New claims allege West groped suspect, pulled down boys’ pants

New allegations of misconduct are surfacing against Jim West even as he digs in to save his job as Spokane mayor.

The allegations include claims that West pulled down the pants of boys at a Boy Scout camp during the late 1970s and, as a deputy, fondled a teenager during a search for marijuana in 1977.

Later, after moving to the state Legislature, West allegedly made an inappropriate sexual comment about the teenage son of state Sen. Pam Roach, R-Auburn.

“Mr. West denies each and every one of these allegations,” the mayor’s private attorney, Bill Etter, said Monday.

Roach told The Spokesman-Review that West was kneeling by her desk in the Senate chamber in about 1990, conferring on a piece of legislation, when he saw her 18-year-old son, who was working as a tour guide in the state Capitol.

“West told me, ‘I want to do to your son what no mother would want to know,’ ” Roach said. “He then got up and left.”

Disgusted with West, Roach said she told fellow Republican Sen. Ann Anderson about the encounter. Roach said she also later told her son. Dan Roach, who is now a Republican state representative from Bonney Lake, confirmed West’s comment through his mother.

Anderson, now a lobbyist for Central Washington University, recalled the incident, but said her friend West told Roach, “Pam, you have a nice-looking young son.”

Earlier this year, before the current controversy about West became public, Anderson said she and Roach discussed West’s comment about Roach’s son.

“I guess her mother’s antenna was going off when he said that,” Anderson said. “But I don’t recall him making that specific comment.”

An outspoken conservative Republican, Roach said she likely will receive criticism from her own GOP caucus for speaking out against one of its former powerful members.

“I’m just somebody that he doesn’t have power over,” said Roach. “It’s time for the truth to come out about Mr. West.”

Roach, who acknowledged having political battles with West when he was a senator, said she’s been following closely the allegations against West, which were first reported May 5 in The Spokesman-Review.

So has Christopher Clifford, a Tacoma high school teacher who filed an ethics complaint against West in 2003 over his handling of a dispute over private e-mails between Republican staff. Clifford said he warned his son Tim, a high school freshman with a 2003 Senate internship, to stay away from West.

“I told him, ‘Don’t be alone with this guy.’ I didn’t base this on stuff that I knew firsthand, but on what I’d heard,” Clifford said.

Revelations that West abused positions of public trust for a quarter century to develop sexual relationships with boys and young men have triggered a preliminary public corruption inquiry by the FBI and an independent investigation by the city of Spokane.

While there are calls for his resignation, West said again Monday that he plans to serve out his term, which ends in December 2007.

West did not return telephone calls seeking comment about allegations that he pulled down the swimming trunks and pants of boys, some of them as young as 8, at a Scout camp on Diamond Lake. Those allegations have come from family members and friends of some of the alleged victims.

“Jim West did, in fact, ‘pants’ the boys,” said a Spokane woman whose son was present during the activity at Camp Cowles, the Boy Scout facility at Diamond Lake.

“I know this happened because my son, John, told me it happened, and my husband was present on one of those occasions,” said the professional woman who asked that her family name not be divulged.

Her husband, a Spokane businessman, said: “When it happened, I looked over at another adult and said, ‘This doesn’t seem appropriate.’ But we didn’t do anything and nothing went beyond that in our presence.”

The parents said they are now guilt-ridden that they didn’t report West’s activities at the time. “Sometimes that doesn’t do any good anyway,” the woman said.

She was particularly troubled, she said, by allegations made earlier this month by Robert J. Galliher, who said he was molested by West and David Hahn starting in the 1970s.

Hahn committed suicide in August 1981 after he was confronted with allegations he was a pedophile. West and Hahn were deputies with the Spokane County Sheriff’s Office, close personal friends and co-scoutmasters of Boy Scout Troop 345 at Hamblen School.

In 1977, Hahn and West received a federal grant to take a group of troubled juveniles for a week-long leadership camping experience at Camp Cowles.

Some of the boys in the Hahn-West troop said they called themselves “naked apes,” apparently a reference to the activity they experienced at the hands of their adult leaders, family and former troop members told The Spokesman-Review.

“I was so upset when I read the Galliher story, but I know it’s not a story,” said the woman. “My opinion is that what happened to Rob Galliher fits the pattern, and I’m outraged that Jim West would in any way discredit him.

“What happens to these little boys when they’re molested or have their pants pulled down?” she continued. “Of course, they’re going to have problems in life.”

West has denied the sex abuse allegations of Galliher and another man, Michael G. Grant, Jr.

“I have said before and I repeat again that the allegations that I molested young boys over 20 years ago are entirely false,” West said Monday in a news conference at City Hall.

The mayor said the “allegations and inferences are totally without merit. I categorically deny them. I have never had improper contact with a child.”

The woman, who lives on the South Hill, said her son John, who died last year, “developed the greatest degree of contempt for Jim West” and dropped out of scouting shortly after his pants were pulled down.

A friend of John’s, who also asked not to be identified, said he remembered the two of them walking together in the early 1980s when they saw a Jim West campaign sign in a yard.

“Out of the blue, John said, ‘I hate that guy,’ ” the friend related. “When I asked him why he said that, he responded: ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’ “

The woman said her son went on to graduate from Washington State University, but led a “troubled life,” suffering from diabetes. He never married and died last August at age 35 after slipping into a diabetic coma. He lived alone in his South Hill home.

Another allegation about West came last week from a former Spokane man, Jeffrey A. Mewes, 45, who is in jail in Montana on a drunken-driving charge.

In 1977, when he was 17, Mewes said West – working as a deputy – shoved his hand down the front of the teenager’s pants, ostensibly looking for marijuana.

The incident occurred when Mewes and two other teenage boys were drinking wine and smoking marijuana in a Subaru parked near Felts Field east of Spokane, Mewes said in an interview.

“He put his hand way down inside the front of my pants, like a fondling search,” Mewes said. “I told him over and over, ‘My weed’s not there, it’s in my shoe.’”

“But he left his hand down inside my pants for a long time,” Mewes said. “I thought it was abnormal and very inappropriate.”

After West removed his hand, Mewes said he was able to kick his shoe off and reveal a small baggie of pot, which West dumped on the ground.

West was summoned on another call and did not arrest the teenagers, but left with their identifications, Mewes said. “We got in the car and followed him down to the community college where we caught up with him and got our IDs back.”

Mewes, who has at least four felony convictions, said he has been “patted down by other cops and nothing like that has ever happened to me.”