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. Detective Kim Davis, who led the investigation, testified that a ride was not unheard of
and that letting someone break a pipe instead of booking her is something some officers do do.
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. 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. He then logged a call at Granada and Martin Luther King to help another officer. The radio traffic the State played includes him being dispatched. Davis admitted leaving the address off the card was not a big deal.
Of the address he gave dispatch, she testified, 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. But she also testified 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 and 52 seconds from the moment the car reached the house to the moment it left. From the car’s arrival to the call being closed from inside, 8 minutes and 39 seconds elapsed.
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, in the eight and a half minutes before the call was closed, the following all had to occur:
- A 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 climb up the stairs to the bedroom of Willie Carter (the man she lived with), and then to her own bedroom
- Oral sex she said took
About five, ten minutes
- Intercourse she said took
About another five or ten minutes
- 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 pegged the departure time for the jury at 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 Daniel wore compression shorts with no fly under his uniform. 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 the home of Grate’s father looking for her. Davis reported that 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 with other potential accusers, Davis reported telling the woman the tip was about a police officer. The Grate report left the officer out, so it reads as if her father brought up a police officer 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. 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 sustained a hearsay objection and let her father say only that it involved a police officer and that she was crying. Grate 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. Davis typed her report on September 2, after Daniel’s arrest. Major Denise Wenzel e-mailed Deputy Chief Johnny Kuhlman the evening of the visit with Grate’s father, passing along what Davis had found. She wrote that the father confirmed his daughter was sexually assaulted by an officer,
though he could confirm only what his daughter had told him, and that Rosetta told him about it the night it happened.
The email gives no date. Paired with Davis’s report, the night in question was 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 division and shift arrested Grate, and in October the State charged her with unauthorized use of a vehicle and aggravated attempting to elude a police officer. 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 documentation that Grate or her father were asked about it. Tr. 2610:18–23; 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.
That arrest is the only police contact in her record that month. It fits what Grate herself later said. She placed her first complaint in July. At Daniel’s preliminary hearing in November 2014, she said she first told law enforcement about her encounter with Daniel [i]n July, I had gotten incarcerated, in July.
She described how 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 Cheyenne Hornbeck and Heather Tisdale as the women. Prelim. Tr. 44–45 (Nov. 2014), Scott Adams 02226–27; Grate letter to Davis, Jan. 3, 2015, Scott Adams 13852–54.
Homan interviewed both women. They didn’t place the incident in July. Hornbeck said Grate talked about being one of the girls he fondled/molested
at a booking she dated 8-26-14, the night of her false 911 call arrest, after the case had aired on the news.
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, but called neither. At trial, Grate said she had been high when she was booked and didn’t remember when she had yelled about the officer. 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, 2014, Daniel was arrested. Within a day, his name, his photograph and the charges spread across local and national news. CNN, Aug. 22, 2014.
At 3:11 a.m. on August 26, an officer stopped a pickup with Grate in the passenger seat. She gave him a false name and false date of birth, then told him there was trouble around the corner. While he ran her Social Security number, dispatch reported a shooting at her residence. The officer dialed the number identified with the 911 call. The phone in Grate’s hand displayed his number. Nobody at the house had called and nobody was hurt. Police deemed it a bogus 911 call.
She was booked for making a false 911 call, obstructing an officer and possessing drug paraphernalia, along with 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. 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 visited her in county jail and brought Homan and a video recorder. On the tape, Grate asks whether they were the ones who came by her father’s before Davis says why they are there.
The tape doesn’t show what came before it. It opens with Davis saying, You probably don’t have a clue why we’re here,
and Davis’s report doesn’t say whether the detectives spoke with Grate before the recorder started. In this investigation they sometimes had. Terri Morris’s July 10 jail interview was taped only after she had moved her allegation to a new location, and its transcript opens (Conversation already in progress when recording begins).
Grate’s own second interview, on September 2, followed a call to Homan that wasn’t recorded, and Homan’s report of it ends, The interview lasted several more minutes then ended.
Davis–Homan video interview of Grate, Aug. 27, 2014; Scott Adams 00564–66, 01163, 01174, 00557–58; see Terri Morris.
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 tape, Davis also raised the arrest. Well I know about you got arrested ’cause you made [a] pretend phone call. I thought that was quite sharp,
she said. Davis asked Grate, Is that why you tried to distract the officer because you knew you had a warrant?
But in her report, Davis wrote only that Grate was currently in jail on a Violation of Suspended Sentence.
Grate denied seeing 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 at least two men had left DNA on the chair she named, and neither was him.
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. Taylor’s screening worksheet records that the men’s underwear fluoresced under an alternate light source, a screen that reacts to many substances besides semen. The tests that followed on that item, for seminal fluid and for sperm, were negative, and the swab taken from it for DNA gave no result. 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, 04157, 04159 (bench notes and serology screening worksheet, Sept. 9, 2014); 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 CF-2013-7725, the felony case under which she entered treatment, 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.
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 the jurors. 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.