By Karin Brulliard, The Washington Post
The evening of Oct. 11, Jorge Otaya Gavilano, 18, placed a frantic call to 911, police said. He and a 17-year-old girl, on a romantic drive in rural western Prince William County, had been forced out of his truck by two masked assailants -- one wielding a BB gun, the other a knife -- who demanded money.
Gavilano, 18, wrested the gun away and pointed it at the robbers, sending them fleeing into the woods. They were still on the loose, he told a 911 dispatcher.
Police swarmed the area, deploying a K-9 unit and a Fairfax County police helicopter to help find the fugitives. Meanwhile, Prince William investigators who were questioning Gavilano learned something that would abruptly halt the search: He told police that he had staged the whole thing, they said.
According to police, the attackers were his friends. The girl had broken up with him. He wanted to impress her with his valor.
“We really thought that there was a robbery and abduction and they held them against their will until the hero came to the rescue here,” said Detective Dennis Mangan, a police spokesman.
The theatrical stickup is among a rash of recent false reports of serious crimes that have sent Northern Virginia law enforcement officers scurrying for nonexistent suspects and evidence. Police say it is more common for people to mistakenly report missing items as stolen or for teenagers who miss curfew to claim they were temporarily abducted.
In recent months, Fairfax and Alexandria police have investigated the cases of two men who said they were robbed and set on fire, a man who said he was shot in the hand by a robber, a man who said he was carjacked, two women who said they were sexually assaulted and a 2-year-old girl whose caregiver reported her kidnapped. All claims turned out to be bogus.
Police say they believe -- and hope -- that they are not the beginning of a trend. False reports can cost departments dearly, frighten communities and, some experts say, make officers overly skeptical.
Cases in point: Last spring, University of Wisconsin student Audrey R. Seiler staged her abduction, setting off a four-day search that cost the Madison Police Department nearly $100,000. In 1994, after South Carolina mother Susan Smith misled police by reporting that her two children were kidnapped by a black man who had carjacked her; later, she confessed to killing them by strapping them into her car and rolling it into a lake. And seven years before, a 15-year-old black girl named Tawana Brawley falsely claimed she was raped by a group of white men near her home in Poughkeepsie, N.Y.
In the Washington region, a man who two years ago lied about witnessing the sniper shooting in Fairfax County sent law enforcement officers on a false trail for two days. He ended up serving six months in jail.
“It takes up police resources and time officers could be spending on other cases,” said Amy Bertsch, an Alexandria police spokeswoman.
Police say it is more common for people to mistakenly report missing items as stolen or for teenagers who miss curfew to claim they were temporarily abducted.
In Virginia, police can charge people with filing a false report, a misdemeanor, although such charges are mostly reserved for serious cases. In Maryland, there are two applicable charges -- giving a false statement to police before becoming a suspect or after. No jurisdiction in the region said the number of false reports is rising.
The back-to-back reports of assailants who set their “victims” on fire sounded dubious to police. In the first, a man told Fairfax County police Oct. 7 that he was accosted at a shopping center by robbers who set him on fire. Police discovered the next day that the man had burned himself.
Five days later, a man told Alexandria police that he was walking near a park midday when a stranger poured gasoline on him and set him on fire during an attempted robbery.
Police would not give details but said they believe that in both cases, the men concocted their tales to cover something they should not have been doing; neither has been charged. The same motive also drove an Alexandria man with a gunshot wound to his hand to report Oct. 29 that he was shot by three men during a street robbery, Bertsch said. Two days later, police found out the man -- who was barred from having a gun because he was a felon -- had accidentally shot himself. Douglas Pearson, 28, was charged with possession of a firearm by a convicted felon.
J. Reid Meloy, a San Diego-based forensic psychologist who has helped police on false-report cases, said that many stem from a need for an alibi. Some people want attention; Seiler, Madison police said, hoped to draw the sympathy of a former boyfriend. Other people falsely report crimes to retaliate against enemies. More rarely, false reports come from psychotic people who wrongly believe that they have been crime victims, he said.
Money from insurance claims spawns the most false reports, he said. Police said that kind of report often backfires, as was the case for an Alexandria man who reported his truck stolen in May. He had actually driven it into a pole in a parking lot and, rather than pay for repairs, went to police -- and was charged with filing a false report.
In Virginia, that charge carries a maximum sentence of one year in jail and a fine of up to $2,500. S. Randolph Sengel, commonwealth’s attorney in Alexandria, said that judges can also require those convicted to reimburse police for costs incurred while they were investigating the alleged crime. Gavilano, who allegedly staged the robbery in his pickup, was charged with filing a false police report. He also faces a charge of conspiracy to commit a felony, as do his friends.
Police said they look for holes in victims’ stories, but they would not divulge much else about how they spot hoaxes.
“We don’t want to give people any greater abilities to fool us,” said Mary Ann Jennings, a Fairfax County police spokeswoman.
Meloy said researchers have identified some red flags that signal false reports of rape or stalking -- absence of trauma in victims, for example, or a history of mental disorders. But usually it boils down to investigators’ intuition.
It doesn’t jibe “with what their experience has been in cases like that,” he said. “Their gut feeling leads them to deepen their investigation.”
The good news for investigators, experts say, is that many people are unskilled liars who do not craft airtight stories.
Pearson, who said he was shot in the hand, gave investigators detailed descriptions of the people he said attacked him: three men -- one bald, one with braided hair, one with an Afro -- each with a different type of gun. But he stumbled when describing the attack itself, Bertsch said. And in the Alexandria gasoline fire case, although the man had burns, his story fell apart from there. His burns were not consistent with those from gasoline, she said, and there were no witnesses, charred clothing or evidence of a fire at the park.
Brent E. Turvey, a criminal profiler and forensic scientist who maintains a Web site that lists news stories about false reports, said he fears the danger of false reports is that they drain officers’ emotions while sapping police resources.
“Law enforcement may be less willing to put their necks out there down the line,” he said.
But police say that false reports come with the territory and that they investigate every case with an open mind.
“We’d rather find out something never occurred . . . than realize we never captured someone who set a man on fire in a park in broad daylight,” Bertsch said.