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An Irvine cop ejaculates on a motorist but escapes criminal liability
By R. SCOTT MOXLEY
No one disputes that an on-duty
Irvine police officer got an erection and ejaculated on a
motorist during an early-morning traffic stop in Laguna Beach.
The female driver reported it, DNA testing confirmed it and
officer David Alex Park finally admitted it.
When the case went to trial, however, defense attorney Al Stokke
argued that Park wasn’t responsible for making sticky all over
the woman’s sweater. He insisted that she made the married
patrolman make the mess—after all, she was on her way home from
work as a dancer at Captain Cream Cabaret.
“She got what she wanted,” said Stokke. “She’s an overtly sexual
person.”
A jury of one woman and 11 men—many white and in their 50s or
60s—agreed with Stokke. On Feb. 2, after a half-day of
deliberations, they found Park not guilty of three felony
charges that he’d used his badge to win sexual favors during the
December 2004 traffic stop.
Park, 31, was red-faced and unable to control his twitching foot
in the moments before the verdict was announced; if convicted,
he would have faced prison. When he was found not guilty, he
briefly embraced Stokke. In the public seating section, tears
flowed from his gray-haired mother’s face. His father, a
mechanic, closed his eyes and threw his head back. Outside the
courtroom, surrounded by his family, a smiling Park said he felt
vindicated.
Veteran sex crimes prosecutor Shaddi Kamiabipour—who’d called
Park “a predator” during the nine-day trial—said she was
disappointed with the verdicts. She also dismissed Stokke’s
contention that the Orange County District Attorney’s office had
overcharged the case. At stake, Kamiabipour said, was the
principle that no one—not even a horny cop who’d once won honors
for community service—is above the law.
“Park didn’t pick a housewife or a 17-year-old girl,”
Kamiabipour said in her closing argument. “He picked a stripper.
He picked the perfect victim.”
* * *
In the wee hours of Dec. 15, 2004, Lucy (only her first name was
used during the trial) finished her final shift at Captain Cream
in Lake Forest, not far from the Irvine Spectrum. Management had
let her go after an incident involving a female customer in a
bathroom stall. According to court records, there had been a
small amount of cocaine, kissing and breast fondling.
Meanwhile, Park was on patrol in the southwest portion of
Irvine. Prosecutors believe he was craving a sexual rendezvous,
and so he watched for Lucy’s white BMW to leave the strip club
parking lot, then tailed her, waiting for an excuse for a stop.
Park insisted he’d been cruising on the 405 north and
coincidentally saw Lucy’s vehicle weave and speed.
Kamiabipour, the prosecutor, shook her head in disbelief. She
knew the facts—that the officer had waited at least eight or
nine minutes before stopping the stripper on a secluded section
of a highway that was out of his jurisdiction.
“He was stalking her,” she said.
Four months earlier, Park had stopped Lucy under similar
circumstances. That time, he’d ignored a plastic drug baggie
he’d found in her car and her suspended license. But the stop
wasn’t a waste of time. After friendly chit-chat, the officer
had scored Lucy’s phone number. Telephone records show that Park
called the stripper the next morning. She told him she was too
busy to meet.
On the witness stand, Park explained that he’d called Lucy out
of concern for a citizen’s safety. He also shrugged his
shoulders when Kamiabipour slowly listed the first names of nine
Captain Cream female employees—Annette, Denise, Rashele, Marlia,
Brandi, Andrea, Deborah, Laura and Shannon—whose license plates
he’d run through the DMV computer in the weeks prior to his
sexual encounter with Lucy. (Another coincidence, according to
Stokke.) Jurors also learned that Irvine Police Sgt. Michael
Hallinan had previously warned Park as they left work to stay
away from the strippers.
Park, who works in construction nowadays, conceded that he’d
been given the warning but claimed that he had no clue it was
Lucy in the vehicle or that she had an invalid driver’s license,
even as he approached her car window.
Kamiabipour believed she’d caught the 6-foot-3 cop in a lie.
Records show he ran the bosomy, 5-foot, 110-pound dancer’s
license plate before the stop, did not call for backup despite
the potential for an arrest and failed to tell his supervisor or
dispatch that he was leaving Irvine. Several Irvine officers
testified that Park’s behavior that night was odd.
“[Park’s] testimony was just incredible,” said Kamiabipour.
Irvine city officials must have doubted his story, too. After an
exhaustive police internal affairs investigation, they felt it
was prudent to give Lucy $400,000 to make her civil lawsuit go
away—for fear a jury might give her much more.
In a secretly-recorded phone call to Laguna Beach police shortly
after the incident, Lucy recalled that she’d told Park she had
no license. Park began “rubbing himself up against me,” she
said. “Then, he said, ‘What are we going to do here, Lucy?’”
Park unzipped his pants, took his penis out and got an erection,
she explained. “Basically, the officer made me give [him] a
freaking hand job and he let me go. I’m so freaked out about
it.”
(Lucy also told police, prosecutors and the jury that Park had
also fingered her vagina and fondled her breasts before he
ejaculated on her.)
“I was confused,” she told the Laguna Beach dispatcher. “He
called me afterwards. I’m scared, you know . . . What’s an
Irvine cop doing hanging out at a strip club in Lake Forest?”
Telephone records prove that Park made a 19-minute call to Lucy
shortly after their encounter. The officer—who told the woman he
was “Joe Stephens,” an Orange County Sheriff’s Department deputy
who had died months earlier—said it was a friendly call to make
sure she’d arrived home safely. The stripper said he told her to
keep her mouth shut.
And then Kamiabipour introduced the bombshell evidence from a
high-ranking Irvine police officer: on the night Park tailed
Lucy out of the city, the global positioning system in his
patrol car had been disconnected without authorization.
“I checked and [the GPS] was not working,” said Lt. Henry Boggs.
An unexplainable coincidence, Park’s defense countered.
* * *
For all his boneheaded mistakes, Park madea sharp decision
picking his legal counsel. Stokke (and John Barnett, Paul Myer
and Jennifer Keller) is among the elite of the local defense
bar. His fine suits and mastery of courtroom procedures
compliment the folksy, grandfatherly style he uses to charm
juries. And there was this unspoken advantage over the
prosecution: longtime courthouse observers have no memory of an
Orange County jury convicting a police officer of a felony.
It wasn’t a surprise that Stokke put the woman and her part-time
occupation on trial. In his opening argument, he made it The
Good Cop versus The Slutty Stripper. He pointed out that she’d
once had a violent fight with a boyfriend in San Diego. He
mocked her inability to keep a driver’s license. He accused her
of purposefully “weakening” Park so that he became “a man,” not
a cop during the traffic stop. He called her a liar angling for
easy lawsuit cash. He called her a whore without saying the
word.
“You dance around a pole, don’t you?” Stokke asked.
Superior Court Judge William Evans ruled the question
irrelevant.
Stokke saw he was scoring points with the jury.
“Do you place a pole between your legs and go up and down?” he
asked.
“No,” said Lucy before the judge interrupted.
“You do the dancing to get men to do what you what them to do,”
said Stokke. “And the same thing happened out there on that
highway [in Laguna Beach]. You wanted [Park] to take some sex!”
Lucy said, “No sir,” the sex wasn’t consensual. Stokke—usually a
mellow fellow with a nasally, monotone voice—gripped his fists,
stood upright, clenched his jaws and then thundered, “You had a
buzz on [that night], didn’t you?”
As if watching a volley in tennis, the heads of the
male-dominated jury spun from Stokke back to Lucy, who sat in
the witness box. She said no, but it was hopeless. Jurors stared
at her without a hint of sympathy.
In his closing argument, Stokke pounced. He called Lucy one of
those “girls who have learned the art of the tease, getting what
they want . . . they’ve learned to separate men from their
money.”
Kamiabipour wasn’t amused. “Dancer or not, sexually promiscuous
nor not, she had the right not to consent,” she told jurors.
“[Park] doesn’t get a freebie just because of who she is . . .
He used her like an object.”
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