Pedophile's Past Links to Singapore

Strohmeyer's high-school days had warning signs

Photo by Richard Lee

Despite trying to keep a low profile at his dormitory, pictured above, hostility remains high toward Stroymeyer's friend UC Berkeley student David Cash (not pictured).

BY RICHARD LEE

At 3:47 a.m. on May 25, 1997, 18-year-old Jeremy Strohmeyer, an honors student with a 1360 SAT score from Woodrow Wilson High in Long Beach, followed 7-year-old Sherrice Iverson, a second-grader from South Central Los Angeles, into the women's restroom at the Primadonna Casino near the Nevada-California border.

What followed during the next 24 minutes was a heinous crime--and possibly the latest manifestation of twisted behavior that became apparent when Strohmeyer was a high schooler in Singapore.

As Strohmeyer recounted to police, he molested Sherrice and then strangled her while stifling her cries for help. David Cash, Strohmeyer's friend and classmate who accompanied him on the trip, admitted in court documents that he followed Strohmeyer into the bathroom, where, as acquaintances of Cash say, he watched the molestation.

Afterward, according to court testimony and interviews, Strohmeyer told Cash what he had done; Cash's first question was whether the girl had been aroused.

Strohmeyer's act, Long Beach police records show, may have been the latest in a pattern of disturbing and violent behavior toward women, especially women of color, that became apparent some three years before when he was 15 and accompanied his mother to Singapore, where she had a job assignment.

In the 10th grade, Strohmeyer enrolled at the prestigious Singapore American School, said his guidance counselor, Mary McDonald, in an interview via e-mail. But as reported by the Los Angeles Times this summer, within weeks of his arrival, Strohmeyer was coming home drunk and had joined a group of students who would gather at bars to recount sexual conquests of underage Singaporean girls. Before the family left Singapore at year's end, Strohmeyer was forced to withdraw from the academy, because the administration had discovered that Strohmeyer had been high on marijuana in school.

Once home in Long Beach, Strohmeyer delved into hard-core pornography, downloading numerous Internet files depicting children, according to court records and police reports. Other images reportedly showed Asian or black women engaging in sex with animals or posing submissively with foreign objects in their vaginas.

The Los Angeles Times reported that just before his senior year, Strohmeyer found a steady girlfriend--Agnes Oak Lee, a Korean American from Cerritos headed for college in Santa Barbara. Sometimes, he sent her long letters, later seized by the Long Beach police, expressing his fantasy to dress her in a schoolgirl outfit and put her in pigtails. By that winter, Lee, alarmed by Strohmeyer's increasing moodiness and alleged drug use, was avoiding his calls. Later, she told the Long Beach police: "He does have a temper. He gets violent, and that's when he's extremely unpredictable."

Other ex-classmates had a dim view of Strohmeyer as well. In a interview with AsianWeek, Gretchen Hutchins, an ex-classmate at Wilson High, stated: "He's a bastard. I hate him. He deserves to die. He pushed himself on my friend." She was referring to another woman, Jennifer Ainley, who had also dated Strohmeyer.

As Ainley recalled, "Once, in the car, he just started beating me up. He was just partying too much." Strohmeyer's blows sometimes left bruises on Ainley, but she never reported his actions.

Months after that came the fatal attack on Sherrice. Strohmeyer was eventually apprehended and faced a trial that was to have been under way-but on Sept. 8, he changed his plea to guilty and avoided the death penalty. Instead, Strohmeyer will spend the rest of his life in prison, with no chance of parole.

His friend Cash was never charged with any crime; Nevada prosecutors maintain he technically violated no state laws. Instead, Cash is continuing to study nuclear engineering at UC Berkeley, despite the fact that he has been almost universally shunned this semester. The target of an August protest rally, Cash has been under police protection since then. He has been kicked out of fraternity parties, yelled at by his classmates, and most recently, spit on at a convenience store. On Sept. 9, the student senate voted to ask for his voluntary withdrawal from the school, but the measure was vetoed by student body president Irami Osei-Frimpong, who said he believed that the senate had no right to pass moral judgment on particular students.

Reaction among Asian Americans at Cal has been mixed. "On a personal level, I don't agree with what [Cash] did ... But, he was charged with no crime," said Randy Gaw, a Chinese American undergraduate. Elected as the university's official student advocate, Gaw represents peers facing charges from the Office of Student Conduct (Cash faces no such charges).

"To expel him is an unlawful expansion of university authority. I flat out think the university has no right to make a moral judgment on this single student." Gaw said. Anish Kejariwal, an Indian American senior, took a much harsher view of Cash, calling him and Strohmeyer "scum."

"They're equally guilty, and on top of everything, Strohmeyer's a racist, too. I'm ashamed to go to a university associated with David Cash."

Although politicians know they may not be able to do much about Cash, they want to ensure that future David Cashes are subject to prosecution. This month, U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer , D-Calif., and U.S. Rep. Nick Lampson, D-Texas, introduced the Sherrice Iverson Act, which would allow federal prosecution of individuals who fail to report sex crimes against children.

And while Cash himself may have escaped prison, he has not avoided punishment. For the foreseeable future, the 19-year-old lives as a virtual pariah in a kind of academic purgatory.

On Sept. 17, while inside a 7-Eleven, Cash was spit on and derided; police arrested Lonnie Long, 24, of Berkeley in the incident. And still, angry students shout epithets at him as he makes his way from his dorm to classrooms and back again. Graffiti calling for his expulsion continues to appear on the walls of UC Berkeley's Doe and Moffitt libraries.

The only printable phrase: "Expel David Cash."

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