Officer fired for falsely accusing woman of rape
A Denver police officer was fired for falsely accusing the mother of his child of raping him in an attempt to avoid paying child support.
The city fired Officer Samuel Sheppard on Sept. 16 for the false report and for lying during the internal investigation, according to a Sept. 16 disciplinary letter obtained through a records request by The Denver Post.
Sheppard on April 1, 2018, reported the woman raped him and that the sexual assault led to the conception of the pair’s child. Sheppard said the woman entered his home when he was incapacitated and using prescribed medication while on leave from the police department. She then raped him and the assault led to the child’s conception, Sheppard said. The child was born in October 2017.
But an investigation into Sheppard’s claims found that he lied about when the child was conceived and that he drove to pick up the woman on the night in question, the letter shows.
“The evidence presented is that Officer Sheppard made an unfounded sexual assault claim against the complainant seemingly to avoid or limit his financial obligations,” Deputy Director of Safety Mary Dulacki wrote in the letter.
The day after he made the sexual assault report, Sheppard, who had been a Denver cop since 2013, appeared for an initial child support hearing. During the hearing, Sheppard said that he was the father of the child and didn’t mention sexual assault, according to the letter.
Denver police investigators presented the sexual assault report to the Denver District Attorney’s Office, but prosecutors declined to file charges.
At a child support hearing in July 2018, Sheppard testified that the woman sexually assaulted him while he was on leave. Police records showed he was on leave from Nov. 1, 2016, to Nov. 28, 2016, but texts between the two show that the incident occurred in January 2017 and the baby’s birthday aligns with the January date.
In January of this year, the woman reported a number of concerns to Denver police internal affairs, including the false police report and Sheppard’s lies during child custody hearings. She sent emails and text messages with her reports that she said showed Sheppard was lying.
Text messages between the two before and after the sexual encounter show no accusations of assault and that Sheppard, in fact, picked up the woman from her home that night. The following morning, he asked her if she was on birth control and she said she was not.
“Oh no,” he responded, the letter shows.
In the months that followed, he invited her to a family party and the two had sex at least once.
In his interview with internal affairs, Sheppard said he continued to have a sexual relationship with the woman after the alleged assault because he “felt that the damage was already done,” according to the letter.
“Five days after the incident, Officer Sheppard offered to leave his door open for the complainant; an offer that is hard to reconcile with the allegation that he was the victim of a sexual assault by the complainant,” Dulacki wrote. “Months later, the texts confirm that the complainant and Officer Sheppard were social and intimate partners, a situation that appears incongruous to an accusation of sexual assault, even if, as Officer Sheppard characterized, the damage was already done.”
“It is inconsistent with an officer’s sworn duty to uphold the law for an officer to make an untrue claim of a criminal violation and then persist in that untruthfulness in his internal affairs interviews,” Dulacki wrote.
Sheppard has not appealed the decision, Denver Department of Public Safety spokeswoman Kelli Christensen said. Investigators pursued a criminal case against Sheppard for perjury, but prosecutors from the Denver District Attorney’s Office declined to file charges, Christensen said.