Phone calls by police led to 6th alleged victim in Rollins case

As an investigation into a series of alleged sexual assaults by an Anchorage police officer began to expand from one victim to several, detectives in 2009 placed calls to other women the officer had contacted while on duty.

The calls were portrayed by detectives as "quality control" inquiries, said assistant district attorney Brittany Dunlop at the start of the ongoing trial of Anthony Rollins. The detectives didn't mention names at first, Dunlop said, but they were fishing for more potential victims of one man in particular: then-Officer Rollins.

Investigators with the Police Department's Internal Affairs unit asked one of the woman if she'd had any problems with police during the contact.

"She said, 'Nothing with me, but you might want to talk to my friend,' " recalled Detective Bianca Cross, who testified Thursday.

The friend ultimately became the sixth and final woman to level sexual-assault allegations at Rollins. She testified in court Thursday that Rollins forced her hand onto his penis one morning in 2006.

Rollins, 43, is charged with first- and second-degree sexual assault, official misconduct, and criminal use of a computer. He's pleaded not guilty to all counts.

The woman testified that she met Rollins at her sister's mobile home in East Anchorage.

Nearly everyone there was passed out from drinking the night before and early that morning, the woman said. She was the only one in the home who hadn't been drinking, and she was trying to clean up when staff from the state Office of Children's Services showed up.

Her sister's boyfriend answered the door and told them they couldn't come in, she said. They said they'd come back with police.

She was standing in the kitchen when Rollins walked in and asked if she lived there, she said. She told him that she didn't.

"He asked me if he could talk to me in the back room," she testified. "I said, 'No, right here is fine.' "

Rollins asked for a hug, she said.

"Why?" she remembers asking, thinking his request was strange for a police officer.

Rollins stepped forward with his arms open and squeezed her body to his, she said.

Equipment on Rollins uniform pressed into her, and she said something to him about it, she said.

"He said, 'That's not the only thing that's hard,' " she testified.

That's when Rollins grabbed her hand, she said.

"He turned it, and placed it, toward him, on his penis," she said.

She looked around to see if anybody else had noticed but nobody could see where she stood with Rollins in the kitchen, she said.

"I felt really dirty, like violated," she said.

Days later, Rollins stopped at the home and left his phone number, asking that the woman call him. She called and left a message, and when Rollins called back he asked her out to lunch, she said.

" 'Well, why would I want to do that?' That's what I thought," she said. "That conversation was getting nowhere."

She hung up, but the calls kept coming, she said.

"There was restricted numbers popping up on my phone, and I didn't answer them, because I didn't want anything to do with him," she said.

She changed her number, she said.

On cross-examination, Rollins' defense attorney, Susan Carney, took several short, tangential lines of questioning with the alleged victim.

First Carney asked if she remembered how many people were in the house. The woman said there were four, plus her.

Carney then repeated a question Dunlop had already asked.

"And everybody in the house but you had been drinking?" Carney asked.

"Yes," the woman said.

Carney asked about pictures shown in court that were taken three years after the woman's sister had moved out of the mobile home, emphasizing that the pictures did not show the home as it looked in 2006.

The woman agreed that it looked different.

Next, Carney asked about the condition of the house, which the woman described as "a mess" that day.

Carney asked if the woman was certain who had placed the restricted calls to her phone, and the witness said she was not.

After the brief exchanges, Carney was done with the witness.

State prosecutors expect to wrap up their case against Rollins by Monday. Then it will be up to Carney to present Rollins' defense witnesses.

Fisherman's Choice Charters