The father of a woman missing since Friday Sept. 18 2009, believes his daughter is being held against her will.
Michael Richardson says he's been conducting his own investigation into the disappearance of his daughter Mitrice, 24. He says her friends told him she's been acting strangely ever since she met a female friend who's been supplying Mitrice with marijuana. Richardson says he's trying to track that friend down in an effort to locate his daughter.
Richardson continues to blame the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department for releasing his daughter after sheriff's deputies affested her Thursday night.
Witnesses said Richardson was drunk and unable to pay her $89 bill at Geoffrey's restaurant on Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu about 10 p.m. Thursday, according to her parents.
Richardson was taken by deputies to the Malibu-Lost Hills station and booked on suspicion of not paying for the meal and possession of less than an ounce of marijuana, sheriff's spokesman Steve Whitmore told the Los Angeles Times. The marijuana was allegedly found in her white 1990 Honda Civic, which was impounded.
Richardson was released about 1:25 a.m. Friday because "she exhibited no signs of mental illness or intoxication. She was fine. She's an adult,'' Whitmore said.
Whitmore said the jailer offered to let Richardson stay through the night, but she declined.
According to her mother, Latice Sutton, a manager she spoke to at Geoffrey's said Richardson appeared to be in "no condition to drive'' while at the restaurant.
Whitmore says if Richardson had been intoxicated at the restaurant, deputies would have arrested her for public intoxication, which they did not do.
Sutton said she called the Malibu-Lost Hills station to ask about posting bail and picking up her daughter, but deputies told her they had released her because they did not have room to keep her in jail.
The sheriff's station is on a frontage road to the Ventura (101) Freeway, in a business park that is unfamiliar to the woman, her family said. It is not served by buses at night, and family members say the woman has not contacted the family or been seen by them since.
The woman's father, Michael Richardson, said he was worried about his daughter's mental state after seeing her booking photo.
"She looked like a demon had come inside her. That was not my
daughter,'' he said. "It ran chills up my spine. I've never seen my
daughter look like that.''
"They allowed her to walk out of that facility and down that road in the pitch black night,'' he told The Times. "That's not right. Now, I just want to find my child.''
Whitmore says deputies at the Lost Hills station asked Mitrice if she wanted to stay the night and she declined. Whitmore says she also signed a document indicating she was not drunk.
The woman's mother said deputies told her nearby residents had called to say a woman was sleeping on porches, indicating to her that Richardson was stumbling around a nearby residential neighborhood early Friday. Her parents filed a missing person report with the Los Angeles Police Department.
Richardson is a graduate of Cal State Fullerton and recently moved to Los Angeles to live with her grandmother near the area where she planned on teaching. She last made contact with her family at her home in the Southeast area of Los Angeles on Wednesday, police said.
Richardson is black, 5 feet 5 inches tall and weighs about 135 pounds. She has brown, curly hair and hazel eyes, and was last seen wearing a dark shirt and blue jeans, police said.
According to a flyer made by her family, Richardson has tattoos on her lower abdomen and behind her neck.
Police urged anyone with information on her whereabouts to call the LAPD's Missing Persons Unit at (213) 485-5381, or (877) LAPD-24-7 after business hours or on weekends.
Police sexually abuse Women all the time.
A detective forced a woman to perform a sex act and then raped her while on duty in his own police station, it has been alleged.
The woman, a heroin addict, had been called to the station to be told that a complaint that she had been gang-raped by three men would not be investigated any further.
But it was alleged that Timothy Michael Jones, at the time a trainee detective with North Wales Police based at St Asaph Police Station, took her to a side room.
Prosecutor Robin Spencer QC claimed at Mold Crown Court that Jones asked if he could have a private word with a family support worker who had accompanied her.
He put the complainant in a side room, then returned and told her he could not believe that she had taken the complaint so far, adding ‘how do you think anyone would believe you,’ it was alleged.
He called the woman a smack-head and a whore. She was shocked and scared and he pushed her against a wall and started to molest her, it is claimed.
Jones then told her to get on to her knees and forced her to perform a sex act, saying ‘I heard that is what you are good at.’
When she said she was not going to do it, he allegedly told her: ‘You are, you know you are.’
Mr Spencer said that the officer then said ‘Let's finish this off’, pulled off her underwear and had intercourse with her on the floor.
It was alleged that Jones had not believed her original allegation that she was raped by three men but Mr Spencer said that her dress had not been sent off for forensic examination.
Jones later claimed that was because a superintendent had said it was not worth the cost involved, but that was not the case, claimed Mr Spencer.
Jones, who faces two rape charges following the allegation in the police station in August 2006, is also charged with raping another woman between March and July 2007 at her home.
She had made a complaint to the police, he visited her bedsit and it was alleged that he had asked her to remove her bra.
But he was back a week later and when she was taking a shower, he burst into the bathroom and raped her, it is alleged.
Jones, of Morley Road in Rhyl, who resigned from North Wales Police in April last year ahead of disciplinary procedures, denies all three rape charges and says that they did not happen.
Mr Spencer told the jury that in March of last year the defendant, a married man, had been cleared of a sexual offence against a woman he had met fleetingly in the police station.
But in his own evidence in that trial he had told the jury that he had been to her home while off duty, they had kissed and that she had performed a sex act on him, said Mr Spencer.
He had said in his trial that he was ashamed and embarrassed, was not proud of it, and knew that it was wrong on all levels, as a husband, father and police officer.
Following that complaint police checked his mobile phone, contacted women he had rung, and the two women made the rape complaints.
There were also allegations that he had behaved in a sexually inappropriate way towards other women.
Mr Spencer told the jury today that it was an unusual case and he started his opening to them by saying that ‘truth is sometimes stranger than fiction’.
Both rape complainants were vulnerable women whose complaints of crime the defendant was supposed to be investigating, he said.
Both women were vulnerable and feared that they would not be believed, he said.
‘The two women did not know each other.
‘The complaints of rape were made entirely independent of each other,’ said Mr Spencer.
At first the jury may wonder whether the allegations could possibly be true, he said.
‘But taken together, and in conjunction with behaviour of a sexual nature towards other women he had come across in the course of his duty, a very disturbing picture emerges,’ he said.
‘The prosecution say that the inescapable conclusion, sadly, is that the defendant grossly breached the trust which is the hallmark of the relationship between the police and the public and that he committed very serious offences.’
The trial, before a jury of six men and six women, is proceeding before Judge Dafydd Hughes. It is expected to last two weeks.
