Orange County prosecutor says sheriff mishandled molestation case
Dist. Atty. Tony Rackauckas says agency was 'merely going through the motions' in investigating charges against detective, who avoided arrest by killing himself.
In yet another sign of tension between Orange County's most powerful law enforcement branches, Dist. Atty. Tony Rackauckas has accused the Sheriff's Department of botching a child molestation investigation involving a sheriff's detective who ultimately killed himself before he could be arrested.
Rackauckas wrote to sheriff's officials and suggested their investigators were "merely going through the motions" as they investigated a deputy suspected of molesting young boys earlier this year.
The case that concerned Rackauckas involved sheriff's Investigator Gerald Stenger, who committed suicide April 2 after apparently learning that prosecutors had charged him with sexually molesting a 12-year-old boy he met through Big Brother Big Sisters of Orange County, where he was a volunteer.
In a June 11 letter to then-acting Sheriff Jack Anderson, Rackauckas said he was concerned that sheriff's investigators appeared to be uninterested in the allegations against Stenger -- concluding in the initial stages that the charges were baseless -- and failed to pursue evidence that later implicated the detective.
"One could easily conclude that the investigators had already made up their minds about the case before the questioning and were merely going through the motions," Rackauckas wrote.
He noted that the sheriff's lead investigator on the case was one of Stenger's friends and called the deputy to tell him that his name had come up in an investigation. Rackauckas said the phone call left the appearance that the investigator was tipping off Stenger.
Shortly after the phone call, Stenger apparently tried to commit suicide but was revived after being rushed to the hospital, the district attorney says in his letter. Not long after that, sheriff's investigators met with him and told him prosecutors would "probably not" charge him.
The district attorney also suggested that the department might be better served by allowing an outside agency to investigate criminal allegations against its deputies.
Orange County's new sheriff, Sandra Hutchens, replied to Rackauckas, saying that the captain who oversaw the investigation told her he had taken steps to make sure any flaws in the Stenger investigation would not be repeated. Hutchens said she was perplexed by Rackauckas' suggestion that her department could not competently investigate its own deputies.
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