In the continuing saga of a department under fire, an officer has accused a Mt. San Jacinto College (MSJC) Police Department chief of firing him in an effort to cover up police misconduct.

On Dec. 11, Kevin Segawa, the chief of the department, fired Officer Scott Jensen after he refused to falsify an arrest report, Jensen said in an interview last Sunday.

Jensen is the fifth person this year to make similar accusations against Segawa. Three former officers and one school employee have also accused Segawa of firing them wrongfully or coaxing them into resigning, according to legal records.

Though an official letter of reprimand the chief gave Jensen cited a failure to report misconduct within the department as the reason for the termination, firing him was actually part of an attempt to cover up the chief’s own misconduct, Jensen said.

Jensen’s problems began in August when the chief commanded him to arrest an MSJC employee named Tomorrow Horton, Jensen recalled.

Alleged unlawful arrest

Jensen and the chief were meeting with Horton in a restaurant in San Jacinto to discuss allegations her coworkers had made against her, Horton said in a telephone interview.

The chief told Horton some MSJC employees accused her of threatening them with violence and of giving out school-owned $50 gas cards without permission, Horton said.

After she refused to resign from her job, Horton recalled, the chief ordered Jensen to arrest her.

Rather than taking her to the Southwest Detention Center for processing, Jensen and Chief Segawa brought Horton to the police station on the Menifee campus, which lacks a holding cell, Horton said.

According to Horton, she sat in the chief’s office, hands cuffed in her lap, for nearly four hours. The chief told her she would neither be allowed to make a telephone call nor leave until she signed a letter of resignation.

As the time neared when she was supposed to pick up her child from school, Horton broke down and signed a letter of resignation, which the chief authored, she recalled.

"I sat there and said, ‘This is ugly,’" Jensen said of the incident.

After Horton left, Jensen asked the chief about filing a supplemental police report for the arrest, as would be usual practice, said Jensen.

"He said, ‘Don’t worry about it. I’ll take care of this one,’" Jensen recalled.

That was the last Jensen heard about the incident for four months. Then, on Dec. 8, nearly four months after the arrest took place, the Chief asked Jensen to file a supplemental report, he said.

Jensen felt suspicious and asked what he should write. "You know what to write," Jensen recalled the chief saying with a sly nod.

Jensen wrote the report as he normally would with only factual information, he said.

"The next morning he read it and he was [furious], slamming doors, and he didn’t talk to me all day," Jensen said.

The silent treatment continued until Dec. 11, when the chief called Jensen and asked him to meet him in the school’s 900 building.

When Jensen arrived, the chief handed him a letter of reprimand. The letter cited two reasons for Jensen’s termination.

Reasons for termination

First, the letter stated Jensen failed to report the sexual misconduct of Cpl. Mark Medina, his superior officer.

Furthermore, Medina, who was Jensen’s field training officer, Advertisement

North County Cosmetic ordered Jensen to stand guard two to three times every week while Medina had sex with the woman in a car in the school’s parking lot, Jensen recalled.

Medina instructed Jensen to turn on his siren lights if a car entered the parking lot, Jensen said.

Jensen kept Medina’s misconduct a secret because Medina had threatened to get him fired on more than 30 separate occasions, Jensen said.

Officers are on probation for eight months after joining the department, Jensen said, and while he was in that period the chief could fire him without any explanation.

The chief eventually fired Jensen two days before his probation period was to end.

The second reason the letter cited was Jensen’s failure to report misconduct by Ryan Myers, one of his fellow officers.

According to the letter, Myers had made threats against Chris Kuhl, an officer who quit the department earlier this year.

According to both Jensen and Ron Navarreta, a former officer with the MSJC PD, Myers admitted to lying to jeopardize Kuhl’s job.

The three officers were at Buffalo Wild Wings in Murrieta when Myers said he would go so far as to "make [stuff] up" to ensure Kuhl never works as a police officer again, Navarreta said in an interview.

Kuhl said in an interview that he quit the department because the chief gave him an ultimatum: quit or be fired.

Navarreta claimed Myers lied to the chief, telling him Kuhl planted drugs on a suspect, to get him fired and this led the chief to give Kuhl his ultimatum.

On a second occasion, Myers lied to get Navarreta fired, Jensen said.

He discovered this after a confrontation with Myers at the Menifee police station last September.

Jensen recalled the incident. The chief had assigned Jensen to the patrol car Myers usually used. Myers, who had taken a liking to this particular patrol car, got upset and confronted Jensen as he removed some gear from the car’s trunk.

Myers, accompanied by a civilian female scheduled to ride along with him that day, told Jensen to "back off" and lunged at him threateningly twice during the argument, Jensen recalled.

The chief later broke up the confrontation and, in an effort to smooth things over, called the two officers into his office a few days later to discuss the incident.

At that meeting in late September, Jensen told the chief for the first time everything he knew about Medina’s sexual misconduct and about Myers’ threats, according to Jensen.

Myers defended himself to the chief, admitting he had lied to get Navarreta fired but had only done so because Medina had told him that his fellow officers, Jensen and Navarreta, were conspiring to get him fired, Jensen retold.

Medina told Myers this, Jensen speculated, to trick Myers into lying to get the two officers fired because they knew about Medina’s affair.

The college’s human resources department put Medina on paid leave when three officers – Kuhl, Navarreta and another former officer, Peter Gonzalez – filed a tort claim for wrongful termination last October. The spokeswoman for the college has declined to comment on the claim and the issue citing the investigation and personnel issues.

Jensen has since joined the other three officers in their lawsuit against the school, he said.