Philadelphia Inquirer
Saturday, September 30, 2000

Delays in making arrests added to city sex-crime unit's problems

In one case, a warrant for rape wasn't served for two years.

By Craig R. McCoy ,
INQUIRER STAFF WRITER

The Germantown girl was sexually assaulted by her mother's boyfriend.

When the 15-year-old girl and her aunt reported the crime, Officer Belinda Daniel of the Philadelphia Police Department sex-crimes unit took down the attacker's name and obtained a warrant for his arrest.

Family members had every reason to expect a speedy arrest.

They were disappointed.

For reasons never explained, Daniel made little effort to apprehend the suspect, and he remained free for two years- until he was finally arrested by other officers.

The man was convicted of sexual assault and sentenced to up to three years in prison.

Now, he might go free because of the delay in bringing him to justice.

Daniel's failure to make the arrest was revealed to be part of a pattern of shoddy police work on her part that left sexual-assault victims in several cases angry and disillusioned.

The trail of bungled cases - gleaned from court records, interviews and internal memorandums recently made public by city officials - offers a vivid illustration of the problems that hobbled the sex-crimes unit for years.

Daniel is not the only member of the unit whose performance left much to be desired. As previously reported by The Inquirer, over nearly two decades, sex-crimes investigators improperly closed thousands of cases after little or no investigation. (The disclosures prompted Police Commissioner John F. Timoney to increase staffing, training and supervision in the unit.)

But if Daniel's failings were not unique, they were serious enough to lead to a reprimand last year and her transfer from the sex-crimes unit to a desk job.

They also prompted a Common Pleas Court judge, in a highly unusual step, to write her commanders to complain about her conduct.

Daniel, 50, a 14-year police veteran, declined to be interviewed.

When he reprimanded her in May 1999 for neglect of duty, Timoney cited the case of the Germantown teenager and another sexual assault that Daniel investigated.

In the second case, involving a South Philadelphia teenager molested in a Boston Market restaurant, Daniel also failed to arrest the alleged assailant, letting a warrant sit in limbo for nearly three years.

In a third case, involving the alleged rape of a Northeast Philadelphia woman, Daniel authorized an arrest - but of the wrong man, after what city lawyers acknowledged was a cursory investigation.

The city paid the man $85,000 to settle a wrongful-arrest suit.

Common Pleas Court Judge Gregory E. Smith, who wrote to Daniel's commanders voicing outrage at her conduct, presided at the trial of the man convicted of assaulting the Germantown girl. As the evidence unfolded, Smith learned of Daniel's failure to arrest the suspect.

"I spoke out of a sense of frustration," the judge said in a recent interview. "There was hardly any effort at all to locate this guy. When you see a child molested, you've got to get on it."



The Germantown girl, now 19, was sexually assaulted by her mother's boyfriend in May 1996. When she became pregnant, the girl said, the man made her drink castor oil and threatened to punch her in the stomach to cause a miscarriage.

The girl moved in with her aunt. The aunt, after learning of the incident, took the teenager to the sex-crimes unit in August 1996.

The girl gave Daniel the address in Germantown where the assault occurred. Daniel searched a police computer and found a second address for the man - his mother's house in Mount Airy.

Daniel made one trip to the Germantown address and did not find the man. She never went to the Mount Airy house.

The suspect, Troy Riley, remained free for two years.

During that time, the girl lived in fear, her relatives said. The aunt transferred the teenager to a new school and wouldn't permit her to leave the house alone.

Riley was arrested Aug. 28, 1998 - not by Daniel but by other sex-crimes officers on assignment to close out old cases. They found him at the Mount Airy address.

Riley went on trial in Smith's courtroom last year.

At one hearing, Daniel was questioned about her failure to arrest him. She said she had checked her computer 40 times over the two years to see whether Riley had been picked up on other charges.

She also said that she had spoken with two acquaintances of Riley's, and that they told her they didn't know his whereabouts.

Daniel was asked why she had never driven to the Mount Airy house - by her own description "a 10-minute ride" from the sex-crimes unit in Frankford.

"I don't have an answer," Daniel testified. "I have other cases that I have to deal with."

At the nonjury trial, Riley was acquitted of rape but convicted of sexual assault.

But in late July, a state Superior Court panel sent the case back to Smith for a hearing. The purpose: to decide if Riley's conviction should be overturned on the ground that the delay in arresting him deprived him of his right to a speedy trial.

The panel ordered Smith to determine whether Daniel acted with "due diligence" in pursuing the suspect. If Smith concludes that she did not, Riley, now 32, will be freed.

"That is horrible. I cannot believe it," the victim's aunt said. The Inquirer is withholding her name to protect the identity of the teenager.

"Because there's someone in the system who did a poor job, he gets to walk away free."



Veronica Rao is another sexual-assault victim who endured a long delay because of Daniel's inaction.

And when other police officers finally intervened, they arrested the wrong man.

Rao agreed to be interviewed for this story and identified by name. She was molested March 17, 1996, while working at a Boston Market restaurant at 31st Street and Snyder Avenue. She was 17.

An assistant manager put Rao in a headlock, dragged her into a hallway, and grabbed her breast.

The case was assigned to Daniel. Based on Rao's account and that of a coworker, Daniel obtained a warrant in April 1996 to arrest the assistant manager for indecent assault.

Nearly three years went by, and Daniel never made the arrest.

In the meantime, Rao brought a civil claim against Boston Market. During discovery, the company said its own investigation had confirmed that the assistant manager molested Rao. The man was fired.

Finally, in February 1999, Rao received a phone call from police. Other officers in the sex-crimes unit had pulled the old warrant from a file and made an arrest.

But they had picked up the wrong person, it turned out.

Police had linked the arrest warrant to a convicted burglar on probation. The man's name was similar to the assistant manager's. But he had a different birthdate and a different Social Security number.

Police somehow overlooked those discrepancies. At a police lineup, Rao failed to identify the man as her attacker. Prosecutors later dropped the charges.

By then, it was too late to arrest the assistant manager. The statute of limitations had expired.

"It's a total disgrace," Rao, now 21, said of the sex-crimes unit's conduct. "Their lack of doing what they should have done totally screwed my life up."



The third case described in city legal documents on Daniel involved the 1998 rape of a Northeast Philadelphia woman.

The victim, Patricia Anne Longacre, 39, also agreed to be identified by name in this article.

Longacre said the rapist was a man she met during a group-therapy session at Neumann Medical Center in Northeast Philadelphia.

After Longacre reported the attack, Daniel called her to the sex-crimes unit to look at photographs of suspects. Longacre said she found the atmosphere intimidating and felt pressured to pick out a particular photo.

The photo was of a Manayunk man whose picture was in police files because of a 1995 heroin arrest. His surname was similar to the rapist's name as recollected by Longacre.

Longacre signed a form stating that the man had raped her.

"I was not satisfied, but I felt I had to sign something in order to go home," she said.

Daniel obtained an arrest warrant for the Manayunk man, and he was picked up soon afterward. Longacre was brought in to view a live lineup that included the man.

She told police that her attacker was not in the lineup. "I stood up. I was crying," she recalled. "I said, 'He is not here. He's loose.' "

In June 1999, prosecutors dropped the case and freed the Manayunk man. He had spent 33 days in jail and later sued the city for wrongful arrest. Once Longacre had picked out the man's picture, Daniel made no effort to gather further evidence linking him to the rape, city legal memorandums show.

For instance, Daniel did not obtain records from Neumann Medical Center to determine whether the man had ever been in the therapy program where Longacre said she had met her assailant.

In March, the city paid $85,000 to settle the man's lawsuit. In a memorandum outlining the settlement, the City Solicitor's Office said:

"Officer Daniel admits that, because she was very busy, she did not do anything to further verify that plaintiff was the person who raped the victim."

The rape remains unsolved. Longacre said police promised her that a new investigator would be assigned. No one has contacted her, she said.