Former San Mateo police officer takes the stand

Charged with 14 felony counts alleging he sexually assaulted four women on separate occasions between 2013 and 2015, Winchester, in custody on $3.1 million bail, has watched as each of the four alleged victims described their fears of being arrested before he allegedly assaulted them.

Deputy District Attorney Alpana Samant has alleged Winchester approached a 22-year-old woman named Alicia A. when she was sitting in a car parked at the Motel Avalon at 220 N. Bayshore Blvd. with a friend around 3 a.m. Sept. 22, 2015. Set to meet with housing officials later that day to secure a place to live, Alicia A. was on probation and told Winchester as much in response to his question, said Samant in her opening statements.

At Winchester’s direction, Alicia A. went into the motel room she and her friend Allan Booze had rented since she was afraid of contact with police appearing on her record, while Booze left the premises after Winchester allegedly threatened to arrest him, said Samant previously. The prosecution has alleged Winchester came into the motel room, groped Alicia A.’s breasts and genitals, told her to take off all of her clothes and left the room when she started sobbing uncontrollably.

But Winchester denied he ever stepped foot in the motel room, and didn’t have any physical contact with Alicia A. that night beyond patting her down, which he described as a cursory check for weapons. Assigned to patrol the east side of San Mateo that night, Winchester made a stop at the Motel Avalon, where he said he had stopped hundreds of times before in his some nine months on the job for the San Mateo Police Department.

“For me, it was a place I knew I would find work,” he said. “We used a significant amount of resources there.”

Interaction at the Avalon

He said he drove his patrol car into the motel parking lot with his headlights and interior lights off and spotted a couple sitting in a car in a carport outside a motel room for several minutes, which struck him as odd. Believing the couple to either be engaged in an exchange of drugs or prostitution, Winchester approached the car and tapped on the window with a flashlight, introducing himself and asking both individuals if either was on probation or parole.

When Alicia A. responded that she was on probation, Winchester said he asked her to step out of the car and walk over to his patrol car, where he patted her down and learned she didn’t know Booze’s name. He said he then spoke with Booze, who he said didn’t know Alicia A.’s name, and learned Booze intended to drop Alicia A. off at the motel. Believing he interrupted what would have been prostitution, Winchester said he told Booze to leave and directed Alicia A. to go into the motel room. After Alicia A. collected her possessions from Booze’s car, Booze drove away from the motel and Alicia A. went into the motel room, which Winchester said is the last time he saw her that night.

Concerned Booze might return to the motel room, Winchester said he watched his car drive off and pretended to leave the scene in his patrol car before returning to Bayshore Boulevard, where he parked his car. It was once he was parked that Winchester said he looked up Alicia A.’s record on his mobile data terminal, a computer in his patrol car with access to several databases.

‘Hunting’

Winchester acknowledged he was assigned to a 911 hang-up call at a commercial building on Fashion Island Boulevard by a dispatcher while he was interacting with Alicia A. and Booze. He said he made a judgment call in calling San Mateo police Officer Mark Garcia on his cellphone and asking him to respond to it in his place. When Winchester’s defense attorney Paul DeMeester asked Winchester why he didn’t use the police radio to ask Garcia to respond to the job, Winchester explained he could have risked developing a reputation for not covering his beat if he asked over the radio. He added he had done enough late-night patrol shifts to get a sense for which calls are risky and which are not.

Winchester said he had let Garcia know that if anything were to come of the 911 hang-up call, he would take over at that point and write a report, describing the decision to take a call another officer was dispatched to as a favor an officer would do for a colleague.

“I told him I was hunting … he told me he was OK handling it by himself and that was it,” he said. “There’s things that you can say on the phone that you can’t say on the radio.”

Los Rios incident

Winchester also denied having any sexual contact with a 21-year-old woman he found sleeping in a Sacramento building’s exterior elevator with her three children while he was working as a police officer for the Los Rios Community College Police Department. Though he said he admitted to his superior during the July 2, 2013, incident that he “screwed up” by having a woman with a felony arrest warrant sleep with her children in the school district’s facility for a few hours, Winchester said he felt he would “catch grief” from other officers in the department if they knew he had arrested her. He said he offered her a better place to sleep with her children after she told him she had been in a fight with her family, and discovered she had given him a partially fake name after he had let her in the building with her kids. It wasn’t until he figured out what her real name was and did a records check on her that he knew she had a felony arrest warrant.

Though Samant rested the prosecution’s case Thursday, she is expected to cross-examine Winchester, who will take the stand again Friday.

anna@smdailyjournal.com

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