Cop Rapes Woman on hood of patrol car, LA County Ignored Victim for Years

The sheriff's deputy who asked Lindsay for her license and registration was Jose Sanchez, then 25 years old. He asked Lindsay if she knew about her warrant. Lindsay told him she did, but that she was taking care of it, and that she had no other way to get to the job interview. When Sanchez asked her if she had been drinking, she told him the truth: only half a glass of wine her friend had offered her a few hours before. Sanchez gave Lindsay a breathalyzer test, which he told her she failed, although he refused to show her the results. Instead, he told Lindsay he had been watching her at the gas station while he ran her license plate number.

"You're pretty hot stuff," he told her, according to depositions. Lindsay asked if he was going to arrest her. "No, but what are you going to do for me?" he asked. That’s when Lindsay started to panic.

Lindsay tried to decline Sanchez's advances by telling him she had a curfew and a boyfriend, but he told her to get in his car. At first, she thought she was under arrest for not having sex with him, but even that didn’t make sense: Where were the handcuffs? Instead, Sanchez drove Lindsay down a dirt road into the pitch-black desert. A summary prepared by the sheriff’s office describes the spot where he stopped his car as a "remote, dark, and isolated area".

Sanchez forced her to have oral and vaginal with him. Then with her pressed face down against the hood of his patrol car, he anally raped her while she cried.
After all this was over he drove her back to where her vehicle was parked. As if the pain and humiliation were not enough, Sanchez asked Lindsay to give him her phone number in case he wanted to "mess around" again.

Lindsay tried to do what she thought was right by reporting the rape immediately afterwards - but that just caused her more suffering, it turns out.

The "authorities" involved in her case made it distressingly difficult for her to find justice. They constantly questioned her and tried to find flaws in minute details, they spent years fumbling around with paperwork and court dates. They even investigated her family members.

The L.A. Sheriff's Department Internal Criminal Investigations Bureau submitted Lindsay's case to the district attorney’s office in January 2011. Lindsay was on edge the entire next year, especially as the DA's office never contacted her with updates, she said, and didn’t schedule her first interview until Aug. 11, 2011. Whenever she checked in, the office told her they were still evaluating her case. In an August email, the DA's office indicated it might drop the case entirely, according to Lindsay's attorneys. In May 2012, it was reassigned. In 2011, Lindsay had filed a civil suit, which her lawyers believe may have moved the criminal case forward. Her attorneys had to go to court multiple times to get an unredacted copy of the internal investigation, which took about a year, they said. The same week they received it, Sanchez was finally arrested. It was July 27, 2013, nearly three years after the rape. A spokesperson for the DA's office said these types of criminal cases "are complex and take extensive investigation." This process of her being questioned, stalled, and forced to relive the rape over and over lasted some years - it wasn't until five years later in fact that Officer Sanchez would finally be sentenced.

The incident took place on September 22, 2010. It was about 1:20 am.

During the course of the investigation, it turned out that only two days after he had raped Lindsay, Sanchez, had stopped another woman for driving under the influence and asked her to perform sexual acts with him as bribe for not getting arrested. The 36-year-old woman refused with the help of a friend who was also in the car.