, Grossman’s lawsuit progressed to an important stage – the summary judgement hearing – in which a federal judge decides whether or not a case has merits to move forward. Most of the arguments at this hearing hinged on whether it was reasonable for police to still suspect Grossman even after it was discovered no murder had occurred. After extensive arguments, the hearing went in Grossman’s favor, with a judge allowing the lawsuit to proceed on almost every ground.

Palm Springs returned to the bargaining table, but now Grossman had stronger leverage. They inked a new deal this month, but the price of peace rose by 60 percent to $175,000. City Manager David Ready signed the settlement on Oct. 2.

Police admitted no liability in the agreement.

"It's really nice to net $100,000 or so, even though it's four years later after a huge amount of stress and ten bottles of Valium, probably," Grossman said. "But I'm still pissed that the cops got away with it."

Public Safety Reporter Brett Kelman can be reached at 760 778 4642 or at brett.kelman@desertsun.com. You can follow him on Twitter @TDSbrettkelman.