The Officers They Didn’t Look For
Several of the women gave the detectives information that pointed away from Daniel or toward another officer: a dark-skinned white officer in a black-and-white patrol car, a shorter Black man, a Black vice officer, the officer who had written one of them a ticket. The case file shows a great deal of work on Daniel’s movements and contacts. It shows much less on any of those men. This page follows each description through the file to the point where the detectives stopped.
She described a dark-skinned white officer in a black-and-white car.
On the night of May 24, 2014, Morris told the patrol officers who found her that an officer had assaulted her a few days earlier. Lt. Michelle Holland wrote that “she described him as a white male with dark skin.” Officer Jonathan Thomas wrote that she said he “was in a black and white police car.” She did not know his name. Scott Adams 01125; 01115–16. Daniel is light-skinned and drove an all-black car.
The department did check other possibilities at first. On May 27, Capt. Ron Bacy told Lt. Muzny that Sgt. Joe Hill had looked up who had run Morris’s name from a patrol-car computer. The most recent run was by Sgt. Jeff Sellers on April 11; Sellers’s AVL put him in the 2200 block of NE 24th at the time, and Bacy noted that the date and location did not match her allegation. Criminal Intelligence had not run her in thirty days. Bacy was waiting on an offline OLETS search. Bacy to Muzny, May 27, 2014, OKC 36361. Two days later Maj. Wenzel asked Hill for Daniel’s AVL for May 8. From then on the detectives worked the Morris case as a case about Daniel. OKC 05087; Terri Morris.
Sellers had stopped Morris in April. The department had fired him in 2006 after an internal investigation into claims that he had sex with a prostitute, then reinstated him. Gregory did not put him in the lineup he showed Morris on June 24. He did put in Officer J. Dutton, and Morris picked two faces, Dutton and Daniel, and could not choose between them. Gregory agreed at trial that this was not a positive identification of either man. Trial Tr. 3271:3–12; 3293, 3317–18, 3350, 3364; Ken Raymond, “City police officer fired after internal investigation,” The Oklahoman, Jan. 31, 2006. The file we have shows no AVL review or interview of Dutton after that, and no attempt to find a dark-skinned white officer in a black-and-white car on the night Morris first described. What the detectives had was a date on which Daniel had run her name, and that became the case.
She described a shorter Black man, darker than herself.
Ellis told Davis on the phone that the officer “was a black man.” On video four days later she said he was muscular, shorter than her own 5'11", and darker than her own light complexion. Ellis Phone Interview Tr. 2; Ellis Interview Tr. 7, 10–11. Daniel is 6'2", light-skinned, and half Japanese.
Davis went through the roster for that shift and found one Black officer assigned to the sector, A. Edwards. She testified that she ruled him out because the databases showed no record of him running Ellis’s name. Trial Tr. 3090:12–3091:21. That showed Edwards had not run her name. It did not show that he, or anyone else, had never stopped her. Davis limited the check to officers assigned to that sector, and the file shows no wider look at where other cars were that night. By then she had already told Ellis, before the DNA came back, “I know what officer did this to you.” Ellis Interview Tr. 9.
She described a Black vice officer.
When Gregory first asked Raines whether an officer had ever behaved inappropriately with her, she said no, several times. In the same interview she described an earlier incident with “some black officer with vice” who she said had exposed himself to her. Trial Tr. 2183, 2200, 2204–05, 2221–22, 2245–46. Gregory did not write that down, and his reports show no effort to find out who the officer was. Raines never picked Daniel from a lineup. The only identification she made was at trial, pointing at the man at the defense table.
She tied her attacker to an earlier ticket. The ticket named another officer.
Lyles told Davis the officer who assaulted her was the one who had written her tickets about a year before. Davis pulled the citations. Daniel had not written them; Officer Allan Cruz had, in March 2013, on second shift at Springlake. Davis wrote that down and put copies of the tickets in the file. OCPD Supp. Rpt. 14-076818 (006), Scott Adams 00480; Trial Tr. 4255–56; Scott Adams 02102. So the one earlier police contact Lyles connected to the man came from an officer other than Daniel, in Daniel’s own division. Lyles could not give a date for the assault, which would have made an AVL check on Cruz slower, not impossible. The file shows no interview of Cruz about her allegation, no AVL review aimed at him, and no lineup with his face in it.
She saw Daniel’s photograph and said he was not the officer.
S.G., the woman the department called Victim #14, reported that an officer had come to her apartment on June 9, 2014, and groped her. Before she spoke to detectives she went to a lawyer, who showed her Daniel’s photograph from a news report. She told him that was not the officer. Scott Adams 02754, 02761, 02764; Victim #14. The department’s records put Daniel’s patrol car at her address and showed he had run the name she gave him, and Davis listed him as the suspect in her report. OCPD Crime Rpt. 14-092553 (000) (Nov. 6, 2014). So the records and the witness disagreed. The detectives did not resolve it: no lineup, and nothing in the file on whether another officer could have been at her door. Prosecutors declined to charge because, as Davis later put it, “she said that he wasn’t the one.” Davis Dep. 55:17–22. Who she said had assaulted her, if not Daniel, was never worked out.
When a lead pointed at Daniel they ran it down. When it pointed elsewhere they wrote it down and moved on.
The detectives put real effort into Daniel. They pulled his AVL, matched his name runs against women he had stopped, and used those records to find more women to interview. To find Morris alone, Gregory says he brought in the gang unit, vice and criminal intelligence. A Rocky Timeline.
When the information pointed somewhere else, the file shows a different level of effort. Morris picked Dutton as readily as Daniel, and nobody checked Dutton. Ellis described a shorter Black man, and Davis cleared the one Black officer on the sector roster with a database search. Raines described a Black vice officer, and Gregory did not ask who. Lyles tied her attacker to a ticket Cruz had written, and nobody spoke to Cruz. S.G. said Daniel’s photograph was not the man, and the detectives closed her case without asking who was.
None of this shows that one of those officers assaulted anyone. It shows that the detectives developed every lead toward Daniel with records, interviews and location data, and that the leads toward anyone else got none of that. In a case file of more than fourteen thousand pages, the follow-up on the other officers is hard to find because it is not there.