Through court documents in the kidnapping and rape case against Westminster Police Detective Anthony Nicholas Orban, his attorney tipped his hand to a defense involving Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome allegedly
suffered after Orban served with the Marines in Iraq.
We now know attorney James E. Blatt is fine-tuning that defense with the equivalent of innocent by reason of insanity–the insanity spurred by the anti-depression cocktail of medications the Irvine resident was taking to deal with his demons.
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How insane? Orban allegedly gagged a
25-year-old waitress he did not know with his fingers, choked her,
repeatedly slapped and punched
her, rubbed
the woman's face with his pistol, put the barrel of the gun in her
mouth, twice threatened to kill her, ordered her at gunpoint to give him
oral sex and snapped several photos of her with his cell phone as he
raped her.
A teaser for a segment on tonight's Channel 5 news at 10 p.m. includes snippets of interviews with Blatt and Tracy Orban, wife of the accused, saying a powerful drug cocktail made the cop snap.
It was Tracy Orban's call to police about her husband's service revolver and his friend's truck being missing that led to the unraveling of events that landed Anthony Orban and state prison guard Jeffrey Thomas Jelinek, both 30 and friends since high school, behind bars in lieu of $2 million bail each.
According to the Ontario Police report: Orban and Jelinek ate lunch April 3 at Chili's restaurant in Rancho Cucamonga, where they drank margaritas. Both had their service weapons with them.
Next, they went to Boston's restaurant on Fourth Street, where they
shared a pitcher of beer before heading to GameWorks at the nearby
Ontario Mills shopping mall, where they downed another pitcher.
They were standing in the parking lot outside Dave N Buster's, which
is also in the mall and where a 25-year-old woman and single mom was finishing her
four-hour waitressing shift around 5:15 p.m. Orban decided they should “go meet this chick.” But, after catching a
glimpse of the pair out of the corner of her eye, she paid little
attention to them and texted as she walked to her car.
After she unlocked her SUV with a keyless remote and started to enter
the driver's side front door, she heard the passenger side door open. She looked up to see Orban point a silver handgun at her and order her into the car. Jelinek, who is a Chino Men's Institution prison guard, asked his friend what he was doing, and Orban replied not to worry about it.
The woman told Orban he could have anything he wanted if he would let her go, but he replied, “Just drive.” He told her to head home, which she informed was in the High Desert. Driving north on the 15 Freeway, Orban told the woman he was going to let her go, getting her to exit the freeway at Base Line Road. Driving east on Base Line into Fontana, they parked in front of a self-storage facility.
With his handgun in his lap, he asked the woman about her child, having noticed a child's car seat in the back seat, and other personal details. He smiled while she answered and asked if she was scared. He also said he had one thing to do before she could go.
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Orban then ordered the woman to perform oral sex on him before forcing her into the back seat, where he joined her by climbing between the two front seats. He demanded she undress, then raped her for about an hour. At times during the assault, he stopped to play with his service revolver and take photos with his cell phone. Before taking one photo, he told the woman to smile. “Look what I'm doing,” read the text message under one photo police later retrieved.
The cop received a phone call during the assault, and whatever the person on the other end was saying, it seemed to scare Orban, who suddenly asked the woman where they were and why she wasn't wearing any clothes. He told her to put her clothes on and apologized. Once she got dressed, he stuck his fingers in the woman's throat and gagged and choked her.
The phone suddenly distracted Orban, allowing the woman to bolt out of the vehicle and flee to a nearby liquor store, where she told employees to call police. Orban, meanwhile, called Jelinek and asked to be picked up at a nearby gas station.
Orban took the woman's car keys, but he left in the woman's car his gun with his name engraved on it.
The cop told his buddy Jelinek to erase the messages on his cell phone. When interviewed after his arrest, Orban claimed he didn't remember the incident. He still had the woman's key's on him.
Channel 5 anchorman Micah Ohlman said during the morning news teaser segment for tonight's report that Orban's defense will not deny the kidnapping and rape happened. Ohlman also mentioned that there is no legal precedence for an anti-depressant cocktail being tied to an innocent by reason of insanity plea.
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.