AP Photo/Oklahoma County Sheriff's Office
OKLAHOMA CITY — Daniel Holtzclaw made a mistake, an Oklahoma County prosecutor argued on Wednesday: “He messed up.”
Holtzclaw’s mistake was pulling over the wrong person: A woman who, when he allegedly assaulted her, wouldn't hesitate to call the police.
It happened around 2 a.m. on June 18, when Holtzclaw, a 27-year-old police officer, was ending his shift on the northeast side of Oklahoma City. He switched off his patrol car computer. Then, without calling for assistance or otherwise notifying his station, police said, Holtzclaw made a traffic stop.
The woman — identified in court documents as J.L. and in local media reports as a 57-year-old grandmother — said she was driving home after playing dominos with a friend, according to detective Kim Davis, who recounted J.L.’s story at length during a hearing at the Oklahoma County Courthouse.
When Officer Holtzclaw approached J.L.’s car, she couldn’t roll down her broken driver’s side window, Davis said. So Holtzclaw directed her to the rear passenger side seat of his patrol car. He asked if she had been drinking — he had noticed a styrofoam cup in her front seat. She said no, according to Davis, and that the drink was Kool-Aid. He continued questioning her, and she suggested he go taste it. He walked over to her car, but J.L. couldn’t see what he was doing. When he came back, Holtzclaw asked if J.L. had anything else on her.
“If you have something on you and you tell me now, then I won’t take you to jail,” he allegedly told J.L., according to Davis. “But if you don’t tell me about it now, and I find something, then I’m gonna take you to jail.” J.L. said no, again. She was still sitting in his patrol car.
“He opens the door and he tells her ‘I've got to check you,’” Davis said. “And he says, ‘Lift your shirt.’”
She lifted her shirt to her stomach, and Davis motioned. “He goes, ‘I can't see that. There might be something in your bra.’ And so she grabs the bottom of her bra, she said, and just shakes it … And he goes, ‘Nope, that's not good enough.’”
J.L. lifted her shirt and bra, Davis said, and Holtzclaw shined his flashlight on her exposed breasts.
“She said about that time, she noticed that he started playing with his penis,” Davis said. “Then he tells her to stand up ... and he says, ‘Pull down your pants.’”
J.L. lowered her pants but left her underwear up, and Holtzclaw turned his flashlight to her “vaginal area,” Davis said. Holtzclaw then told J.L. to sit back down. She planted her feet on the concrete, sitting sideways in his patrol car.
When J.L. looked up, Davis said, Holtzclaw’s penis was in her face.
“She started begging him, ‘Please don't do this. You're not supposed to do this.’ ... She kept thinking in her mind, 'OK, this is a police officer, and if he's gonna do this, he's gonna kill me. And I’m not gonna make it out of this alive’ …”
“And he put it in her mouth, and she pulled away. And she said ‘Please, please don't do this.’ And he put it back in her mouth. And she said for about 10 seconds. Then he pulled it out and stopped, and he told her, ‘I'm gonna follow you home.’”
J.L. went back to her car, Davis said. She pulled into what she thought was a driveway, then did a U-turn. Holtzclaw pulled his car around her and unexpectedly took off.
At home, J.L. and her daughter did what middle-class people in Oklahoma City do when they’ve been the victim of crimes: called the local police station. When no one answered, , according to Davis, they went to report the alleged assault in person.
Davis was the on-call detective in the Oklahoma City Police Sex Crimes Unit that night and met J.L. at the hospital, where she was receiving a sexual assault medical forensic exam. Two and a half months later, on Wednesday afternoon, Davis and another detective recounted for a district judge how J.L.’s report was similar to an unsolved May 2014 assault report allegedly involving an officer. The connection led the detectives to identify six more women who said they’d been assaulted, raped, or forced to expose themselves to Holtzclaw while he was on duty.
Holtzclaw’s “mistake” — the slip-up that prosecutors said landed him in orange jail scrubs in an unremarkable fluorescent-lit courtroom on Wednesday — was believing J.L. was similar to his other alleged victims: all black middle-aged women, but women of a lower social status and with reason to fear the authorities. They had been caught with active warrants or drug paraphernalia. J.L., Davis said, had no criminal record to be held over her. She was driving through the neighborhood where the other women were confronted, but she didn’t live there.
“He’s stepping out,” Assistant District Attorney Gayland Gieger said Wednesday. “He’s getting bolder.”
J.L.’s report would put Holtzclaw on administrative leave and make up two of the state’s 16 charges against the young cop. But more broadly, it would launch a case that underscores how alleged police abuse of minorities goes far beyond Ferguson, M.O. — but how national attention does not.
FILE - In this Sept. 29, 2007 file photo, Eastern Michigan linebacker Daniel Holtzclaw, right, brings down Vanderbilt tailback Cassen Jackson-Garrison (22) in the first quarter of a college football game in Nashville, Tenn.
AP / Mark Humphrey
Daniel Holtzclaw “vehemently denies each and every” charge brought against him, his lawyer said in a statement Saturday. Holtzclaw didn’t speak at Wednesday’s hearing. He would occasionally whisper to his attorneys, but his expression remained unreadable as he intently watched the witnesses — among them his father, a childhood friend who lived with Holtzclaw while he was at the police academy, and a sports reporter. Many more family members and friends sat in the front rows of the courtroom, including Holtzclaw’s girlfriend of six months, his defense attorney Scott Adams said.
Holtzclaw joined the Oklahoma City Police Department in September 2011, officials said in a press conference after his arrest. A year earlier, he had graduated from Eastern Michigan University with a criminal justice degree and had tried and failed to get drafted into the NFL.
Holtzclaw today looks the same award-winning linebacker he did then; six-foot-two, 260 pounds, tree-trunk neck, short black hair. When he was arrested, it was outside his gym.
Holtzclaw’s father, Eric, is a 17-year veteran of the Enid Police Department. His mother, Kumiko, is unemployed but does some baking from their home, Eric Holtzclaw said. He has two sisters. One of them, Jenny, has been leading the movement to raise support for him online, selling shirts that say “Free The Claw” — his nickname.
Recently, on the Justice For Daniel Holtzclaw Facebook page she created, Jenny posted a message her father sent her after he passed a Coke machine at work and saw two bottles with their names — Daniel and Eric — side by side. He saw this as a “sign from god” and bought them. “I am determined to help him through these tough [times] for he is my son and I love him dearly!!!”
In a statement, the Holtzclaw family said much of the “witness and officer testimony presented by the prosecution … is based on solicited testimony by the police department of felons, prostitutes and others who would have personal motives beyond the basic truth to fabricate their stories.”
“We ask the public to wait to cast judgment on Daniel as he is entitled to the same rights under the law as any other citizen,” the family said.
AP / Sue Ogrocki
In May, a woman known as T.M. approached a group of officers and reported that an unknown officer had sexually assaulted her, Detective Rocky Gregory testified Wednesday.
Gregory said T.M. — an “admitted drug user, prostitute” — was at an apartment complex “kind of known for drugs,” around 9 p.m. on May 8. She left on foot but was stopped by Holtzclaw, whom she’d allegedly seen at the complex earlier that night.
Holtzclaw put her in the backseat of his patrol car and took her purse, Gregory said. He drove for about two blocks before stopping to check her name for existing warrants. He then went through her purse and allegedly found a crack pipe.
“What are we gonna do about this?” Holtzclaw asked, according to Gregory.
“She says ‘Why don't you just stomp out the pipe, we'll call it good?’” Gregory said. T.M. was still sitting in the backseat, she said, when Holtzclaw got out of the car and exposed his erect penis to her.
“He's made it very clear it's basically this or jail,” Gregory said. “She then turns her head, places her mouth on his penis, and performs oral sex for a short period of time.”
Holtzclaw did not ejaculate, Gregory said, but he stopped after about two minutes. He offered to give her a ride, but she said no.
“He says, ‘No, I want to make sure that you're safe,’” Gregory said. “He was supposed to take her to another location to let her go, but then he goes almost in the exact opposite direction, kind of zigzags through the neighborhood ... And then he starts to pull off by an open-field park area. Once he stopped there, she got real worried. She started to scream, thinking that this is not where it's gonna end.”
But then Holtzclaw drove back around again, taking her to the place she originally wanted to go and letting her out. Later, T.M. showed Gregory in person the route they went. Gregory then referenced the route with Holtzclaw’s automated vehicle locator, a GPS recorder on all patrol cars. It was an exact match, he said.
After connecting T.M. and J.L.’s reports, the Sex Crimes Unit began looking through Holtzclaw’s automatically recorded history of running names through the department’s two databases, looking specifically for people who’d been checked out multiple times. (One system shows information including someone’s arrest record, what kind of contact they’ve had with police, whether they’ve reported a crime, and their address. The other system is used to check for existing warrants.)
Davis and Gregory took two lists of names — created by the unit’s lieutenant through a victimology profile — into northeast Oklahoma City, telling each woman on the list that they had received a tip that she may have been sexually assaulted. An undisclosed “percentage” of the women said yes. By the end of their investigation, six more women joined T.M. — who initially did not want to prosecute — and J.L.
“They all matched up basically in age,” Gregory said. “The earliest one was probably in her thirties. The oldest in the 50s. They all kind of looked like they were in their 50s.”
They were all black women — a majority, he added, had “some kind of drug history, maybe a prostitution history.”
By allegedly focusing on poor black women with criminal records, Holtzclaw kept himself from being caught — until he met J.L., a black woman who was just passing through the neighborhood he patrolled. “Not only is this individual stopping women who fit a profile of members of our society who are confronted rightly or wrongly by police officers all the time,” said the prosecutor, Gieger. “He identifies a vulnerable society that without exception except one have an attitude for ‘What good is it gonna do? He's a police officer. Who's going to believe me?’”
There was T.B., a woman who said she was confronted by Holtzclaw while sitting in a parked car in front of her house on Feb. 27, 2014. He ran her name and found existing warrants, Gregory said. He began asking her about drugs in the house and brought up the warrants, telling T.B. he could place her under arrest. He told her he needed to “check her for any drugs,” Gregory said.
“He then tells her to lift her shirt. He lifts her shirt to her belly, says ‘Now I need to see everything.’ He then makes reference about the warrants and the arrest ... She just goes ahead and lifts her bra and shirt according to what he requested.”
Oklahoma City Police Department policy is to call a female officer over to do a complete search when the suspect is required to lift her shirt above her belly. T.B. had been stopped before and knew that was the procedure, Gregory said. But according to court documents, Holtzclaw touched her bare breasts with his hand and without her consent.
Through Holtzclaw’s car GPS record, Gregory confirmed that the officer returned to T.B.’s house multiple times over the following month. In one instance, Holtzclaw allegedly broke into the house without permission, woke T.B.’s sleeping boyfriend — the only person in the house at the time — and told him to go outside, running his name for warrants.
Shortly afterward, T.B. pulled up to the house with her kids in the car, Gregory said, and Holtzclaw told her to step back to his patrol car.
He repeated the same motions, Gregory said — running her name for warrants, asking about drugs, and making “reference to, you know, ‘We can kind of take care of these warrants ... Just play by my rules.’"
T.B. said she knew Holtzclaw meant that she could “do sexual favors and the warrants could probably disappear,” according to Gregory.
Holtzclaw told T.B. to lift her shirt again, and T.B. complied, though “it was obvious she did not have a bra on,” Gregory said. Then he looked down her pants; she said she didn’t have any underwear on, according to Gregory.
T.B.’s boyfriend, Terry Williams, testified on Wednesday that Holtzclaw woke him up and “ran me outside,” though he couldn’t recall many specific details — he was “kind of tipsy that day,” he said. But when T.B. later told him about her interactions with Holtzclaw, Williams “got kinda mad, and I just told her just to handle it the best way she can.”
“Afterwards, [Holtzclaw] told [Williams], ‘If I ever see you in this neighborhood or around this area, I'm gonna stop you every time,’” Gregory said. “He made it very clear he was not welcome around there, at this woman's house.”
The next day, around dinnertime, Gregory said, T.B. saw Holtzclaw walking up to her house. She still didn’t know the officer’s name; she called him “Spike,” because of his hair. “She knew that she was gonna be harassed by him again,” Gregory said, and started to call her mother. Holtzclaw knocked at the door, and T.B. answered.
“She says ‘I'm making dinner for my kids,’” Gregory said. “He asked to come in. She tells him, ‘No, you can't.’ He says, ‘Well, I need to check your house for drugs.’” They argued, and Holtzclaw told her that he would be back, according to Gregory, while T.B.’s mother listened on from the phone. T.B.’s mother later allegedly told the detective she could hear Holtzclaw “bullying her daughter.”
T.B.’s allegations make up five of the 16 counts against Holtzclaw, including sexual battery, burglary, two counts of indecent exposure, and stalking.
AP Photo/Oklahoma Police Dept.
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