7 of 14 Victims Identify Hubbard in Police Lineups

Henry Hubbard Jr., the former San Diego police officer charged in a crime series of rapes, kidnapings, sexual assaults and murder attempts, has been positively identified in police lineups by seven of 14 victims, according to grand jury transcripts.

Five other victims tentatively identified Hubbard as the man who terrorized them at several beach locations over a two-month period this summer. Two could not make an identification.

In all but one case, the lineups were shown with six men wearing ski masks, similar to the style worn in seven of the eight attacks. The other case involved a daytime rape in which no mask was worn.

The 392-page transcript, taken from the jury hearing on Oct. 29 and 30, portrays a cool and collected gunman who had grown increasingly brazen with each attack.

Earlier assaults occurred in remote beach areas near darkened cliffs, but by the end of the series the masked assailant approached a couple sitting on a bluff outside their apartment and attacked two men and a woman on Torrey Pines State Beach close to Highway 101.

Hubbard has pleaded not guilty to 35 felony counts, five of which were filed against him shortly after the Torrey Pines attack Aug. 15 and his subsequent arrest. The special grand jury, convened to consider criminal cases, indicted Hubbard on 30 new counts two weeks ago.

An officer for 4 1/2 years, the 29-year-old Hubbard patrolled the beach area and worked the late shift, until 1 a.m. All but one of the attacks occurred shortly after that time.

Hubbard is linked to the Aug. 15 assault, in which two men were shot and Hubbard turned up at a nearby hospital with a gunshot wound several hours later, by evidence found at the scene. It includes his police-issue flashlight, blood samples and cartridge casings that match a gun make that is registered to him, prosecutors say.

But Hubbard has told police investigators that he was attacked by a group of men on his way home from work after his car broke down on the freeway. He said he doesn’t know how his flashlight could have been found on the beach. His attorney, Kerry Steigerwalt, said the blood samples have too large a margin of error to prove conclusively they are from Hubbard.

In sometimes tense and riveting testimony, victims of the attacks, including women who were raped, testified that the gunman seemed to appear out of nowhere, dressed all in black and training a gun on them. In each of the beach attacks, he demanded money and car keys but didn’t always seem interested in anything handed over.

An eerie pattern developed: at least one man and one woman were always present, and the woman was always asked to bind the man’s hands, usually with duct tape the gunman had brought along. He would sometimes get so frustrated with the woman’s efforts that he would grab the tape and finish the job himself.

The male victims would be placed face down or with their backs to the gunman, as he took their girlfriends behind some rocks or to remote areas of the beach to rape them.

During a rape of two girls, a 13-year-old and a 14-year-old, at Windansea Beach in La Jolla, he took the 13-year-old away from her girlfriend and older boyfriend and raped her. At one point, he asked, “Why don’t you get into it a little bit?” according to her testimony.

He then walked back over to the 14-year-old and, with a gun at her head, told her to lie beside her friend. He ordered them to masturbate themselves and each other.

He thought to ask the 14-year-old if she was a virgin. When she said yes, he replied, “We’ll change that,” before raping her. He then went on to rape the 13-year-old twice more.

At all times, both girls had their shirts wrapped around their heads so the gunman could not be identified.

When it was over, and the gunman ran away, the younger girl stood stunned on the beach with her friends.

“We just, like, all held and hugged each other and cried for a minute or two,” she said.

The male friend, Johnny Contreras, picked Hubbard out of the police lineup, the prosecution said.

“The voice, right away, sent chills down my spine,” he said. “That voice was the person that I heard that night.”

Two women were lucky to escape. One waited for the gunman to turn his head during a confrontation at Dog Beach in Solana Beach July 19 and then struck him hard in his left temple. Her boyfriend was several hundred yards away, untying himself, when the gunman looked away.

After she hit him, she sprinted off, fearing she would be shot.

“I heard him running after me for a little bit, so I was going to run into the water to get away,” she said. “Literally, I was waiting for a gunshot. The way I was running was sort of jagged, just like I didn’t know if he was going to shoot me or not.”

During the lineup, she heard the voice later identified as Hubbard’s.

“I don’t know what happened,” she said. “(My boyfriend) was sitting right next to me and literally, my heart started beating. And I grabbed (his) arm, and I’m just clenching onto his hand. I don’t know why it affected me so much.”

The woman’s identification was only tentative because she thought the physical build of the suspect more closely resembled someone else in the lineup.

Another woman, sitting with her boyfriend outside her Del Mar apartment building on the bluff, saw the assailant approach behind them. He asked for their car keys, but when they were handed over and the car’s location was described, “he didn’t seem to be listening,” she said.

The gunman tried to lead them down a steep bluff, but the boyfriend protested. He yelled for his girlfriend to run and, when she did, the boyfriend took two steps toward the gunman and ran in the opposite direction, he told the grand jury. No shots were fired and the incident was over.

Described as “calm, in control,” by Aldo Ochoa--one of the two gunshot victims at Torrey Pines State Beach--the gunman panicked when Ochoa’s friend, Arthur Lee Gracia, charged him and was also shot.

“I kept going at him, and I grabbed his gun with my left hand and hit him in the face with my right hand,” Gracia said.

The three men were struggling as the victims’ female friend, Charisma Carpenter, looked on in horror.

“I ended up turning the gun into his stomach,” Gracia testified. “I was trying to reach the trigger to shoot him, but I couldn’t. So it snapped back again. Then the gun went off.”