Police officer faces 13 felonies charging him with sexually assaulting woman during date
Dec 16, 2024, 2:06 PM | Updated: Dec 17, 2024, 6:30 am
FILE — A Salt Lake City Police Department squad car. (KSL TV)
(KSL TV)
AMERICAN FORK — Criminal charges were filed Monday against a Salt Lake police officer accused of sexually assaulting a woman whom he had invited over to watch a religious Christmas devotional.
Zander Etan Nunley, 26, of American Fork, was charged Monday in 4th District Court with rape, object rape and two counts of forcible sodomy, first-degree felonies; eight counts of forcible sexual abuse, a second-degree felony; aggravated assault, a third-degree felony; and assault, a class A misdemeanor.
Investigators say the two met on the dating app Hinge and communicated for two to three weeks before agreeing to meet on Sunday, Dec. 8. She drove to his house “and their plan was to watch a religious Christmas devotional, then go look at Christmas lights,” according to charging documents.
But “after five minutes, (Nunley) changed the channel and started kissing” the woman, the charges state.
The woman reported that Zander was kissing her “very aggressively as if he didn’t know his own strength,” a police booking affidavit say. When the woman told Nunley he was really strong, “his response was, ‘I like to beat people up,'” charging documents state.
Nunley became more aggressive and took the woman to his bedroom where he sexually assaulted her despite being told “No,” the charges allege. “At one point, (he) put his hands around (the woman’s) throat and squeezed to the point she was having a difficult time breathing.”
The court documents say, “Throughout the assault, (the woman) said (Nunley) was saying things like, ‘You like it rough, don’t you?'”
Afterward, Nunley told her “she’d had a gun right by her head and chest the whole time, which was upsetting to (the woman) because, in a previous conversation, she told him she wasn’t comfortable around guns,” the charges state, adding that she saw several other guns in his living room as well.
At a hospital, the woman told a forensic nurse that Nunley bit her neck “very hard to the point of bruising,” according to the affidavit. The woman also had other bruises on her body, police said.
Salt Lake police announced last week that Nunley has been placed on paid administrative leave.
