Sentencing delayed for former San Mateo police officer

During the trial, prosecutors 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 also faced charges he groped 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.

Prosecutors 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 to follow him from the Motel Avalon to the Coyote Point Recreation Area with the intent of having sex with her.

Winchester’s defense attorney Paul DeMeester pointed to inconsistencies in the women’s statements and to their criminal pasts as potential motives for making up stories about what happened between them and Winchester.

Winchester was 31 years old when he was charged with 22 felonies for on-duty sexual assaults occurring in 2013 and 2015. In the years that have passed, Winchester has had two attorneys represent him, has seen seven jury trial dates set and has had some charges dropped after the credibility of one of the alleged victims was called into question and Judge Lisa Novak consolidated some of the charges. Appointed to Winchester’s case by the county’s private defender program, DeMeester took over Winchester’s case from attorney Michael Rains nearly two years ago.

Though he had been in custody on $3.1 million bail before the jury’s verdict in October, Winchester’s bail status was modified to no bail and he is still in custody, according to prosecutors.