The sexual assault trial of former Canterbury police chief John LaRoche opened Monday with prosecutors describing four traumatic attacks on a teenage cadet some 16 years ago, including one under the threat of a police baton, and the defense insisting the accuser is trying to “rewrite history” nearly two decades after the fact.
LaRoche, 45, is accused of pressuring the girl into oral sex during a nighttime ride-along in 1999 or 2000, when he was just starting out at the Boscawen Police Department and she was a 16-year-old mentee in its Explorer Program. The girl, now 33, also claims he touched her intimately twice while on duty at Boscawen’s old police headquarters and once directed her to perform a sexual act on herself when they were inside his cruiser.
In an opening statement to jurors Monday in Merrimack County Superior Court, Assistant Attorney General Lisa Wolford said LaRoche behaved coercively in each instance, threatening to handcuff the girl in one and showing her his baton while asking if she wanted “it inside her” in another.
“The defendant,” Wolford said, stressing the point, “asked a 16-year-old Explorer under his supervision and control whether she wanted a police baton shoved into her” sexually.
LaRoche, who went on to be chief of police in Canterbury until his resignation early this year, has admitted two of the encounters and said the other two, inside the old headquarters, might have occurred. But he says they were entirely consensual.
“John has never denied the moral inappropriateness of crossing that line,” defense attorney Nicholas Brodich said Monday, referencing the tryst.
“But the moral inappropriateness on that crossing of the line,” he continued, “does not make it a crime.”
Though the girl had reached New Hampshire’s age of consent when the encounters allegedly began, LaRoche is still subject to statutory charges because of his professional authority over her. But for a conviction, prosecutors will have to prove either that he used that authority coercively, or that the girl did not “freely consent” to the contact.
Brodich sharply questioned the girl’s account Monday, focusing on what he described as her counterintuitive behavior after the alleged encounters. He noted that she continued going on ride-alongs with LaRoche, twice asked him to be an employment reference, approached him cheerfully years later at a pizza shop, and returned at least once to the scene of the first purported encounter, at the Boscawen boat launch.
Wolford said that it had been difficult for the girl to process the assaults. She said the girl, like many victims of sexual assault, felt the need to internalize her trauma rather than confront it at such a young age.
“Who would believe her?” Wolford said of reporting the crime. “And when they didn’t believe her, how would she stay in the Explorer program? And if she couldn’t stay in the Explorer Program, how was she supposed to get the advantage of getting a jumpstart on a career in law enforcement? And if she just up and left, wouldn’t her parents wonder why, and wouldn’t she have to tell them? And when she did, when she told them about the defendant, (who) in his care and custody they have left her, wouldn’t they be devastated?”
The trial is expected to last four days.