Jury Gets Case of the Missing Police Flashlight

Prosecutors say the snatching of a police officer’s flashlight during a melee at a protest against Minuteman Project founder and congressional candidate Jim Gilchrist constitutes petty theft.

But to the accused and her lawyer, it’s police and prosecutors who are being petty.

Theresa Dang, 26, of Westminster is charged with stealing the $100 flashlight during a May 25 protest rally outside the Garden Grove Women’s Civic Club, where Gilchrist was speaking. She was charged with two counts of misdemeanor theft three weeks after the rally and three days after she and others asked the City Council at its meeting to investigate her allegations of abuse by police at the demonstration.

“Clearly, there is political vindictiveness involved,” said B. Kwaku Duren, the lawyer for Theresa Dang.

Jurors began deliberating Dang’s fate Wednesday after a one-day trial.

During the trial, an officer and a detective narrated video footage of the melee, saying it showed Dang stealing the flashlight and putting it in her purse.

Taking the stand, Dang acknowledged picking up the flashlight but said she thought it belonged to a friend who was being arrested. She said someone else then took the flashlight from her.

She did not ask the friend about the flashlight until her home was searched for it June 17, she testified. And, she added, when a Garden Grove detective called to ask whether she picked up the flashlight at the rally, she mentioned nothing about thinking it was her friend’s flashlight but instead told him that she needed to “follow up” with other people.

Duren told jurors that Dang refused to answer the detective’s questions because she already knew she had been charged with theft.

But the prosecutor, Deputy Dist. Atty. Erik Petersen, told jurors that he believed Dang lied on the stand, concocting a story about picking up a friend’s flashlight but not bringing in the friend to testify.

“If she was so willing to help” her friend, Petersen said, “why isn’t he willing to come testify and help her?”

Petersen told jurors that Dang saw the flashlight fall out of Officer David Lopez’s hip pocket and picked it up as a souvenir.

“She took the flashlight as a trophy,” he said. “It was an opportunistic crime based on the passions of that night.”

The flashlight has not been recovered.

After jurors started deliberating, Dang stood outside with a dozen supporters and worried about the jury makeup: four women, eight men, most middle-aged or older and predominantly white.

“They are not a jury of my peers,” said Dang, who is Vietnamese American. “There are a lot of people out there who look upon protest as a nuisance or people being violent, and they accept whatever police say.”

Dang was one of the nearly 300 people at the rally, which turned violent after one of the attendees forced his van through a crowd that decided to block the driveway.

Five protesters were arrested, three of them facing felony and misdemeanor charges related to the violence.

Gilchrist, a foe of illegal immigration and an Aliso Viejo resident whose Minutemen Project practices border vigilance at the U.S.-Mexico line, did not attend the trial and offered no comment. The candidate is focused on Tuesday’s special election, said spokesman Tim Bueler.

Bueler added that he attended Gilchrist’s Garden Grove speech, saw “violence and hatred coming from the protesters” and supports Dang’s prosecution.

“Certainly, stealing something from a police officer is unacceptable,” Bueler said. “Any person who does so should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”

Petersen, in his opening statement, agreed that Dang’s alleged theft should not be minimized.

“This is not the crime of the century, but nevertheless it’s still a crime,” the prosecutor said. “Our office and the city of Garden Grove take it seriously.”