Woman Ordered to Strip Says Officer ‘Frightened’ Her

A former Garden Grove police officer accused of forcing women motorists to expose themselves during trumped-up drug searches apparently focused on women who worked at two bars, waiting in his patrol car for them to leave work in the early-morning hours, according to police reports filed in court.

One of the officer’s alleged victims, a former waitress at Sugar’s bars in Westminster and Garden Grove, said in an interview that as many as 13 other employees had been approached by the officer, but police refused to confirm the number.

Geoffery Alan Lynch, 26, of Chino Hills, resigned as a patrol officer in November after his department investigated complaints from several women.

This week he pleaded not guilty to four counts of false imprisonment, felonies that could result in six years in prison and a $4,000 fine.

Lynch’s attorney, John D. Lueck, said he had just received a 63-page police report and audio and videotapes of interviews with alleged victims and was not prepared to comment on the case. He said his client “absolutely denies all the allegations against him.”

Lueck said Lynch had “some suspicions why someone might want to say these things against him.”

Statements of the four victims taken by police and filed in court alleged similar encounters with Lynch.

One of the women, a waitress at Sugar’s in Westminster near the Garden Grove city limits, said she noticed a police car parked across the street as she left work and saw it pull out behind her as she drove off. The officer stopped her, saying she had one headlight out, checked her driver’s license and registration, then sent her on.

Exactly a week later, the same officer followed her after she left work at a different Sugar’s, the one in Garden Grove, she told police.

Friends accompanied her to a gas station, where she saw the officer parked at a distance watching her, she said, adding that when the friends left and she drove away, the officer pulled her over.

Over a period of 20 to 25 minutes, the officer questioned her, searched her and said he was “debating” whether to arrest her and impound her car.

She said in an interview that his questions about her undergarments and remarks about clothing he found while searching her bag made her “frightened.”

“I didn’t know what he was going to do to me,” she said in an interview with The Times.

She told him she had to pick up her child from a baby-sitter’s because “I wanted him to know that someone was expecting me,” she said.

Rather than be arrested, the woman consented to pull down her undergarments and to turn back and forth, supposedly to prove she was not concealing drugs, according to the report. The officer then let her go, according to the report, saying: “Just remember you owe me. We’ll talk about the terms later.”

The investigator who interviewed the woman reported that when shown a photograph of Lynch, she gasped, put her hand to her mouth, “backed up all the way against the far arm of the chair” and said, “That’s him, that’s him.”

The investigator reported that he had to remove the photograph from view to continue the interview, “since it was obviously having a very traumatic effect” on the victim.

Another victim reported that she had a nearly identical encounter with Lynch and that when she talked to a friend, she discovered that the friend too had been approached. A fourth victim was found by investigators after calling women listed in Lynch’s records of patrol activity.

According to one victim interviewed by The Times, police concealed a sound transmitter on the fourth woman in hope that she would be stopped again. But that night turned out to be a busy one for police, and the suspect was occupied, she said.

Normally the hours from 2 to 6 a.m. are the slowest for patrol officers, a police spokesman said.