Rosetta Grate
On April 24, 2014, Daniel stopped Rosetta Grate, ran her for warrants and radioed that he was driving her home. Four months later, in jail the day after an arrest for a false 911 call, she told detectives he had forced her into oral sex and raped her at the house while his car sat in the driveway at least 30 minutes.
The car’s GPS puts it there under ten. The jury acquitted him of the rape. Count 8, forcible oral sodomy: twenty years.
What the records show: a stop, a warrant check and a ride home he called in.
Daniel called in a stop at NE 14th and Jordan at 7:00 p.m. His patrol car sat at zero speed there from about 7:03 to 7:13, and at 7:06 he ran Grate’s name. The Crime Information Unit told him she was clear of warrants. Tr. 2740:9–15, 2735:18–2736:4, 2736:15–2737:9; Scott Adams 00555, 00568.
Grate testified that she told him she had been getting high and working as a prostitute, and that every time she tried to walk home a date pick me up.
He had her throw down her crack pipe and break it, then offered her a ride. Davis, who led the investigation, testified that a ride was not unheard of
and that some officers do do that
with a pipe. Tr. 2526:3–6, 2527:10–19, 2528:18–2530:15, 2739:25–2740:2, 2777:17–21, 2779:22–2780:2.
At 7:15 p.m. Daniel told dispatch he was transporting a woman and gave his starting mileage, and the dispatcher logged her address as a secondary location. At 7:21 he radioed that he had arrived. The car’s GPS put it at the house from 7:21:04, stopped there until about 7:29. At 7:29:43 the call was closed through the car’s mobile computer, which Davis agreed meant Daniel closed it from the car. The car pulled away at 7:30:56. Scott Adams 00568, 00578; Tr. 2741:2–18, 2743:2–24, 2748:12–13, 2789:7–17.
His activity card logs the stop from 6:50 to 7:20 and then a call at Granada and Martin Luther King to help another officer, and the radio traffic the State played includes him being dispatched there. Davis said leaving the address off the card was not a big deal,
and of the address he gave dispatch, I don’t think it’s nefarious at all.
Scott Adams 00563; Tr. 2745:16–2746:24, 2749:5–7, 2807:2–2808:9.
Grate later said he never made those calls. Asked at the jail on August 27 whether he had run her for warrants, she said, I don’t know. I don’t think so.
In a handwritten letter to Davis postmarked January 21, 2015, she wrote that other officers had given her rides too, but the difference is they called in
and gave their mileage first. This officer never made that call.
The records show he made both. At trial Davis said he should have told dispatch when he went inside, and also that he’s already told them he’s with a female because he gave his mileage.
Davis–Homan video interview of Grate, Aug. 27, 2014; Grate letter to Davis, postmarked Jan. 21, 2015, Scott Adams 13855–56; Scott Adams 00568; Tr. 2736:15–2737:9, 2741:10–14, 2801:3–9.
Under ten minutes at the house. She first said at least thirty.
The GPS leaves 9 minutes 52 seconds from the moment the car reached the house to the moment it left, and 8 minutes 39 seconds from its arrival to the call being closed from inside it.
The patrol car’s records
What was said about the time
She said all of it happened during that visit, so her account has to fit the minutes. By her trial testimony, the eight and a half minutes before the call was closed had to hold the search for her purse at the car, the walk to the front door, a tour of the living room, dining room and kitchen to show him she lived there, the stairs, the bedroom of Willie Carter (the man she lived with) and then her own bedroom, oral sex she put at About five, ten minutes,
intercourse she put at About another five or ten minutes,
and Daniel’s walk back down to the car. In her account he kept his uniform and gun belt on throughout and exposed himself through his fly. Her estimates for the two acts alone, even at the low end, run longer than the car was at the house. Tr. 2535:1–2537:7, 2539:6–2542:12, 2543:16–2544:8, 2545:1, 2546:10–11, 2592:6–7, 2594:19–24.
Her first estimate was three times longer. At least 30 minutes. At least,
she told Davis at the jail. A week later Davis swore in a search-warrant affidavit that the GPS showed the car stayed for over 15 minutes.
At trial Davis gave the jury the departure time herself, 7:30:56. Asked again in 2021, Grate said, Too long, that’s my final answer.
Davis–Homan video interview of Grate, Aug. 27, 2014; Scott Adams 00575; Tr. 2789:7–17; Grate Dep. 73:16–21 (Mar. 22, 2021).
Kerri Hunt, Daniel’s girlfriend at the time, testified that under his uniform he wore compression shorts with no fly. Asked on cross-examination whether he could pull the shorts down and bring his penis out through his fly to use the bathroom, she said, I definitely think it would take some work.
Tr. 4118:20–4119:11, 4127:1–4.
The only account police heard before Daniel’s arrest pointed to July, when he was on leave.
Grate didn’t come to the police. That summer, Lieutenant Tim Muzny had the Crime Information Unit list every woman Daniel had checked through it since April, then ran each name through the department’s records, looking for women who had either a drug history and or a history of prostitution.
Grate was on his list because Daniel had run her name on April 24. Scott Adams 00551, 00554; Tr. 2731:11–23.
On August 15, Davis and Detective Valari Homan went to her father’s house looking for her. By Davis’s account, she told him she had information that Rosetta might have been sexually assaulted.
He answered, Are you talking about that officer.
In four other reports on first contacts that summer and fall, Davis records telling the woman the tip was about a police officer. This report leaves the officer out, so it reads as if her father raised it on his own. Scott Adams 00551, 00263, 00318, 00791, 00860.
He said she had come home very upset about a month ago
and told him a cop took her somewhere and forced her to perform oral sex on him.
If his timing was right, that account doesn’t fit Daniel. A month before August 15 was mid-July, when Daniel had been on leave since June 18, and Davis agreed at trial that he couldn’t have assaulted her as a police officer then. Grate placed the assault in April, inside the house where she lived, and told detectives he made her perform oral sex and then had intercourse with her. Davis’s summary of what her father said mentions only oral sex. At trial the judge didn’t let him repeat what she told him. He said she was crying, and she testified she had told him I’d been raped by an officer.
Scott Adams 00551; Tr. 2770:1–3, 2806:3–24, 2616:18–2617:2, 2569:12–2570:3; Davis–Homan video interview of Grate, Aug. 27, 2014.
No recording of the conversation is in the case file, and Davis typed her report on September 2, after Daniel’s arrest. An email Major Denise Wenzel sent the evening of the visit, passing along what Davis had found, says Rosetta told him about it the night it happened.
The email gives no date. Read with Davis’s report, it puts that night about a month before August 15. Scott Adams 00551; Wenzel email to Johnny Kuhlman, Aug. 15, 2014, 6:13 p.m., OKC 0103.
There was a police contact in July. On July 18, 2014, an officer from Daniel’s own division and shift arrested Grate, in a case the State filed that October. That was four weeks before her father talked to Davis. A printout of Grate’s police record that Davis ran before trial lists the arrest. The file shows no one asking Grate or her father about it. Scott Adams 02817–18, 00209; 2014 training list by division, Springlake, OKC 0158–59; Docket, No. CF-2014-7441; see The officers they didn’t look for.
Grate herself later put her first complaint in July. At Daniel’s preliminary hearing in November 2014, asked when she first told law enforcement, she said, In July, I had gotten incarcerated, in July,
and that two women in the jail’s receiving area had approached her because I was yelling that this officer had raped me.
In a January 2015 letter to Davis she named them, Cheyenne Hornbeck and Heather Tisdale. Prelim. Tr. 44–45 (Nov. 2014), Scott Adams 02226–27; Grate letter to Davis, Jan. 3, 2015, Scott Adams 13852–54.
The two women didn’t place it in July. Homan interviewed both. Hornbeck said Grate talked about being one of the girls he fondled/molested
at a booking she dated 8-26-14, the night of the false 911 arrest, after the case had aired on the news,
though she named an arresting officer and charges that don’t match that arrest. Tisdale didn’t remember the date and said Grate never said what had happened to her. The State listed both as witnesses and called neither. At trial Grate said she had been high and didn’t remember, and that she was assuming it was the July one.
Scott Adams 01520–22, 08281–83; OCPD Crime Report 14-070211; Tr. 2602:17–2604:5.
She first spoke to detectives in jail, the day after a false 911 call.
On August 21 Daniel was arrested. Within a day his name, his photograph and the charges were in local and national news. CBS News/AP, Aug. 22, 2014.
At 3:11 a.m. on August 26, an officer stopped a pickup near 23rd and Broadway because its tag light was out. Grate was in the passenger seat. She gave him a false name and a false date of birth, then got out of the truck and told him there was trouble around the corner. While he was running her Social Security number, dispatch put out a shooting, with seven people possibly fighting, at the house where she lived. The fire department, an ambulance and other officers went looking for victims. The officer dialed the number that had called 911, and the phone in Grate’s hand showed his number. The people at the house told officers nobody there had called and nobody was hurt, and the report calls it a bogus 911 call.
She was booked for making a false 911 call, obstructing an officer and possessing drug paraphernalia, and on a warrant for violating her suspended sentence. OCPD Crime Report 14-070211 (Aug. 26, 2014), released under the Oklahoma Open Records Act; Tr. 2579:2–11.
It wasn’t the first time she had given police a false identity. In July 2008 she gave an officer a false name and date of birth, changed them twice, and told him her real name only at the county jail, where he learned she had a felony warrant for drug possession. He cited her for giving false information. In 2003 she had pleaded guilty to identity theft. At trial the jury heard about that conviction. The only mention of her giving a false name came in the defense’s opening statement, which isn’t evidence. OCPD Crime Report 08-058078 (July 11, 2008), released under the Oklahoma Open Records Act; Docket, No. CF-2002-4621, July 16, 2003; Tr. 2607:24–2608:3, 451:10–13.
The next day Davis found her in the county jail and went with Homan to interview her on video. Grate spoke about the visit to her father before Davis said anything about why they were there.
DAVIS: “You probably don’t have a clue why we’re here.”
GRATE: “…are you two who came by daddy’s?”
(Davis nods.)
GRATE: “Yeah. I’m just trying to figure out how’d y’all know? Is he confessing?”
…
DAVIS: “Let me tell you, while I was searching for you, and everybody was telling me you were off on the dope in a bad way.”
GRATE: “I relapsed.”
…
DAVIS: “And I also want to let you know that, um, the DA’s office is offering rehab if you want it.”
GRATE: “Yeah, I want it.”
Davis–Homan video interview of Grate, Aug. 27, 2014 (transcript).
For Grate, rehab was a way out of jail. She was being held for violating a suspended sentence, with what she later called ten years over my head,
and less than three months later a judge let her leave the jail for inpatient treatment under an agreement with the district attorney’s office. Treatment had ended a revocation for her once before, in 2006. Grate Dep. 19:1–2 (Mar. 22, 2021); Docket, No. CF-2013-7725, Nov. 17, 2014; Docket, No. CF-2002-4621, Mar. 3 and Apr. 6, 2006.
On the tape Davis also raised the arrest. Well I know about you got arrested ’cause you made pretend phone call. I thought that was quite sharp,
she said, and asked, Is that why you tried to distract the officer because you knew you had a warrant?
Davis’s written report of the interview says only that Grate was currently in jail on a Violation of Suspended Sentence.
Grate said she hadn’t seen the case on the news, but a friend had told her it’s all in the news
and asked if she was one of the women. Davis–Homan video interview of Grate, Aug. 27, 2014; Scott Adams 00564, 00566.
The next day, August 28, Davis swore out an affidavit of probable cause, and the prosecutor, Gayland Gieger, authorized charging Daniel with raping Grate and forcing her into oral sodomy. The affidavit dates the assault April 24, from Daniel’s records. Grate had told Davis she didn’t know the date. No one had yet searched her room or tested anything in it. Scott Adams 00598–99, 00555, 00564.
In a 2021 deposition in her own lawsuit, Grate described how she felt that day. I was in my crack addiction coming down,
she said, and I was looking for a ticket out so I can get high again.
Grate Dep. 32:25–33:8 (Mar. 22, 2021), Grate v. City of Oklahoma City, No. CIV-16-0412-HE (W.D. Okla.).
What she said about the drive, the gun, ejaculation and the time changed with each telling.
Grate told the detectives her account twice in 2014, both times on video. She told it to the jury in November 2015 and again in her 2021 deposition. The core stayed the same. He followed her into the house and upstairs, told her to sit, said This is better than the county,
and put his penis in her mouth. Much of the rest evolved.
| Detail | To detectives, 2014 | At trial, 2015 | Deposition, 2021 |
|---|---|---|---|
| The drive | Asked, Did he go straight to [the house]?she answered, Mm-hmm.(Aug. 27) | We was headed the wrong way at first.She said the prosecutor first showed her the GPS map of the route that day. | we’re going southuntil she told him where she lived, and then he made that right. |
| The gun | It was kinda slapping me in the face.She asked him to move it. He did.(Aug. 27) | The gun stayed on because I was looking at the gun the whole time, asking him to, you know, could you move the gun… I said, could you move your gun? And he just kept going. | Not described. |
| Ejaculation | I think he ejaculated… He would’ve had to of.(Aug. 27) Yeah, I know he did. That’s why I wiped with the thing.(Sept. 2) | I don’t really think that he did. I have never been a hundred percent sure that he ejaculated. | I don’t know if he ever did at all. |
| How long | At least 30 minutes. At least.(Aug. 27) | Oral sex, About five, ten minutes.Intercourse, About another five or ten minutes. | Too long, that’s my final answer. |
Davis–Homan video interview of Grate, Aug. 27, 2014; Grate Jail Interview Tr. 7 (Sept. 2, 2014); Tr. 2531:15, 2581:9–13, 2543:24–2544:1, 2544:13–19, 2545:1–5, 2546:10–11, 2547:10–18, 2595:4–9; Grate Dep. 45:6–16, 50:20–25, 73:20–21 (Mar. 22, 2021).
Davis’s written report of the August 27 interview records the same things the tape does. Grate thought he ejaculated, he moved his gun when she asked, and she thought she heard the door. Confronted at trial with telling Davis he had ejaculated, Grate said, I did not say I was absolutely sure.
Scott Adams 00566; Tr. 2594:25–2595:3.
The people she told saw nothing. The police car Carter heard about was the one Daniel called in.
Grate said she told her father, a man she knew only as East Side, and Willie Carter, the man she lived with. None of them saw what happened upstairs, and the judge wouldn’t let Carter or her father tell the jury what she had said. What they could describe was how she seemed and what they made of it.
Carter was at a pool tournament that evening, gone maybe three or four hours.
When he got home, Grate told him something. Asked what he had thought she had done, he said, Brought someone into the house.
Tr. 2623:7–13, 2624:20–2625:24.
The next morning, Carter said, a friend of his who stayed in a van said something about a police car, and his view changed. The judge kept out what the friend said. No police report identifies the man, and the prosecutor told the judge none was ever written. I didn’t believe her, but I believed him,
Carter told the jury. Tr. 2626:5–22, 2627:10–2628:4, 2641:2.
Two days after her false 911 call sent officers to his door looking for a shooting, Carter talked to KFOR News 4 about her. She’s slick. She’s a criminal. She’s a schemer and con woman,
he said. At trial he agreed he had been upset with her over the call. The jury never heard what he told KFOR. KFOR News 4, Aug. 28, 2014; Tr. 2643:2–20.
Her father’s account is above. No report shows police ever found East Side. Tr. 2568:12–18.
Nothing taken from the room pointed to Daniel. The analyst testified that the male DNA on the chair she named wasn’t his.
On September 2, Grate called Homan from the jail and said she had had time to sober up
and had information. In 2021 she explained the call, Because I sober up and memories start coming back.
Detectives went that day, and she pointed them to the chair by her bed, where she said she had wiped her hand during the oral sex, to the plastic cover on the box spring, and to a rag she said she had wiped herself with and thrown in the closet. Scott Adams 00557–58; Grate Dep. 34:8–11 (Mar. 22, 2021); Grate Jail Interview Tr. 2–8 (Sept. 2, 2014).
Homan asked whether she had felt him ejaculate inside her. Yeah, I know he did. That’s why I wiped with the thing,
she said. The chair and the rag, she told the detectives, were the two most important things that I thought y’all could use if you’re trying to look for some type of evidence.
Grate Jail Interview Tr. 7, 8 (Sept. 2, 2014).
Davis’s affidavit for the search warrant, sworn the next day, says the first interview took place on 8-28-14
and puts the chair and the wiping in it. Neither appears in the transcript of the August 27 video or in Davis’s own report of it. Davis wrote that report on September 4, the day after she swore the affidavit. Scott Adams 00564–67, 00574; Tr. 2767:22–23; Davis–Homan video interview of Grate, Aug. 27, 2014.
Officers searched the house on September 3. The rag wasn’t there. A crime-scene sergeant took the leather back of the chair, plus a pair of men’s white underwear with a blue stripe and a pair of black panties from the closet. The bedding had been washed and was left behind, and nobody took the plastic box-spring cover. Scott Adams 00561, 00570; Tr. 2785:8–14, 2786:3–5, 2791:2–23, 2802:19–2803:11.
On September 26, 2014, the State’s laboratory reported no sign of semen on any of the three items and no DNA results from the underwear or the panties. A year later, at the prosecutor’s request, it went back to the chair. Its report names an unknown man as the main contributor to a male DNA mixture on the leather back and excludes Daniel, and Grate, from that profile. The rest of the DNA on the chair wasn’t suitable for comparison. On the stand the analyst went further, agreeing that at least two men had left DNA on the chair and that it wasn’t Daniel’s. Asked by the prosecutor whether that meant Daniel had never been in the room, she said, I can’t say that,
and I have no idea who was or wasn’t in that room.
The search came more than four months after April 24. Davis said she didn’t really expect to find anything.
Scott Adams 04095, 04153–54; Tr. 2726:5–2727:6, 2729:3–23, 2803:12–19.
At trial, more than a year after the lab found no semen, Grate told the jury she didn’t think Daniel had ejaculated and had never been a hundred percent sure
that he did. So I did not say I was a hundred percent sure ever,
she said. Tr. 2547:15–18, 2594:25–2595:9.
Her charges from the false 911 call were pending when she testified. The State dismissed them in 2017.
Grate spent the next twelve weeks in the county jail. On November 17, 2014, the first day of Daniel’s preliminary hearing, at which she testified, a judge released her on a personal-recognizance bond TO COMPLETE INPATIENT DRUG TREATMENT PER AGREEMENT WITH DA IN CF-13-7725,
the case in which she was on a suspended sentence. She left the jail for treatment two days later. The plan predated the hearing. On October 28 the docket had noted, DFT IS GOING TO TREATMENT ON NOV 11,2014.
Docket, State v. Grate, No. CF-2013-7725 (Okla. Cnty. Dist. Ct.), Nov. 17, 2014; preliminary hearing, State v. Holtzclaw, Nov. 17–18, 2014; Tr. 2555:20–22, 2661:2–25.
Davis testified that she got with the DA’s office
and that the office has a contact
who helped Grate get into rehab. There was no written agreement, and Davis didn’t know where Grate went. She’s not the first victim I’ve offered that to, and she will not be the last.
Nothing in the docket says what, if anything, the agreement asked of her in return. Tr. 2775:5–2776:16.
When Grate took the stand in November 2015, she was in custody on a six-day sanction from her court-supervised drug program. Early in his questioning, the prosecutor, Gayland Gieger, asked her, does Ms. McConnell or I have any involvement in that? Have we ever been involved in your diversion program?
She answered, No. No.
The docket of the case her program belonged to shows Gieger appearing for the State when the revocation of her suspended sentence came up on January 6, 2015, and a licensed legal intern appearing FOR G.GIEGER
when it came up again on March 3. Tr. 2519:1–2520:12; Docket, No. CF-2013-7725, Jan. 6 and Mar. 3, 2015.
The charges from the night of the false 911 call were still open. Her public defender told the judge at the bench, That is a pending matter. There is no plea and there is no plea agreement.
The judge let Daniel’s lawyer ask what she had been arrested for but not what she had done, so from her the jury heard only the names of the charges. Willie Carter later answered yes when the lawyer asked whether he had been upset with her for calling in a fake 911 report of a shooting at his house. Tr. 2575:19–2576:2, 2577:20–2578:7, 2579:2–7, 2643:13–18.
She also had a felony case pending from July 2014. Oklahoma City police had arrested her on July 18, and on October 31, after she had become a witness against Daniel, the State charged her with unauthorized use of a vehicle and aggravated attempting to elude a police officer. Daniel’s lawyer asked her about the case at trial, and she agreed she was facing those charges. Nobody asked when the arrest had happened, so the jury never learned that it fell in the month her father’s account pointed to. Docket, No. CF-2014-7441, counts; Scott Adams 02817; Tr. 2610:18–23.
After the verdict, the hearing on revoking her suspended sentence was continued again, FOR FURTHER NEGOTATION.
On June 28, 2017, the State dismissed all three charges from the false 911 call. The same day she admitted violating her suspended sentence and pleaded guilty in the July 2014 case, and she was sentenced to ten years in each, to run concurrently, with credit for time served. She had sued the city and Daniel in 2016. Docket, No. CF-2013-7725, Dec. 16, 2015, and June 28, 2017; Docket, No. CM-2014-2946, dispositions; Docket, No. CF-2014-7441, June 28, 2017; Grate v. City of Oklahoma City, No. CIV-16-0412-HE (W.D. Okla.).
He gave her a ride home.
The only records from April 24, 2014, are the police department’s. They show a stop he called in, a warrant check, a transport he announced with his mileage, an arrival he radioed, a call closed from inside the car and a car back on the street less than ten minutes after it reached the house. The stop and the warrant check were the kind of work his division asked for. In 2013 its commander told the officers on its overtime detail, Daniel among them, to be VERY proactive.
Jennings, “V.I.P.E.R. Overtime Program,” Feb. 1, 2013, OKC 6290, 6658.
Grate’s account to police came four months later, in a jail interview the day after her arrest, after detectives had been to her father’s house about a sexual assault and after the case had been on the news. Her first estimate of the time at the house was three times what the GPS allows. The drive, the gun, the ejaculation and the time changed from one telling to the next. The testing of the room she sent police to didn’t identify Daniel.
The jury acquitted Daniel of raping her and convicted him of forcible oral sodomy, and he is serving twenty years on Count 8. Both counts rested on the same witness describing the same encounter in the same room, minutes apart. The jurors didn’t say why they split the verdicts. Daniel’s car was at the house under ten minutes for everything she described, and the call was closed from the car less than nine minutes after it pulled in. The jury heard each of these times, but Daniel’s lawyer never added them up for it. Tr. 4324:1–4, 2788:8–2789:17, 4236:21–4240:25. UNCUFF believes he gave Rosetta Grate a ride home, as he told dispatch he was doing, and nothing more.