Syrita Bowen
Syrita Bowen’s two counts carried 46 years. She didn’t go to police. Detectives found her through Daniel’s records, the interview that produced her account wasn’t recorded, and she placed the encounter in July. The date the jury heard was May 21. At trial she said, “they gave me the date.”
Her name came from Daniel’s records.
An officer building a spreadsheet for Detective Kim Davis of the women Daniel had run through the department’s records unit noticed one entry. I noticed a "Bowen, Syrita" was ran by Holtzclaw on 5-21-14.
Davis already had two leads, a woman who said a friend named “Sherrita” had been assaulted and then hung up, and Rosetta Grate, who pointed to Bowen as a possible victim. When the officer passed on the May 21 entry, Davis wrote, she and her partner immediately began looking
for Bowen. Scott Adams 00859–60, 00873; Trial Tr. 3433:5–16.
Bowen reached Davis by phone on October 2. Davis opened the way detectives opened with the other women. I explained to Syrita I had received a tip that she was a possible victim of inappropriate behavior involving an Oklahoma City Police officer.
Bowen didn’t want to meet. On October 7 the district attorney called Davis. Bowen now had a lawyer, and the lawyer arranged the interview. Scott Adams 00860, 00862–63; Trial Tr. 3433:20–3434:2.
Two recorders, neither working. The interview went ahead.
Davis and Detective Valari Homan met Bowen at a church on the evening of October 9. Davis’s report explains why there is no recording. I had brought a tape recorder from home; however, it did not work. Detective Homan tried to use her cell phone to record the interview but that did not work either.
The October 2 calls weren’t recorded either. Scott Adams 00863; Trial Tr. 3487:19–3488:21.
Daniel’s arrest had been in the news since August, and Bowen had seen it. I wouldn’t even say nothing about it until I seen him on the news,
she told the jury. She didn’t know the officer’s name or badge number. Trial Tr. 3381:23–24; Scott Adams 00865; Trial Tr. 3490:15–18.
She told the detectives the encounter happened sometime in July 2014.
Scott Adams 00863.
She said July. The State said May 21. She said they gave her the date.
At the preliminary hearing in November 2014, the prosecutor began Bowen’s testimony by directing her to May 21, 2014.
Under cross-examination she answered “Yes” when asked whether she knew the date Because some computer records were able to generate by the DA’s office.
Prelim. Hr’g Tr. 227:23–24, 242:10–16 (Scott Adams 03305, 03320).
At trial, asked whether she had ever suggested May to the detectives, she answered, No, they gave me the date. They told me when.
Trial Tr. 3412:7–15.
Davis testified that she couldn’t have given Bowen a date. I didn’t have a date to search out because she hadn’t told me where she was. I didn’t have a location to go search out. And I didn’t know who she was.
Her own report says the search began when an officer found the May 21 entry in Daniel’s records. Asked on cross-examination whether she knew of that run before the interview, she said, I might have. Yes.
Trial Tr. 3434:17–25; Scott Adams 00860, 00873; 3490:19–25.
In closing, the prosecutor told the jury that Bowen had tied the date to her birthday from the beginning. She testified it was after her birthday. Well, it’s in the police reports. And she said that from the start.
Davis had already testified otherwise. Asked whether Bowen mentioned her birthday in the interview, she said, No, her birthday didn’t come up.
Davis agreed her report says nothing about it. Trial Tr. 4302:1–3; 3489:12–22.
The GPS shows a stop. It can’t show what happened.
The records are the State’s strongest evidence on her counts, and they are real. Daniel ran Bowen’s name at 12:51 and 12:53 a.m. on May 21, and the patrol car’s GPS shows it stopped where she said she was picked up. It then stopped for about thirteen minutes on a stretch of Miramar Boulevard she had described in her interview, before the GPS was pulled. Daniel logged nothing about the stop. Scott Adams 00869–70; Trial Tr. 3436:25–3438:12, 3444:1–3447:14.
A record of a stop and a pause is not a record of a rape. And Bowen had been found through the record of that stop, so the match was built into how she was found. None of her DNA was on Daniel’s uniform pants, and the clothes she wore that night were never collected. Trial Tr. 3471:1–12, 3418:5–15.
The details moved between the interview, the hearing and the trial.
She told Davis and her lawyer that the officer ejaculated, and said so again at the preliminary hearing. At trial she said, Well, I don’t know if he did or not because, you know, I just wanted to get it over with and go home.
At the hearing and in her interview she said he told her he would take her home; at trial she said he didn’t. She described the patrol car as all black
to Davis and as Black and white
at the hearing. She told Davis he drove east on 17th Street; the GPS shows 19th. Scott Adams 00862, 00864–65, 00869; Prelim. Hr’g Tr. 230:18–20, 233:18–19, 237:17–18; Trial Tr. 3358:1–3, 3403:20–21.
The man she lived with testified that she told him that night. In 2014 he told police she came home sometime after midnight
; at trial he put it at about three in the morning. Scott Adams 00867; Trial Tr. 3422:9–25, 3424:4–9.
Guilty on both counts: 46 years.
The jury convicted Daniel on Count 27, forcible oral sodomy, with a sentence of 16 years, and on Count 28, first-degree rape, with a sentence of 30 years. The judge ran them consecutively, and both fall under Oklahoma’s 85 percent rule. Only Sherry Ellis’s and Adaira Gardner’s counts carried more. Trial Tr. 4325:21–4326:1; Sentencing Tr. 45:24–46:8 (Jan. 21, 2016); Holtzclaw v. State, 2019 OK CR 17, ¶ 1.
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