Former San Mateo police officer denies any sexual contacts

Deputy District Attorney Alpana Samant has alleged Winchester forced a 21-year-old woman he found sleeping in a Sacramento building’s exterior elevator with her three children to have sex with him in July of 2013 while he was working as a police officer for the Los Rios Community College Police Department. He is also facing charges for groping a 24-year-old woman found with an Oxycontin pill in a parking lot of San Mateo’s Hillsdale Shopping Center in September of 2015. Samant has also alleged Winchester told a 22-year-old woman to take off all her clothes under the guise of a probation search at the now-defunct Motel Avalon in September of 2015 and in October of 2015 told a woman named Sherry C. to follow him from the Motel Avalon to the Coyote Point Recreation Area with the intent of having sex with her.

Winchester has testified that he was trying to get Sherry C. off the streets after finding her sleeping with the passenger door of her car open at the Motel Avalon in an effort to reduce the chances she was arrested by another police officer. According to Winchester, when Sherry C. wasn’t able to obtain a room at the motel because she didn’t have cash, he told her she could follow his patrol car in the direction of a gas station where she could find an ATM.

During her cross-examination Tuesday, Samant questioned Winchester’s description of Sherry C. as a “functional drunk” in an Oct. 23, 2015, interview with inspectors from the San Mateo County District Attorney’s Office, noting he described her as hysterical and intoxicated when he woke her up in the parking lot and let her drive behind his patrol car some 30 minutes later. Though he acknowledged “functional drunk” wasn’t an appropriate term to use, Winchester, who has had training as a drug recognition expert, said he’s seen those who regularly use drugs be able to understand what others are saying and perform many functions.

“I’ve seen it day in and day out,” he said. “People who use drugs for a long period of time, they are able to function … I didn’t believe that she was so far gone she couldn’t drive up the street.”

Several interactions

In his testimony last week, Winchester said his encounter with Sherry C. in the parking lot of the Motel Avalon was the fourth time he had interacted with her during his shift, which started Oct. 19, 2015, and was set to end 3 a.m. Oct. 20, 2015. He said he first met Sherry C. several hours after she got into a fight with her boyfriend and another woman at the America’s Best Value Inn the morning of Oct. 19, 2015, when someone reported wanting her off the property, where she had returned after going to the hospital.

Winchester said he saw her two other times sitting on her car as he did a passing check of the Motel Avalon shortly after and found her sleeping in her car at the motel parking lot when he drove through the property after midnight. Though he said he did a pat-down of Sherry C. before seating her in his patrol car to check her record, Sherry C. testified last week that he groped her breasts and genitals in a dark portion of the parking lot before telling her she should get a room at the motel.

Though Winchester testified that he found a bottle of pills in Sherry C.’s car and believed she was intoxicated, he said he did not do any field sobriety tests that night. He said in the interview with inspectors some three days after the incident that after Sherry C. went to talk to the motel manager about getting a room there, he pulled his car to a part of the property where it couldn’t be seen by the motel manager and waited for 10 minutes to 15 minutes for her to get a room.

In response to Samant’s question about whether he hid his car so the manager would not see him going to the room with Sherry C. later, Winchester said that was never his intention and he was instead concerned the manager may not want to rent a room to Sherry C. if he or she knew she had contact with law enforcement that night.

Samant noted Winchester told inspectors shortly after the incident that he knew the managers at the Motel Avalon don’t care to whom they rent their rooms. When Samant asked him whether he told Sherry C. to get completely into the car and continue sleeping there for the rest of the night, Winchester said he didn’t do that. In the interview with the District Attorney’s Office’s inspectors, Winchester said he told Sherry C. he couldn’t have her on top of her car near the America’s Best Value Inn where they didn’t want her, and on Tuesday he said he said that to her thinking of the context of his previous interactions with her.

Samant also asked Winchester if he could have taken Sherry C. to a gas station to get cash in the time he spent waiting for her to get a room at the motel, and also if he could have performed a drug test on her in the some 50 minutes they spent at the Coyote Point Recreation Area together between roughly 1:45 a.m. and 2:38 a.m. He acknowledged he could have told dispatchers he was taking Sherry C. to a gas station a couple minutes away on Peninsula Avenue in the 10 minutes to 15 minutes he spent waiting for Sherry C. to get a room.

Though he said he may have been able to conduct a couple of preliminary drug tests on Sherry C. at the dark and deserted park, Winchester said to do the full set of tests he had been trained to do, he would have had to take her to an office and write a report. He noted he didn’t have time to do that as he was nearing the end of his shift and wanted to be able to make the trip home to Lathrop with other police officers who lived nearby.

“I wanted to go home and I wanted to get off work,” he said. “I was trying to get off on time and catch my commute car.”

Three options

Winchester previously testified that he had planned to spend the rest of his shift at Coyote Point after driving away from the Motel Avalon and didn’t remember seeing Sherry C.’s car after he turned right at the intersection of North Bayshore Boulevard and Peninsula Avenue. He said in the interview with district attorney’s inspectors days after the incident he was surprised to see Sherry C. drive her car behind his patrol car at the park entrance, having told her to turn left toward gas stations on Peninsula Avenue when he turned right. But he told inspectors he ultimately suggested she sleep off her intoxicated state in the park when he spoke with her at the entrance, and led her to a playground parking lot where the two smoked cigarettes and talked.

Sherry C. has testified that Winchester threatened to take her to jail at the motel and then told her to follow him to a place where they could get cash. She said she made several unanswered calls to a friend several times during the drive to the park to ask for help and believed the three options Winchester said she had when they arrived in the park to mean three ways of having sex.

When Sherry C. told him she would not orally copulate him, she said Winchester asked her why she wouldn’t. She testified she then told him she had a condom in her car, and Winchester directed her to get it and proceeded to have sex with her on the back of his patrol car.

In asking Winchester why he thought it would be OK for Sherry C. to drive away from the park after telling him she had taken 10 Oxycontin pills throughout the day, he said he thought she would either go to the gas station or the address of a friend in Mountain View she was trying to get to the day before. During the interview Oct. 23, 2015, Winchester told inspectors he thought Sherry C. was making sense and was OK after the time they spent together, and drove out of the park along with her car and didn’t look back once they exited. He said he had heard her say she hadn’t slept the night before, but noted that drugs affect different people in different ways.

“People are different,” he said. “Drug users are different.”

Pornography addiction

Samant also asked Winchester about a pornography addiction he said he had on Monday, and asked whether internet searches found on his electronic devices showing he searched on Google for terms like “best rape scenes” and “darkly disturbing sex scenes we wish we could unsee” were representative of the types of pornographic videos he watched. Though he acknowledged he looked at pornography nearly every day, he said he also watched videos on apps on his devices that might not appear in his internet search history, denied that rape scenes excited him sexually and said he watched a wide spectrum of pornographic videos.

Winchester said Oct. 29, 2015, internet searches on his devices for terms such as “my rapist used a condom” and “forensic analysis of condoms” were done after he had been told the person accusing him of sexual assault said he used a condom, and told Samant when she asked him that he didn’t have a reason to lie about that.

“I’m trying to be as open as possible,” he said. “I’m trying to be as honest as I can.”

anna@smdailyjournal.com

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