For 25 years, a sexual predator held the law in his hands, and
it’s a shame his peers in the San Benito County Sheriff’s Office
took a quarter of a century to get Michael Rodrigues off the
streets for good.
For 25 years, a sexual predator held the law in his hands, and it’s a shame his peers in the San Benito County Sheriff’s Office took a quarter of a century to get Michael Rodrigues off the streets for good.
With so many continual warning signs, and with so little done to stop his deplorable actions, it now warrants an independent examination of sheriff’s office practices and policies to ensure the Blue Wall never again takes precedent over protecting citizens’ livelihoods.
A jury last week convicted the former sergeant for raping three women. He abused his position of authority in a habitual line of behavior that prompted prosecutor Patrick Palacios to call Rodrigues a “serial rapist.”
Although sheriff’s officials and investigators played a major role in Rodrigues’ ultimate conviction by conducting investigations and recommending rape charges, it was their job to do so. It was their duty and obligation to recognize and relinquish what finally became too obvious to ignore. And they fulfilled it far too late.
It became clear throughout the two-week trial that Rodrigues fit a definitive profile of a problem officer for many years. In a culture of professionals who are trained to recognize signs of such behavior, it’s inconceivable that such misconduct merely slipped through the cracks. It’s inexcusable that Sheriff Curtis Hill and others waited so long in taking the appropriate, aggressive tack toward preventing this animal from unleashing himself on victims again and again and again.
Documented warning signs during the trial, among a slew of others, included reserve deputy John Klauer’s testimony alleging Rodrigues attempted to rape a prostitute in a Nevada hotel room in 2004. Klauer testified that two weeks after the incident, he discussed it with former sheriff’s Sgt. Wes Walker. Others soon became aware as well. Yet, sheriff’s officials waited three years to question the matter, and only when mounting rape allegations gave them no other choice.
They waited three years when there already had been an established history of inappropriate behavior by Rodrigues, in the least enough to get him removed from his position as a peace officer.
Going back to 1987, in Rodrigues’ fifth year as a deputy, then-Sheriff Harvey Nyland suspended him for more than 10 weeks after a grand jury indicted him alleging a felony charge that he falsely imprisoned a 19-year-old Santa Cruz woman. Prosecutors dropped the charge three months later when the woman refused to testify.
Two years later, his girlfriend at the time alleged battery, brandishing a weapon and false imprisonment against Rodrigues, but she later dropped her charges and noted to the court how he had enrolled in counseling and she didn’t think “it would happen again.” Around that same time, the district attorney’s office alleged Rodrigues had been illegally using an office computer to track women’s personal information to possibly date them.
Two years later, he was placed on paid leave for an unknown length of time for something Nyland had referred to in a memo as “unlawful.” Five months later, he was on a two-week leave again for an undisclosed reason.
That was two decades ago, but Hill happened to be undersheriff in 1989 when the office had been conducting internal affairs investigations on Rodrigues. They have spent almost their entire law enforcement careers together.
Even after Rodrigues shot and killed an unarmed man on the side of Highway 156 in June 2007, Hill wasted little time in jumping to his sergeant’s defense and calling the shooting justified, which remains questionable to some.
The bottom line is, people in that office knew how potentially dangerous Rodrigues was to the very community for which they were sworn to serve and protect. In this case, they didn’t serve, and the only person they protected was Rodrigues.
It signals a serious, long-held management problem. How did this happen? How did logic, morality and responsibility get trumped by such a shallow, self-serving credo? There’s only one way to find the answer, an independent investigation from an objective source. Now, it’s on county leaders to show the courage necessary to seek out the truth. It’s time to impanel a blue-ribbon commission to investigate whether all these tragedies could have been, and should have been, prevented.
