Woman sues police who didn’t believe her rape report

Tom Gardner

Tuesday, March 23, 1999 | 2:25 a.m.

SPARKS, Nev. -- After calling 911 in November to report that she had been raped, Jennifer W. says, police laughed at her, called her a liar and warned her she would have to pay for the lab tests if the results came back negative.

Finally, last week, the man she accused pleaded guilty to raping her. And he also admitted raping a teen-age girl more recently.

Now Jennifer, a 24-year-old junior at the University of Nevada at Reno, is suing the Sparks Police Department, its chief and three other members of the force for more than $200,000.

"There wouldn't be a second victim if the Sparks police did their jobs instead of calling me 'a goddamned liar,"' she says.

The officers accused in the case and City Attorney Chet Adams say they cannot comment while the lawsuit is pending.

Timothy Mobly pleaded guilty to attacking Jennifer, who asked that her last name not be used. Mobly and his roommate, Aaron Cross, also pleaded guilty to charges they lured a 17-year-old girl to their apartment on Jan. 2 and raped her before she escaped the next morning.

Prosecutors are asking for 30 years in prison for Mobley and 20 for Cross.

Jennifer, like the 17-year-old girl, met the men through the Internet. Jennifer dated Mobly briefly, then tried to break it off via e-mail. Mobly wanted to meet, and she told him he could come to her parents' house, where she lived.

Jennifer said Mobly showed up with Cross and immediately attacked her, handcuffing her hands and feet, stuffing a sock in her mouth and putting her in a suitcase in the trunk of his car. Mobly later cut off her clothes and raped her. Then they drove her home.

"They thanked her for helping them live out their fantasy," says her attorney, Marc Picker.

Jennifer says she told them she would call the police, but they told her that nobody would believe that someone had raped her and then taken her home. "Little did Jenn know he was right and she was wrong," Picker says.

She did call police, and spent three hours being interviewed. At the end, officers told her they thought she was lying and threatened to prosecute her unless she immediately withdrew her complaint, Picker says.

When Jennifer was taken to a hospital for an examination, Detective David Adams allegedly told her she would be charged for the test if it came back negative for signs of rape. She was billed, but Picker says he thinks it came back positive and police lied.

Jennifer, a biology and psychology major, says she urged investigators to search Mobly's trunk for DNA evidence and her room for fingerprints. She says the police laughed.

"My father keeps the garage as clean as the White House. He told them there were tire marks in the garage that he would never leave there and they blew him off," she says.

Later, Mobly even sent her a taunting e-mail: "I got away with rape." Jennifer says she called police to tell them about it and got a call the next day from Sgt. Robert Schmidt.

"He told me, 'You're a goddamned liar. Nobody in town believes you. Your parents don't believe you. You accused an innocent man of rape,' and he slammed the phone down on me," she says.

Two months later, police contacted her, saying her case was going to the district attorney's office because of new evidence: A 17-year-old student who had been lured through another Internet liaison to Mobley and Cross' apartment had escaped an assault, half-naked.

Jennifer says police did not even apologize. "I knew it was going to be rough, that they would ask me a lot of hard questions," she says. "But I never imagined I would be called a liar."

Picker says four other women have come forward with stories about being accused by the Sparks police of making up rape complaints over the past 20 years.

Jennifer has left school and is in counseling to deal with the taunts she says she heard. "I don't know why they didn't believe me," she says. "I hope what I went through will make things better for other women in future cases."