A career criminal accused of breaking into actress Amanda Peet's apartment last October and stealing her jewelry was acquitted yesterday—and he wasn't even there for the good news. Jurors cleared Henry Santos in an hour, saying there wasn't enough evidence, but he had other things to do at the time. "I went to my house and had something to eat," he told the Post. "I thought the judge said five o'clock to come back."
Peet's nanny was allegedly home with her 2-year-old daughter when she caught a man bolting with Peet's jewelry box. She later picked 27-year-old Santos out of a police lineup. He had been included in the lineup because his DNA was found on a shirt at a similar break-in on East 4th Street, but there was no physical evidence that he had broken into Peet's home. Peet's husband claimed he found a boot print on a bookshelf, but because cops missed the clue during their search it was too late to use it as evidence. Santos claims, "They were framing me. They tried to make me as a crash dummy. They wanted somebody to convict because she is a celebrity, she's not just a regular person."
The jury apparently didn't have the same awe over Peet's celebrity as the cops did. One juror called the nanny's description of the perp "very vague," and others agreed cops just wanted to solve a celebrity case. But that doesn't work so well when the jury isn't even impressed with Peet's work, with one admitting, "We didn't really consider her a Nicole Kidman or anything like that."
