An Allegation the State Didn’t Charge
Prosecutors told the jury that the patrol car’s records backed up the women who accused Daniel. Those records backed up one woman’s account more closely than most. They put his car at her apartment and showed he had run the name she gave him. “Everything points to another victim,” the Sex Crimes lieutenant wrote. Prosecutors still declined to charge Daniel, because she had said he wasn’t the man. They took Sherry Ellis to trial although she, too, said she couldn’t identify him. The department called this woman Victim #14. She never testified, so this page uses her initials, S.G.
“FIND HER.”
On the night of November 4, 2014, S.G. saw Daniel on the television news. The next morning she called the police. Dispatch transferred her to the Springlake Division, and she told the division’s secretary that the officer she had seen on TV was the one who had come to her former apartment. She did not know his name. Her call went up the chain within the hour, from the secretary to the division’s major, from the major to the captain over investigations, and from the captain to the Sex Crimes lieutenant. The lieutenant forwarded it to the department’s crime analyst that afternoon with two words in large type: FIND HER.
OKC 2622 (Nov. 5, 2014); OCPD Supp. Rpt. No. 14-092553 (007) (Nov. 7, 2014), Scott Adams 02762.
Detectives Kim Davis and Valeri Homan interviewed her at home on November 6. She said that on an afternoon about four months earlier an officer had stopped her outside her apartment complex, run a false name she gave him, driven her to the apartment to get her identification, followed her inside, and touched her over her clothing. Scott Adams 02753–56.
That evening the lieutenant reported the result to his captain, copying a major and the Deputy Chief of Investigations. The email begins Victim #14
:
The records fit her account better than they fit most of the thirteen.
She did not know the date. Police found it the way they found the others, in Daniel’s own records. On June 9, 2014, at 5:26 p.m., he had run through Varuna the exact false name she said she gave him, from the state she said she had claimed to be from. The Crime Information Unit log shows the same check minutes later. His activity card put him out on subject
and on a walk-thru
at the cross street of her complex from 5:15 to 6:00. The AVL showed his car at zero speed where she said he stopped her, then again at the apartment. Scott Adams 02764–65.
Detective Davis, under oath four years later: Everything she told me matched up crime information, AVL and all of that.
Davis Dep. 55:17–19 (Jan. 29, 2019).
The State took the first answer and closed the file.
Before she went to police, S.G. had visited a lawyer. He pulled up Daniel’s photograph from a news website and showed it to her, and she told him that was not the officer. He told her to come back if she found out who it was. The file shows no lineup; the only one in it is the Springlake shift roster for June 9. By the time she spoke to detectives, she said it was the officer she had seen on television. Scott Adams 02754, 02761, 02764.
The District Attorney’s office declined to charge Daniel. Detective Davis explained why:
The records had verified her as fully as they verified anyone. What the State required of her was an identification.
The test the State did not apply to the allegations it took to trial.
Sherry Ellis told Detective Davis she thought the man was Black. Asked at the preliminary hearing whether she could identify him, she answered, No. Because it was dark.
Prelim. Hr’g Tr. Vol. I 294:14–24, 295:5–18 (Nov. 17, 2014).
The patrol-car data gave her account three minutes and forty-nine seconds, from the last reading in the cul-de-sac to the next one on Miramar, about 500 feet away by the defense’s measurement. In that window Daniel had to drive over the curb and across the field to the back of the school, stop, get out, open her door, commit an assault she said lasted five to ten minutes, get back in and drive out to the street. Davis’s answer was that four minutes is plenty of time.
The jury convicted on all four of her counts. Trial Tr. 2989:23–2993:8; Trial Tr. 3007:23–25; Trial Tr. 3101:12–13; Trial Tr. 3118:21–3123:2.
Terri Morris gave dates that matched no stop by Daniel and a description that police checked against a different officer. The State charged Daniel on her allegation anyway. The jury acquitted. Trial Tr. 3265:14–3267:2; Gregory Dep. 191:15–192:17 (Jan. 17, 2019).
After the news hit.
S.G. was one of several women who contacted police after Daniel’s arrest was on the news. Two of them, Kala Lyles and Shardayreon Hill, became part of the thirteen accusers whose allegations the State took to trial. Lyles contacted police after seeing the coverage. Shardayreon Hill’s mother told Detective Davis that she had urged her daughter to come forward: Later on the news hit.
The State charged Daniel on both women’s allegations and took them to trial. The jury acquitted on every count involving them. Scott Adams 00628; Judgment and Sentence, Jan. 21, 2016.
The records could not tell the State whether to believe her. They could not tell the jury either.
The file lists one suspect, Daniel, and ends with the declination. It shows no effort to find out who, if not Daniel, came to her apartment. Scott Adams 02753, 02936.
That leaves two possibilities, and both end in the same place. If the State believed her account but doubted her identification, then an officer had run her name, walked through her complex and followed her upstairs, and the department let it go. If the State did not believe her account, then the records that fit it so closely had verified nothing, and the same records could not verify the thirteen either. Either way, the “corroboration” the prosecutor called independent was the fact that Daniel ran a name. Running a name was part of every stop he made on duty.
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