Affair with officer alleged after he cut her ‘a break’
After a Calgary officer had a woman’s impaired-driving charge reduced at the scene of the offence, the two began a sexual relationship, the woman testified Thursday.
Caren Lileikis said she had been drinking vodka in her idling car in the Cranston Sobey’s parking lot on Nov. 11, 2015, and was “not sober” when Const. Mark McCullough knocked on her window.
She said they remembered each other from when Lileikis had given a witness statement two months earlier about a theft at a southeast Home Depot store where she worked.
“He said he would cut me a bit of a break because he saw my Alcoholics Anonymous chips and knew me from Home Depot, so he’d just drive me home and the vehicle would be towed,” she told provincial court by video in McCullough’s obstruction of justice and breach of trust trial.
Court has heard McCullough, 44, was instrumental in having an impaired-driving charge reduced to a suspended licence.
After he drove the woman to her Auburn Bay home, Lileikis said she hugged and thanked McCullough “because I was grateful he drove me home and I wasn’t charged.”
“He said, ‘ Wow, most people tell me to F-off.’ ”
McCullough, she testified, returned her driver’s licence a day before the mandatory 72-hour suspension period was over “but said he’d have to sneak it out,” and drove her to the impound lot to retrieve her 2008 Dodge Avenger.
About a week after the parking lot incident, Lileikis said she was charged with impaired driving after she rear-ended another vehicle, noting McCullough wasn’t on the call.
“I tried to communicate with him in the holding cell,” she said.
Lileikis said her push for the 10year officer to honour a promise he had made to pay $100 of her impound costs wasn’t fulfilled. But the two struck up a relationship that led to kissing and oral sex in McCullough’s private vehicle, said the woman.
“It just happened,” said Lileikis. But the woman said she balked at McCullough’s suggestion to provide nude photos of herself.
The relationship withered when McCullough’s then-partner discovered the affair and sent her a hostile Facebook message, said Lileikis.
Defence lawyer Cory Wilson argued Lileikis pursued McCullough following the Nov. 11 incident, including by contacting him over the $100. And he said the two barely knew each other during the Sobey ’s parking lot encounter.
“If someone were to say you were friends with him, that’d be incorrect, right?” said Wilson. Lileikis agreed.
Last November, McCullough was acquitted of charges alleging he had assaulted his then-pregnant fiancee in 2016.
The trial continues Friday.