A Contra Costa County sheriff’s deputy resigned Thursday after a teenager at the center of a Bay Area-wide police scandal said the deputy had sex with her several times last summer when she was 17 years old.
Ricardo Perez’s departure was announced by Sheriff David Livingston, who said in a statement that his agency “will not tolerate even a single breach of the public trust we work so hard to earn.”
An attorney for Perez, who worked in the county’s jails, has not responded to requests for comment.
Perez resigned on the same day The Chronicle published an account of his actions provided by the teenager, who turned 18 in August and asked to be identified by her online alias of Celeste Guap.
Perez had been the subject of an internal disciplinary investigation, and he remains the subject of a criminal probe by the Oakland Police Department.
Guap, who lives in Richmond and works as a prostitute, said that she had sex with 29 officers in the Bay Area in the past two years and that her relations with Perez as well as three Oakland police officers occurred before she turned 18. One of the three Oakland officers committed suicide in September after leaving a note that referred to Guap.
Multiple investigations
Guap said she had met all of the Bay Area officers either through law enforcement circles her mother is an Oakland police dispatcher or on the streets or through social media.
A few officers paid her, she said, while others warned her about antiprostitution stings or ran the names of people she knew through confidential databases.
Several law enforcement agencies have opened investigations into whether officers should face criminal charges or workplace discipline.
The episode has raised serious questions about the Oakland Police Department, which remains under federal court oversight more than a decade after a brutality scandal.
Guap said she met Perez a little more than a year ago, sending him a Facebook message after he added her as a friend on the social network. The deputy, she said, would pick her up while off duty and drive up Fish Ranch Road, off Highway 24 near the Caldecott Tunnel, where they would have sex. She said no money was exchanged.
Several contacts
“I’d say about 10 times,” Guap said. “It was consistent for about a month, six weeks, then we stopped for the month of August, then we did it again one more time in September.”
Asked if the deputy knew she was under 18, Guap said, “I don’t think he asked.”
Sgt. Shawn Welch, president of the Contra Costa County deputies union, declined to comment on the investigations into Perez but called the larger scandal “horrific.”
“The amount of training officers go through in California now, I don’t see how these officers think what they did was close to justified,” he said.
“It brings discredit to your agency, yourself and your profession.”
Guap also revealed to The Chronicle that she recently told internal affairs investigators at the San Francisco Police Department that she had sex with three city officers — and that in each case she was 18, they were off-duty and they did not pay her.
Guap said she had told the San Francisco inspectors about her interaction with two of the officers. But in an interview, she said she had mistakenly neglected to tell them about sex with a third officer.
San Francisco probe
Sgt. Michael Andraychak, a department spokesman, said Thursday that the agency “has an open investigation to determine if any members have had any inappropriate contact with the victim.”
Guap said two of the San Francisco officers had picked her up in Richmond for sex in their cars.
She communicated with one of them after he added her to his network on Instagram, she said, and she met the other after the two “flirted” while he was in uniform on Geary Street near Union Square.
She said that she had sent a message to the third officer after he added her as a friend on Facebook and that she had spent one night at his home in Vacaville.
It’s unclear how much each San Francisco officer knew about Guap, her history or her earlier suspected exploitation at the hands of other officers.
