U.S. Inquiry Targets Strohmeyer Friend

Federal authorities have opened a preliminary investigation into David Cash’s possible involvement in his high school friend’s notorious murder of a 7-year-old Los Angeles girl in a Nevada casino restroom last year, officials said Thursday.

Despite months of intense public pressure, county prosecutors in Las Vegas have refused to pursue criminal charges against Cash--the brash 20-year-old UC Berkeley student who acknowledges that he witnessed the start of Jeremy Strohmeyer’s assault on Sherrice Iverson but did virtually nothing to stop it.

Federal prosecutors used a sitting federal grand jury in Las Vegas this week to take testimony in the case. The panel heard from two Long Beach teenagers who had been friends of both Cash and Strohmeyer, the Long Beach man serving a life sentence after confessing three months ago to the sexual assault and strangulation of Sherrice.

“It’s too early to know where the investigation would go or what direction it would take,” one federal source close to the case said Thursday.

Federal prosecutors have asserted jurisdiction before in cases prosecuted at local levels--notably in the Rodney G. King beating, for which two Los Angeles police officers were convicted on federal civil rights charges in 1993 after they and two others were acquitted in state court.

The entry of federal authorities into the Iverson tragedy angered Cash’s attorney, who accused federal prosecutors of bowing to a mob mentality among the public. But the development boosted the hopes of the victim’s family and community activists who maintain that Cash’s disregard for the little girl’s life--and his failure to report her murder after his return to Southern California--rise to the level of criminal conduct.

“He could have stopped the crime, but he didn’t do anything to help my grandbaby. I hope they get him,” Joe Lee Laird, the victim’s grandmother, said from her Los Angeles area home Thursday.

Said Najee Ali, director of the Sherrice Iverson Justice Campaign in Los Angeles: “I’m excited that the federal government has heard our calls for justice. . . . We’ve known all along that David Cash was more than an innocent bystander. I always felt he was a co-conspirator in Sherrice’s murder.”

Cash has acknowledged in interviews with the media and the police that he saw Strohmeyer carrying the struggling girl into a restroom stall at what was then the Primadonna Resort & Casino near the California border around 3:45 one morning in May 1997. He says he looked into the stall but left before Strohmeyer began sexually assaulting and strangling the girl, although two classmates who spoke with Cash have challenged that assertion in interviews with authorities and The Times. Those classmates were not the ones who testified this week.

James Trujillo, 19, said Thursday that he and Jordan Wheeler, 18, former Long Beach schoolmates of Cash and Strohmeyer, testified before the grand jury Wednesday. He said he understands that other people have also been called to testify.

“It’s kind of tough having the whole thing starting again,” Trujillo said. Although he declined to elaborate on this week’s testimony, Trujillo told police last year that he had not believed Strohmeyer and Cash when they told him about Sherrice’s murder. Trujillo’s conversation with his friends took place the evening before Strohmeyer’s arrest.

The refusal of Nevada authorities to pursue charges against Cash has triggered an outpouring of protest in recent months, including petitions and radio call-in campaigns, proposals for Good Samaritan laws that would require witnesses to report crimes against children, and protests seeking to have Cash drummed out of UC Berkeley.

Kathryn Landreth, the U.S. attorney for Nevada, refused to confirm any details of the investigation in an interview Thursday but she did acknowledge that many people have contacted her office about the Cash case.

“People have expressed concern over David Cash’s behavior and suggested where there might be a federal link” to allow criminal prosecution, she said. Some have asked whether Cash could be prosecuted under federal civil rights statutes, among other areas, she said.

Although asserting that such public sentiment would never determine whether her office would bring charges, she said, “I take comments from the community very seriously.” But Mark Werksman, attorney for Cash, said that is no reason to begin a federal investigation.

“The U.S. government should not be responding to the clamor of the mob. They should only undertake a matter as serious as a federal investigation when they have evidence of a crime. To begin a federal investigation to placate the public when there is no evidence of a crime is inappropriate, and it may be an abuse of federal law,” he said.

“It’s hard to imagine what federal crime could have occurred-here,” he added.

Clark County Dist. Atty. Stewart Bell said his office welcomes the federal inquiry.

“We certainly didn’t have any love lost for Mr. Cash, and we found his involvement morally reprehensible. But what he did didn’t violate any of the state laws of Nevada. If the feds find that what he did violated a federal law, it would be their prerogative to prosecute him.”

Bell said that a few months ago--after Strohmeyer’s September guilty pleas--a federal agent spent several days reviewing the district attorney’s records in the case.

But federal agents have only begun their inquiry in earnest in recent days, said Kevin Caudle, FBI spokesman in Las Vegas.

Cash “claims to have been a witness, at least following the crime’s occurrence, and we’re looking into that to see whether there were any federal violations, since the state didn’t prosecute it. Where it would go I don’t know,” he said.

Caudle said he is uncertain how the investigation began but that public pressure certainly appears to have played a part.

“I think it’s clear somebody [in federal law enforcement] is wanting something done about this, and we’re trying to see if there’s a way of getting something done. The public outcry has been very loud,” he said.

Strohmeyer, who is white, reportedly used a racial epithet to describe the victim, who was black, and that has prompted speculation that prosecutors might seek to show a racial motivation in pursuing civil rights charges against Cash. But Werksman dismissed such theories as “far-fetched,” adding: “His crime was one of total neglect. His actions were to neglect Sherrice Iverson, not to exhibit any racial animosity toward her.”

But the victim’s father, Leroy Iverson, who left Sherrice with her older brother in the early morning hours while he gambled, said he believes racial issues have delayed Cash’s prosecution.

“If David Cash was a black person who killed a white kid, he’d be dead by now,” Iverson said. “David Cash should be convicted like Strohmeyer. He did just as much wrong.”

Stories about Jeremy Strohmeyer and the murder of Sherrice Iverson are on The Times’ Web site: https://www.latimes.com/jeremy