Two more women testify in Harris County deputy’s aggravated sodomy and sexual battery trial

Two women who accused a former Harris County Sheriff’s deputy of inappropriate behavior during separate 2015 traffic stops testified before a Superior Court jury on the third day of an aggravated sodomy and sexual battery trial.

Thomas Carl Pierson is facing a dozen charges stemming from multiple traffic stops in the fall of 2015 and early 2016. The most serious of the charges — aggravated sodomy and sexual battery — come from a stop on Feb. 14, 2016, on Ga. 85 near Warm Springs. A woman who alleges that Pierson forced her to perform oral sex testified Wednesday and Thursday for more than five hours. If convicted on the aggravated sodomy charge, Pierson faces a minimum 25 years up to life in prison.

Pierson, when first confronted with the sexual allegations by his superiors on the day of the incident, denied anything happened. He was then told the woman had identified his blue plaid boxer shorts, and he immediately told his bosses that it was consensual.

Judge Bobby Peters recessed the trial for the weekend. It will resume Monday morning at the Harris County Courthouse with the prosecution still presenting its case to the nine-woman, three-man jury. The prosecution is expected to rest on Monday, then Pierson’s attorney, Bernard S. Brody of Atlanta, will get the opportunity to present a defense.

Both of the women who took the stand on Friday said there was no sexual contact between them and the deputy, but they outlined similar stories of lengthy traffic stops and mutual banter with Pierson that resulted in warning tickets. Each woman told the jury how Pierson found them in different locations after the stops.

The two 2015 traffic stops and Pierson’s behavior in the wake of them resulted in two stalking charges — a misdemeanor — and with two felony charges of violating his oath as a public officer.

Neither woman reported the incidents, which happened on Sept. 12, 2015 and Oct. 19, 2015, until after the incident on Feb. 14, 2016, became public. One woman responded to an inquiry from Harris County Sheriff Mike Jolley, who sent letters to women who had been stopped by Pierson, asking if anything out of the ordinary happened.

The other woman posted on Facebook about her encounter with the Harris County deputy after seeing a news report of Pierson’s arrest. She was then contacted by a Georgia Bureau of Investigation agent who was working the case.

The jury watched the dash-cam video in Pierson’s vehicle on each stop. Then during the questioning of the women, attorneys pulled out clips of the conversations.

The first witness to testify on Friday was the woman that Pierson pulled over near Ellerslie on Oct. 19, 2015. Like the first victim who testified earlier in the trial, the second woman said she was flirting with the deputy during the 45-minute stop, during which he gave her a warning ticket for going 60 miles per hour in a 45 mph zone.

“I wanted to get out of the ticket,” the woman testified. “When people are pulled over, you want to establish some sort of rapport because you don’t want a ticket.”

The woman talked with Pierson about her son’s encounter with a Harris County deputy, Pierson’s job history and a number of other topics.

About 15 minutes into the stop, Pierson was looking at the woman’s cell phone when a photo of her in a bra appeared, the woman testified. Not long after that, Pierson turned off the microphone on his uniform, the dash-cam video showed. There was no audio for the remainder of the stop.

Toward the end of the lengthy stop, another deputy pulled up. The woman told the jury that at that point it ended pretty quickly, but not before she told the deputies if they ever needed to use the bathroom in that area they could stop at her house.

The next day at about 1 p.m., Pierson knocked on the woman’s door. With her dogs barking, she told the deputy that she was not dressed and did not open the door.

He left and returned about an hour later, the woman testified. The second time she retreated to her bedroom, the woman told the jury.

“I remember being scared,” she said.

The woman who was stopped by Pierson on Sept. 12, 2015, was considerably younger than the other two, but all three were blonde at the time of the stops.

She was stopped just off Ga. 85 by Pierson for doing 57 mph in a 35 mph zone, according to testimony. When he approached the woman, he asked if she knew how fast she was going and she responded she didn’t. He then asked her if she was doing 75 mph before telling her how fast she was going.

Pierson asked her for her thoughts on what he should do about the ticket. She responded, “Nice conversation and a warning ticket would be wonderful. ... A warning would be very pleasant.”

When asked by Assistant District Attorney Sheneka Jones if she was flirting with the deputy, the woman said that she wasn’t.

“I don’t consider what I was doing flirting,” she testified. “I was trying to be nice and pleasant. A couple of times I set myself up for stuff, but it was unintentional.”

The defense focused on an incident before Pierson gave her the written warning in which she pointed to a pink Breast Cancer Awareness pin he was wearing on his uniform shirt pocket. It led to a conversation about the woman’s breasts.

The woman told the deputy she was going to a relative’s house when she was pulled over, and she named the road the relative lived on.

When he finally gave the woman the warning ticket, he had a hand-written message on the bottom of the citation. It read, “Slow your ass down.”

The stop lasted nearly 25 minutes.

Almost two hours later, after going home first, the woman got to the relative’s house and saw Pierson driving his patrol vehicle along that road.

“At that point, I became fearful,” the woman said.

She turned into the driveway and got inside the house. Pierson sat in his patrol vehicle at the end of the driveway, she testified.

“He was there about 10 minutes,” she told the jury. “It was enough time for me and my (relative) to freak out about it.”

She called her then-boyfriend, who worked in the public safety field, and told him what was happening. She had already told him about the traffic stop and he was already on his way to the relative’s house at the time.

The third woman said part of her motivation for speaking with the GBI when she was contacted after the stop on Feb. 14, 2016, was to see if the deputy was the same one that pulled her over.

She didn’t report her stop at the time, but she told the jury on Friday that she wished she had.

“If I had said something, maybe it could have saved the other two women from this,” she said.

This story was originally published August 25, 2017 at 5:30 PM with the headline "Two more women testify in Harris County deputy’s aggravated sodomy and sexual battery trial."