Ex-officer sentenced for assault of multiple women

Winchester to serve 81 years in prison

A former San Mateo police officer has been sentenced to 81 years in prison after jurors convicted him of assaulting five women while on duty.

On Thursday, San Mateo County Superior Court Judge Lisa Novak denied probation for Stockton resident Noah White Winchester, 35, instead ensuring that he likely spends the rest of his life in state prison.

“A lot of times victims feel like we’re going to sweep these things under the rug because it’s a police officer, and it’s great to go back to them and say, ‘Just because the person who violated you was a police officer doesn’t mean we’ll treat them any differently,’” case prosecutor San Mateo County Deputy District Attorney Alpana Samant said.

The case began in October 2015, when a street sweeper encountered a woman asleep in her car near downtown Burlingame and called the police.

But when officers arrived, the woman refused to get out of the car, saying over and over again that she was terrified: Just a little ways down the road, she told officers, a policeman from a neighboring department assaulted her.

That tip led to a wideranging investigation all the way from Sacramento to the Peninsula to track a series of incidents between 2013 and 2015 when Winchester patrolled the city of San Mateo and the Los Rios Community College District.

During those years, Winchester assaulted five women — three in San Mateo and two in Sacramento — and in several cases threatened and kidnapped the victims, prosecutors said.

When he encountered the women in the field, he did not contact dispatch or call for backup, instead looking them up himself from his police cruiser computer, Samant said. That ensured that he was able to be alone with the victims without anyone else in the department knowing.

The search for additional victims in part hinged upon looking back through his old searches, Samant said, after which prosecutors aimed to show a pattern of hours that Winchester could not account for.

Throughout the threeweek trial, Winchester maintained that he didn’t call dispatch so as to “give the women a break,” Samant said. But jurors found him guilty of all 14 felony charges, including forcible rape, kidnapping to commit sexual assault and residential burglary.

Winchester’s case represented a first for both the San Mateo and Los Rios police departments. On Friday, both departments said that he is the only former cop to be convicted of on-duty sexual assaults that they’re aware of.

Winchester had spent four months working unsupervised in San Mateo following a probationary period. Before that, he for the Los Rios department for six years.

In 2016, he resigned from the San Mateo department while the initial investigation was still underway. That summer, he was formally charged.

His sentence also includes a credit for 1,464 days for time served since his arrest.