Hunted by night: Oklahoma City police officer accused of series of sexual assaults
For six months, prosecutors allege, Oklahoma City police officer Daniel Ken Holtzclaw prowled the dimly lit nighttime streets of one of the state’s poorest neighborhoods engaging in an escalating level of sexual assaults, often while on duty.
http://newsok.com/hunted-by-night-oklahoma-city-police-officer-accused-of-series-of-sexual-assaults/article/5339632The incidents took place in private residences and in a police car parked on streets or in empty lots, authorities say. The crimes advanced from groping, to oral sodomy, to rape. The victims ranged in ages from 34 to 58.
The attacks stopped in June, only after Holtzclaw, 27, allegedly assaulted a woman who immediately reported the incident to police. That report came more than two months after another victim had come forward to tell police she’d been assaulted by an unknown officer later alleged to be Holtzclaw. Department officials say it wasn’t until the second victim came forward that they were able to link both cases to Holtzclaw. He was removed from duty the day of the second assault. In the weeks that followed, police would canvass neighborhoods, examine Holtzclaw’s police computer searches and review the global tracking system on Holtzclaw’s police vehicle to trace his movements.
Hotlzclaw, son and brother-in-law of law enforcement officers, a former college football star and three-year department veteran, is charged with two counts of first-degree rape and several other counts of forcible oral sodomy, sexual battery, indecent exposure, burglary and stalking. Eight victims have been identified already, and investigators say there could be more.
On Wednesday, Oklahoma County District Judge Timothy Henderson agreed to lower Holtzclaw’s bail from $5 million to $500,000. Holtzclaw was released Friday after posting a cash bond. He will stay with his parents in Enid and wear a monitor to track his whereabouts.
EDITOR’S NOTE: The following sections allege encounters between Holtzclaw and eight victims. The quotes and descriptions, especially quotes attributed to Holtzclaw, come from court records and testimony. Holtzclaw did not speak to The Oklahoman for this story.
Court records and testimony in the case allege the following encounters between Holtzclaw and eight victims:
The first known assault took place Feb. 27, just past midnight, in the 1500 block of NE 15 St., a few blocks east of the OU Medical Center in the Culbertson East Highland neighborhood. The neighborhood sits in one of the poorest census tracts in the state, where the median household income hovers around $14,000 a year, about one-third the state average, and 50 percent of residents live in poverty. Eighty percent of the residents are black and 10 percent are white.
It was into this tough neighborhood, part of the sprawling Springlake Patrol Division covering much of the city’s north side, that Holtzclaw went to work straight from the police academy. He worked third shift — 4 p.m. to 2 a.m., often patrolling alone. He stood 6 feet 2 inches tall and weighed 260 pounds, 40 pounds over his listed playing weight when he amassed more than 400 tackles and 18 sacks as a record-setting Division 1 football player at Eastern Michigan University. He’d grown up in Enid, the son of a longtime city policeman and stay-at-home mom and grandson of the dean of the OU Health Sciences Center. After unsuccessful attempts to make an NFL team, he’d joined the police department in September 2010. A fitness and weightlifting enthusiast, Holtzclaw attended LifeChurch in Edmond.
The first victim would later tell investigators she was sitting in her car with her children and a friend in front of her home when two police cars blocked her in. After running her friend’s license and finding he had no warrants, one officer left on another call. A second officer, young and burly, lingered. He asked the woman if there were drugs in the house, whether they were going to buy drugs, whether she had any on her. He ordered the friend and children inside the house so he could talk to the woman alone in his patrol car. He checked her for warrants. He found three. In a recent court hearing, a police detective testified about the conversation that followed.
“What are we going to do about this?” Holtzclaw asked.
The woman said Holtzclaw told her he needed to search her and told her to lift her shirt.
The woman said she lifted her shirt, exposing her belly. She knew the protocol. She knew she wouldn’t have to show more without a female officer present.
“No. That won’t work,” he told her. “I need you to lift it all the way.”
When she did, Holtzclaw fondled her, the woman said.
It would be the first of three such encounters the woman would have with Holtzclaw over the course of the next month.
About two weeks later, on March 14, about two blocks east, near NE 16 St. and Fonshill Avenue, another woman was walking down a street pocked with vacant lots when a police officer pulled to the crumbling curb and asked her for identification. A warrant check turned up a history of drugs and prostitution.
The same routine followed. The officer told the woman to raise her shirt and expose her breasts.
When detectives later tracked down the woman, she said she never reported the incident because she didn’t want to make trouble for herself or the people in her neighborhood.
On March 25, authorities allege Holtzclaw returned to the first victim’s house on NE 15 St. She wasn’t home, but inside, Holtzclaw found the woman’s boyfriend, Terry Wayne Williams, sleeping in one of the bedrooms. Holtzclaw shook him awake, asked where the woman was, ran a warrant check on the man, then ordered him to leave, saying he didn’t want to see him around the house anymore. When the woman returned home some time later, Holtzclaw told her children to go inside the house then told her he could take care of her warrants “if you play by my rules.”
The woman told police she knew that meant more sexual favors. Told to expose her breasts and vagina, she said she complied.
The next day, Holtzclaw again showed up at the woman’s house and tried to get inside.
The woman, who was cooking dinner and talking to her mother on the phone, told him to go away.
Holtzclaw threatened to arrest both the woman and her mother, before leaving.
“I’ll be back,” he warned.
Looking back, Scoggins, the victim’s neighbor, said she remembers hearing the woman complain several months ago about being bullied by police.
“She was livid,” Scoggins recalled. “She said police kept pulling her over for no reason.”
Attacks escalate
On April 14, just a block away from the first victim’s house, authorities say Holtzclaw stopped another woman near NE 16 Street and Jordan Avenue. He’d stopped the same woman and done a warrant search three weeks earlier.
He asked what she was doing in the area. Did she have any dope on her? Was she trying to buy some?
He did another warrant search. He told her he was going to search her and ordered her to turn around. When the woman turned and raised her arms, she said Holtzclaw groped her from behind, then told her she was free to go.
Ten days later, on April 24, Holtzclaw came across his fourth victim as she walked near NE 14 Street and Jordan Avenue. The woman said she was honest with Holtzclaw, telling him that she had a history with prostitution and drug addiction, had relapsed and had been smoking crack. Holtzclaw found a crack pipe in the woman’s purse and made her smash it on the ground.
Holtzclaw then drove the woman to her home about five blocks away.
“He pulled up in the driveway like he lived there,” the woman later told police.
The woman said she didn’t invite Holtzclaw inside the house, but also didn’t want to tell him no since she was on probation and didn’t want to go to jail.
Once inside, the two made their way to her bedroom, where the woman said Holtzclaw told her, “This is better than county,” before sodomizing and raping her.
Two weeks later, on May 7, Holtzclaw struck again, picking up a woman walking near NE 18 Street and Highland Drive.
He ordered the woman into the back of his patrol car where he sodomized her, then drove to a nearby abandoned school where he hopped a curb, parked between the building and a tree and raped her. As he drove away, Holtzclaw told the woman, “have a good night.”
The very next day, Holtzclaw picked up another woman walking near the 2700 block of N Lindsay Avenue. He drove a few blocks, rounded a corner and parked in the 700 block of NE 24 Street, just north of the Oklahoma History Center, where he sodomized her in the back seat.
Afterward, the woman said Holtzclaw drove her through the neighborhood, before stopping near a vacant field. Fearing he was going to kill her, the woman said she began screaming before Holtzclaw let her go.
It would take the woman more than two weeks before she approached several officers working another case in the area to tell them what had happened. It was the first inkling the department had of a potential predator in their ranks.
The case went to Detective Rocky Gregory, a longtime veteran of the department’s sex crimes unit, who spent the next two weeks trying to find the May 7 victim.
Meanwhile, on May 26, a woman was walking near NE 16 Street and Jordan Avenue when a police car speeding around a corner almost hit her.
The officer rolled down his window.
“Haven’t I taken you to jail before?” Holtzclaw asked the woman.
He hadn’t, but he had stopped her and checked her name for outstanding warrants about two months earlier.
This time, he searched her for drugs, fondled her, then let her go.
Weeks later, when detectives investigating the case approached the woman about whether she’d been assaulted by a police officer, she immediately broke into tears.
The last attack
On June 18, Holtzclaw had just finished his shift and was driving outside his normal patrol area when he pulled over a car near NE 50 Street and N Lincoln Boulevard.
The woman told police she saw a car pull up next to her on NE 50 Street before dropping behind and activating his emergency lights as she crossed over N Lincoln Boulevard.
Holtzclaw had turned off both the computer in his patrol car and a global positioning system that tracked the car’s movement.
He ordered the driver into the back of his patrol car and asked if she had any drugs.
“If you have something on you and you tell me now, then I won’t take you to jail,” Holtzclaw told the woman. “But if you don’t tell me about it now, and I find something, then I’m gonna take you to jail.”
The woman, who had a drug arrest from the 1980s but no history of prostitution, insisted she didn’t have any drugs and was returning home after a night spent playing dominoes at a friend’s house.
“I’ll still need to check you,” Holtzclaw told her. “Raise your shirt.”
She lifted the shirt to her belly, but Holtzclaw insisted she raise it higher.
He shined his flashlight on her breasts and told her to pull down her pants.
Holtzclaw then sodomized the woman, despite her pleas for him to stop.
The woman drove home and tried to call police, but got no answer. She drove to the police station. Right away, detectives noted similarities between her encounter and that of the May 7 victim.
Holtzclaw was placed on paid leave later that day.
Now, detectives, including Kim Davis, a 13-year veteran of the sex crimes unit, began to pore over Holtzclaw’s logs, warrant searches and arrest reports and began interviewing people he’d come into contact with while on duty.
They noticed a pattern. The victims all were black, appeared to be middle-aged and had histories of drug use or prostitution. Most of the attacks also occurred within blocks of each other.
Investigators would go to great lengths to track down potential victims, going from rehab clinics, to homeless shelters to known drug houses.
When they approached the victim of the Feb. 7 assault, she described her attacker as a big man with short black hair that seemed to stand up. She’d given him a nickname — Spike.
As police found the women, they checked their stories against searches Holtzclaw had made on his police computer and the tracking device that traced the movements of Holtzclaw’s police cruiser. Everything matched.
They found that the day after the May 7 attack,
Holtzclaw had searched the victim’s name twice in police databases. Detectives believe he was looking to see if she had reported the assault to police.“He’s stepping out,” Assistant District Attorney Gayland Gieger said Wednesday in court. “He’s getting bolder.”
On Aug. 21, police arrested Holtzclaw at an Edmond gym.
Many residents of the Culbertson East Highland are reluctant to talk about recent events in their neighborhood. Some said they feared retribution from other police officers. Others said they just wanted to mind their own business.
The Rev. Sterling Mitchell, 62, pastor of Amos Memorial Christian Methodist Episcopal Church, 1301 NE 18 St., said people in most cases have confidence in the police.
“But when things like this happen, there is distrust,” he said.
With noticeable frustration in his voice, Garland Pruitt, president of the Oklahoma City chapter of the NAACP, said there is a long-standing legacy of distrust for law enforcement in the neighborhood.
“There’s a good reason behind not completely and totally trusting our so-called law enforcement to do the right thing,” Pruitt said. “When you see injustice with your own eyes, when you experience injustice, unfair treatment, when you see it and experience it, it’s a great reason to have a little distrust.”
Pruitt said he walks those same streets everyday, and that people in the community believe Holtzclaw is not the only city officer to push their authority past legal limits.
“Their major concern is that this particular one just got caught,” Pruitt said.
The pervasive feeling, he said, is a sense of betrayal.
“When you’re in a position of ‘to protect and serve,’ we expect to be able to call on you for help, call on you to save us, rescue us, pull us out of a situation, versus being the (one) causing havoc on the community,” Pruitt said.
A woman who runs a hair salon on Lottie Avenue said she’s upset about the negative attention the attacks have brought regarding crime and poverty in the neighborhood.
“Everybody will forget about this and nothing will change,” the woman said, not taking her eyes off of her soap opera on a nearby television. “This is the northeast side, and that’s the way it’s always been.”