Family: Cop Used Computer for Sex Chat

ANAHEIM, Calif. – A family claims a police officer used their computer to send sexual messages to a teenage girl.

Antonio Vilchez was chatting via the Internet with high school classmate Brittany Donlon for about 40 minutes when he dropped off because police showed up at his home. The family said the visit was part of a narcotics investigation.

When the Instant Messages resumed, they were racier than any Donlon had ever gotten from her longtime friend. When the question about her breast size popped on her screen, she shot back: “excuse me?”

The reply: “u herd me girl.”

Donlon, then 17, started to get the feeling it wasn’t Vilchez. Later, Vilchez told Donlon that a police officer had been impersonating him.

“She just was horrified to think that any adult, much less a police officer, would speak to her that way,” Brittany’s mother Nancy Donlon said.

The Vilchez family filed a legal claim – often a precursor to a civil lawsuit – against the Police Department seeking $25,000 in damages.

The claim, rejected in June by the department, alleged that while officers were at the family home on Oct. 8 for a narcotics investigation, an officer cut in on the teenager’s ongoing chat.

An Anaheim police captain said in a June 23 letter that an investigation failed to prove or disprove some allegations, but it conceded “some actions were deemed inappropriate and out of departmental guidelines.”

The family’s complaint and police report said several officers arrived to investigate possible sales of narcotics at the family’s home. Officers questioned Vilchez’s two older brothers, both of them previously arrested on narcotics-related charges.

Police arrested William Vilchez, 28, on an outstanding warrant after drug paraphernalia was found.