A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible early. Some clouds this evening will give way to mainly clear skies overnight. Low near 75F. Winds ENE at 5 to 10 mph..

A stray shower or thunderstorm is possible early. Some clouds this evening will give way to mainly clear skies overnight. Low near 75F. Winds ENE at 5 to 10 mph.

KEARNEY — A woman said her former Kearney psychiatrist put his hand down her pants from behind, felt her buttocks and groped her breast during a counseling session in August 2021.

The testimony came on the first day of the misdemeanor third-degree sexual assault trial in Buffalo County Court against Reynaldo A. De Los Angeles, 77, of Kearney. He is accused of having sexual contact with a victim at his office on Aug. 25, 2021, without consent that didn’t cause serious personal injury.

De Los Angeles is a board-certified psychiatrist with certification in addiction and forensic medicine and provides professional psychiatric services, care and treatment for individuals and families. He currently has an office in Kearney, and at one time he had a practice in Grand Island. It’s unclear if the Grand Island office is still open.

Chief Deputy Buffalo County Attorney Melanie Young argued that De Los Angeles used his position as a psychiatrist and addictionist to take advantage of a patient. An addictionist is a physician who deals with prescription medical management.

De Los Angeles’ attorney, Aaron Bishop of Kearney, argued that the accusations are false.

The alleged victim testified for 2½ hours Monday about how she went to De Los Angeles’ office on Aug. 25, 2021, to straighten out her prescription medications that he had ordered for her days earlier.

The woman has been a patient of De Los Angeles’ off and on since 2004, when she was 24, for counseling and medication management. At the time of the alleged incident, the woman had been a regular patient of De Los Angeles for about five years and relied on him for her medications.

On Aug. 23, 2021, the woman said, she had a regular appointment with De Los Angeles and he adjusted her prescription medications. Two days later, the woman said, she met with him again because she felt the dosage was decreased to the point where she was nonfunctional and she felt like she may relapse.

It was during the Aug. 25, 2021, appointment, which the woman estimated lasted three hours, that she alleges De Los Angeles inappropriately touched her. The woman confronted De Los Angeles about her prescriptions being significantly smaller dosages and that they caused her to start withdrawals.

Feeling weak that day, she asked De Los Angeles to give her similar medications she’d had in the past. Instead, the woman said, De Los Angeles avoided her concerns and asked her inappropriate personal questions, including what it was like to kiss someone with dentures, which the woman has.

At one point De Los Angeles gave the woman a box of magazines, which she took to her car. When she returned to the office, De Los Angeles was sitting in a chair in his office lobby and tried to pull the woman to sit on his leg, then he tried to kiss her and hold her hand.

The moment was cut short by a woman coming into the office to pick up a package from De Los Angeles. The topic of conversation was changed, and the alleged victim, who works in automotive sales, went outside to look at De Los Angeles’ pickup, which was leaking fluid in the parking lot.

She opened the hood and inspected the engine, telling De Los Angeles what he needed to do to fix it. The two returned to the office, where the woman said she again asked De Los Angeles to correct her prescription.

De Los Angeles gave the woman more magazines, which she held in her left arm along with her keys and purse. De Los Angeles wrote the woman another prescription. As she tried to leave the office, the woman says, De Los Angeles hugged her from behind. He then stuck his hand under the untucked shirt she was wearing and into her jeans, under her panties and rubbed her buttocks.

The woman said De Los Angeles then reached around the right side of her body, put his hand under her shirt and groped her right breast as she turned away from him. She was lost for words. “I didn’t know what to say.”

The woman then left De Los Angeles’ office and drove to a Kearney pharmacy to fill her prescription. Instead she sat in her car for some time trying to absorb what had just happened.

“I was upset about being physically violated and not being able to trust my doctor again,” she said.

The woman eventually took her prescription into the pharmacist and was asked by staff why she was upset. Pharmacy staff and the woman’s mother, who was also at the pharmacy, encouraged the woman to report the incident, but the woman was upset, overwhelmed and unsure about what to do.

“I feel doctors kind of have a power over their patients, and their word might be better than mine,” she recalled feeling.

The woman eventually reported the incident to Kearney police and was interviewed at the Family Advocacy Network in Kearney.

During cross examination, defense attorney Bishop questioned the woman to clarify the date De Los Angeles gave her the different prescription. The woman corrected her testimony, saying De Los Angeles changed her medication on Aug. 16, nine days before the alleged incident, not Aug. 23 as she first told prosecutor Young.

Bishop also questioned the woman about the timeline of events while she was in De Los Angeles’ office on Aug. 25, what medications she thought her new prescriptions were for and how many prescriptions he wrote her.

Bishop also questioned the woman about her medications being destroyed before Aug. 25, and if that was the reason she needed a different prescription. The woman said her boyfriend took her medications and De Los Angeles gave her another prescription for a week.

Monday’s hearing ended with the woman’s testimony. Additional witnesses, including pharmacists who saw the woman after the alleged incident, have been summoned to testify.

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A new employee of the Adult Book and Cinema Store disappeared overnight April 18, 1974, along with 51 bondage-themed adult magazines, a calculator and $30. A cord leading to an extension from a pay phone had been cut and the shop door left unlocked.

Two and a half days later, a man went to feed cattle on a vacant farm he owned east of Hallam and found her bullet-riddled body.

Patricia Carol Webb was nude under the hay, except for a quilted jacket, one of 143 extra-large jackets distributed by a feed mill and given to customers or sold to employees. Webb, 24, had a piece of tape over her mouth.

Thirty-eight years later, her death remains one of Lincoln’s greatest murder mysteries.

“This case has been investigated, reinvestigated, reinvestigated. A lot of effort put into it,” said Lincoln Police Sgt. Larry Barksdale, who was tasked with the investigation since the early 1990s. Barksdale retired in 2012, but the case remains open.

Together, Lincoln police, the Lancaster County Sheriff’s Office, Nebraska State Patrol and FBI logged nearly 15,000 man hours during the first year alone. They even consulted clairvoyants.

Tina McMenamin, an 18-year-old UNL freshman, was stabbed and sexually assaulted in her apartment on July 25, 1995. 

Gregory Gabel, a mentally ill Lincoln man, was arrested in the homicide and has always been the prime suspect, an investigator said, even after pivotal DNA evidence failed to link him to the crime scene. Gabel has a computerlike memory for numbers and facts and a history of following women at businesses and public events, retired investigator Rich Doetker said in 2005.

McMenamin was killed in the minutes before she was due at work at Godfather's Pizza at 5:30 p.m. that night in 1995. Roommate Sarah Bognich found her friend in a pool of blood that night. 

"The apartment was ransacked. I walked past the bedroom a couple of times before noticing her on the floor. My life changed after that. I tried to go back (to college), and I couldn't ever finish."

A single hair clutched in McMenamin's hand led police to Gabel. It matched his DNA, a one-in-1,049 chance. Circumstantial evidence also linked Gabel to the apartment building. And a man matching Gabel's description was seen fleeing the crime scene, Amberwood Apartments, 4600 Briarpark Drive.

That night, Gabel was a block away at a Sonic Drive-In. He was there every Tuesday night, cleaning up in exchange for food. And Gabel had earlier convictions for third-degree sexual assault and public indecency. Police arrested him a year after the crime.

But two years later, when a different DNA test proved the hair was not Gabel's, he was released. That hair, however, didn't necessarily belong to the killer, Doetker said. The investigator also has suspicions about the validity of the second DNA test, conducted in a Pennsylvania lab.

"There were questions that came up: Was it the right hair? The same hair?" he said.

Murder charges were dropped against Gabel with the hope that additional evidence would be found to re-arrest him, Doetker said. If the case went to trial and Gabel was found innocent, Doetker added, he could not be retried if new evidence came to light.

Mary Hepburn-O'Shea, who has worked in the mental health field in Lincoln for decades and has known Gabel for many of those years, said in 2005 that the man lost two years in jail for something he didn't do.

Hepburn-O'Shea runs downtown O.U.R. Homes, the city's largest provider for developmentally disabled people that also houses people with mental illnesses. Gabel lives and works there. "He's a weird kid," she said. "He's not ever a violent kid."

Then-Assistant Police Chief Jim Peschong, speaking in 2005, added that you can't try a case on personal beliefs and supposition. Peschong said he personally believes there is a suspect in the crime, but he declined naming anyone. 

A 30-year-old Iraqi refugee with a new bride and a new home was slain in 2001 in the city where he came to begin a new life. Ali Saleh Al-Saidi's body was found in June 2001 in Salt Creek, east of the North 70th Street bridge near the Abbott Sports Complex. Then-Police Chief Tom Casady said Al-Saidi suffered "significant traumatic injuries."

Friends and family members said that Al-Saidi moved to Lincoln from Dallas a few months earlier. He had lived five years in Texas and was in a Saudi Arabian refugee camp before his arrival in the United States.

Casady called Al-Saidi a "Gulf War era" refugee and said he had recently married an 18-year-old Lincoln resident and fellow Iraqi exile.

Al-Saidi wed Azher Alghazawi on June 16. She spoke about the husband and friend she lost. "He's a good man," she said. "I love him very much." A welder by trade, Al-Saidi also loved to fix cars. He enjoyed making people laugh with funny faces.

Azher said her husband left their South 18th Street apartment to find an apartment key around 10:45 p.m. the day before his body was found. It was the last time she saw him alive. Just hours earlier, said Saleh Al-Daraji, a longtime friend of Al-Saidi's, he had helped Al-Saidi move some belongings from his old D Street apartment.

Authorities did not know whether the slaying took place near Salt Creek or whether the body was moved. Police found Al-Saidi's 1991 Chevrolet Caprice parked beside a curb at the corner of 21st and Dudley streets, then-Capt. Allen Soukup said.

In September 2001, a Lincoln couple who had been earlier interviewed by police about the slaying were arrested while trying to flee the country, authorities said.

Rabeha Kadhim Zaher  Al -Atbi and her husband, Asaad  Al -Asady, tried to board a flight to Syria from O'Hare International Airport, Lincoln Police Investigator Kathy Phillips said.  "I'm not going to label them suspects," Lincoln Police Capt. Gary Engel said. 

According to the affidavit signed by Phillips seeking the arrest of  Al -Atbi as an accessory to a felony, she lied to police during a July 5 interview about  Al - Saidi 's whereabouts on the night of his slaying and about having had an affair with him. She later admitted to police she had had an affair with  Al - Saidi , according to the affidavit.

The arrest affidavit goes on to describe how interviews with Iraqis in Lincoln have led police to believe  Al - Saidi 's death was a "crime of honor" and that  Al - Saidi  was killed for having brought shame or dishonor to his or another Iraqi family.

Gina Bos disappeared near Duggan's Pub in downtown Lincoln on Oct. 17, 2000, at the end of open mic night. She put her guitar in her trunk and then vanished.

The cold case is classified as a missing persons case, although it’s highly unlikely Bos, 40 when she disappeared, is alive. Koziol declined to detail the leads the department has chased, citing the open investigation.

Bos was a middle child in a large, close-knit family; she was waiting for a Habitat for Humanity house and had begun a new job when she vanished.

Bos’ sister, Jannel Rap, became the family’s spokeswoman early in the search. She started the Squeaky Wheel Tour, traveling the country performing and bringing attention to Gina and others who are missing in the cities she visited. She also started 411 GINA, a website with a hotline for tips about her sister’s whereabouts.

Said Koziol: “Someone knows what happened to her. Hopefully one day they will finally find it in their soul to come forward.”

Law enforcement hoped someone would remember seeing the dated minivan Ann Marie Kelley was driving when she disappeared. Neither has ever been found.  

Originally published on kearneyhub.com, part of the TownNews Content Exchange.

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