Winters said deputies took him out of bed, handcuffed him, and made him stand in the front yard of his Sterling, Va., home in his pajamas while they patted him down, in full view of the neighborhood. .
When he went to the Loudoun jail, Winters said, he was strip-searched, which his attorney said violated sheriff’s policies because he wasn’t booked into the jail. But his mug shot was taken and distributed to the news media along with a press release saying he was accused of sexually abusing one of his students when he was 17 years old. Soon after, he was fired from his job at Park View High School, after teaching in Loudoun for eight years.
When the prosecutors in Loudoun looked at the case brought by Detective Peter Roque, they quickly dismissed all the cases. Winters sued Roque and Loudoun Sheriff Mike Chapman (R). And after a five-day trial earlier this month, a Loudoun jury took less than two hours to find two law enforcement officers liable for Winters’ economic and punitive damages. They gave him $5 million.
It appears that Roque did not seriously investigate any of the student’s claims, Winters’ attorney, Thomas K. Plofchan, said. In a sworn search warrant application in November 2018, Roque wrote, “The statements of the witnesses were corroborated by the phone records,” but there were no records, Plofchan said the evidence showed.
Winters said she couldn’t get a job for two years, even as a stock clerk at a grocery store, with her master’s degree in teaching. He lost all his friends, many from his years in the Loudoun schools. And he developed severe anxiety, including an involuntary tremor. “It became so embarrassing, I couldn’t even leave my house,” Winters said. “This has been going on for four years. The repeated trauma of reliving it created this tremor. My whole body was shaking.”
“I’m hoping I can just start rebuilding,” Winters said. He sold his house and moved from Sterling, where he grew up and worked. “It’s definitely not a cure-all. The information [about the arrest] is still out there.”
Court records show the defendant is a Park View graduate who first came forward to the school district with her mother in the fall of 2018, alleging that Winters abused her at her home. He then took his accusations to the Loudoun sheriff’s office. But the school district and the Loudoun prosecutor’s office determined the former student was 18 at the time of her allegations, and therefore not a child under the supervision of an adult, meaning no crime occurred. Winters denied that he had sex with her at any time.
Roque, a detective with the sheriff’s office’s Eastern Loudoun Station, declined to comment, as did Chapman, who was not involved in the investigation, and their attorney, Alexander Francuzenko. Francuzenko argued at trial that Roque’s mistakes were honest, and that “sometimes you get it wrong and you don’t want to, but that doesn’t mean you’re malicious,” the Loudoun Times reported.
The former student’s mother said in an interview that she remains convinced that Winters sexually abused her son, and that it was wrong even though the contact happened when her son was 18.
“Do you know what his scar is for that?” the mother said to her son. “He got all of this with $5 million on top of it. That’s a miscarriage of justice.” The former student, now 23, could not be reached for comment.
Michele Bowman, information officer for the Loudoun sheriff’s office, said the defendants will appeal. Five days after the verdict, Chapman was named “Sheriff of the Year” by the National Sheriffs Association.
Five of the seven jurors who heard the case did not respond to messages seeking comment, and two jurors could not be located. A spokesperson for the Loudoun school district said it could not comment on personnel matters.
In her lawsuit, Winters alleged that mother and son changed the dates of the alleged sexual abuse to a time when the son was 17, after Roque and the school district initially refused to investigate. The mother signed an affidavit about the accusations, which Roque heavily redacted, and admitted she had records of texts between her son and Winters, the lawsuit said. The son said he called and texted Winters repeatedly, but wiped his phone before meeting with authorities, Plofchan said.
In the new alleged dates in 2017, Winters said she was at a volleyball tournament on one occasion, and out of state at a wedding on another. But Roque did not question Winters or check his alibi, Plofchan said. Two unidentified deputies showed up at Winters’ door and he said he refused to talk to them.
Roque obtained an arrest warrant and search warrant from a magistrate in November 2018, including a handwritten claim that phone records corroborated the accusations. A search of his home, and his classroom, turned up nothing, but Winters has been charged with felony sexual abuse. After the arrest, Roque obtained search warrants for the accused’s two phones, which had no evidence of sex while he was a minor, according to the lawsuit.
Plofchan took the case, and in early 2019 presented his evidence of Roque’s lack of investigation to Loudoun prosecutors, who asked to see Roque’s evidence, namely the text records claimed by the victim’s mother. -accused of having. Winters said in the lawsuit that the mother then told Roque that he was “bluffing.” The charges against Winters were dismissed, but the Loudoun school board still fired him.
“After the arrest,” said Plofchan, “they did everything they should have done before the arrest,” such as searching the house and phones. Plofchan said Roque “admitted to bringing the case without doing any investigation.”
The accuser’s mother said the system allowed her family down. “No one stood up for my son,” said the mother. In an interview, he denied telling Roque that he was bluffing about his phone records. He said there were no phone records when his son was 17 because he only spoke to Winters in person at school.
The mother and her son were subpoenaed at the trial but did not testify. Plofchan said this is because the trial focused on Roque’s knowledge at the time he was getting charges — the lawsuit alleged malicious prosecution — and not the entire situation of the case.
The mother pointed to the Loudoun school board’s actions in firing Winters as the appropriate response. Plofchan said an internal trial before an administrative judge cleared Winters of any wrongdoing, found that the accuser was not credible, and that the district wrongly appealed to the board. at the school and used possibly falsified phone records to conclude that Winters had an inappropriate relationship with the student. Nothing about the school district’s handling of the case was presented to the jury.
“Once I was arrested,” Winters said, “I was blacklisted from everyone at school, from all my friends, from all my group chats with teachers. I don’t feel safe in my community. I couldn’t go outside, or go to church. They all thought I was guilty. No one gave me the benefit of the doubt. It’s terrible.”
So Winters filed suit, and Chapman and Roque did not try to argue that the charges against Winters had been approved by a prosecutor, which would have been an affirmative defense, Plofchan said. Chapman did not attend the trial. The settlement will be paid out of a state fund where many towns pool their money to pay for judgments like this, and a secondary insurance policy that Loudoun takes out, Plofchan said.
The trial began on February 6. “This has been the worst week of my life,” Winters said. He had to watch the more than three-hour video of Roque interviewing his accuser and his mother, and “the ridiculous accusations they made against me.” Winters said when she testified, the jury could see her visibly shaken.
The jury got to the case at 4 p.m. Friday afternoon, and when Circuit Court Judge Margaret P. Spencer asked an hour later if the jury wanted to go home for the weekend, they said no, Plofchan said. At 5:30 p.m., Spencer asked the jury if they wanted dinner, and they declined, saying they were almost done. By 6 p.m., the verdict was in.
“I need time to process it,” Winters said. “I definitely remember hearing a number and not knowing what it meant.” He said his second-chair attorney, Jacqueline A. Kramer, “wrote the number. I turned and looked at him and he said, ‘It’s true.’ Then we all hugged.”
Winters said he doesn’t think he’ll return to teaching. “I don’t think I’ll ever go back to the classroom,” she said, to which Plofchan said she’s had great success with many students at Sterling. “I can’t trust that someone else won’t do it again. The scariest part is that it can happen to anyone. “
