Fairfax County Police Watch: Woman who fell from LAPD car claims she was sexually assaulted

By Brett Wilkins

Los Angeles - A graduate student who was caught on camera tumbling out of a moving police car in Los Angeles claims she was being sexually assaulted by her arresting officer.
CBS Los Angeles reports Kim Nguyen, a 27-year-old pharmacist, claims she was handcuffed in the back of a Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) cruiser when an officer sexually assaulted her last March 17.

Nguyen was arrested shortly after 2 a.m. as she stood with two men in front of a Koreatown restaurant waiting for a sober friend to pick them up. That's when LAPD officers pulled up and took her into custody, allegedly for being drunk. The men were left behind.

In a videotaped deposition, Nguyen claimed the officer in the back seat with her tried to spread her legs open. He also allegedly touched her chest and pulled her by the ear to bring her closer to him.

"He was grabbing my left inner thigh, trying to-- I'm assuming-- opening my legs," Nguyen said in the deposition.

Last September, the Los Angeles Times identified the LAPD officers involved in the incident as David Shin and Jin Oh.

A surveillance camera on a building on Olympic Boulevard shows the patrol car approaching the intersection of Grand Avenue at 3:08 a.m. Seconds later, video footage shows Nguyen, still in handcuffs, lying bloodied in the street with her dress removed from the waist down. She awoke from a medically-induced coma six days later in excruciating pain with her mouth wired shut and bruises all over her body. Nguyen and her attorney, Arnaldo Casillas, say her jaw was shattered and she suffered brain bleeding. She required several jaw surgeries and lost all of her teeth. She may still need to undergo risky brain surgery.

It is not clear whether Nguyen jumped from the patrol car to avoid the alleged sexual assault, whether she was pushed out by one of the officers, or if something altogether different occurred. In a lawsuit filed against the LAPD, Nguyen alleges that officers failed to secure her with a seatbelt or properly lock her door, which led to her being ejected from the vehicle.

An incident report filed by paramedics claims officers told them Nguyen fell from the car as it accelerated from an intersection at a speed of 10 miles per hour (16 km/h). But the surveillance video shows the vehicle traveling at what appears to be a much higher speed, crossing the intersection without stopping or slowing down.

"The video shows that the statement that the police officers gave the paramedics is an unabashed, unequivocal lie," attorney Casillas told reporters last September.
The two officers involved in the incident are under investigation. LAPD would not comment on pending litigation.

Morrogh finds cop he doesn’t love. In other news, hell freezes.

Probe of fatal police shooting goes to federal authorities

By Justin Jouvenal/Post

The Fairfax County prosecutor has turned over the investigation of a fatal police shooting of an unarmed Springfield man to federal authorities, citing complications with the five-month-old case.

Commonwealth’s Attorney Ray Morrogh said the U.S. attorney’s office for the Eastern District of Virginia has agreed to continue the probe into the death of 46-year-old John Geer, who was shot during a standoff with Fairfax County police in August. No one has been charged in the incident.

“There is a conflict of interest that has arisen in the case,” Morrogh said Thursday. “And there is a second potential conflict of interest that has arisen out of my office. . . . This is the prudent thing to do.”

Morrogh declined to describe the nature of the conflicts because the investigation is ongoing. The U.S. attorney’s office said Thursday that it could not confirm or deny any investigation or comment on pending investigations.

Police went to Geer’s Pebble Brook Court home on Aug. 29 because of a report of a domestic disturbance. Geer’s father, Don Geer, said his son was upset because his girlfriend, the mother of his two children, had decided to leave him.

John Geer had thrown his girlfriend’s belongings in the front yard. She called police and told them that Geer had a firearm. Police said they tried for about 50 minutes to persuade Geer to leave the home, but he refused.

Don Geer said he watched the climax of the encounter. He said that he could not hear what officers were saying to his son but that he saw him standing with empty hands resting on top of a screen door at the home’s entrance.

At some point, John Geer began to slowly lower his hands and an officer opened fire, hitting Geer in the chest, his father said. Geer retreated inside and closed the door. A SWAT team eventually entered the home and found Geer dead.

Don Geer said detectives later told him that his son did not have a gun on him at the time of the shooting but that there was a holstered handgun a couple of steps from the front door.

Don Geer said it appeared to him that the shooting was unjustified, but he was unsure what to make of the probe being turned over to federal authorities.

“I don’t know whether that’s good or bad — if I had a better idea of why they are doing it, I could form an opinion,” he said.

Geer and friends of his son have been critical of how long the investigation has taken, but Morrogh said police and prosecutors were working to explore all the evidence. He did not think federal prosecutors would have to start from scratch.

“No one wants these things to linger on,” Morrogh said.

Our ink will outlast his career

Under the reign of former Chief of Police Rhorer the Fairfax County Police arrested a man for not wearing clothes in his house while he made coffee, set up an eye doctor on a gambling charge and then used the SWAT team to kill him. An investigation into the charge that the Doctor’s primary clients were cops has never been investigated. The police gunned down an emotionally unstable man because cop who shot him wrongly assumed the man was trying to escape. He wasn’t. The cops also shot dead four other citizens under highly questionable circumstances. The department under Rhorer was sued multiple times by citizens. So did they fire Rhorer? Naw they promoted him. According to news reports Rhorer draws a salary of $191,168 per year as Deputy Fairfax County Executive as well as a concurrent pension from the Fairfax County police of $173000 per year.

Occupation by force

According to the most recent U.S. Census figures, nearly one in five Fairfax residents (17.5 percent) is of Asian descent while Hispanics make up nearly 16 percent of Fairfax’s overall population. Those numbers drop considerably when applied to the Fairfax County Police Department, where only 4.3 percent of officers are Asian and 4.1 percent Hispanic. White officers make up 84 percent of Fairfax County’s 1,360-member police department, significantly higher than the county’s general population (54 percent white). Almost 90% of the force lives outside the county.