Buena Park Choir Coach Pleads Guilty to Sex Assaults on 2 Boys
A former boys' choir vocal coach in Buena Park pleaded guilty Tuesday and was immediately sentenced to 24 years in prison for sexually assaulting two boys.
Roger Alan Giese, 49, pleaded guilty to 20 felony counts and one misdemeanor count related to the assaults on two boys, according to court records. He was given credit for 3,558 days behind bars.
Giese was freed on $200,000 bail in 2003 in his original case involving the 13-year-old boy, but by 2007 he had disappeared and an arrest warrant was issued for him in March of that year.
He was tracked down in England in 2012 thanks to a tip generated by an "America's Most Wanted" episode about his disappearance. After years of fighting extradition, Giese was returned to the Southland in August 2018. Part of his custody credits included 513 days spent behind bars in England, according to court records.
Giese met the first victim, who was 13 at the time, in his capacity as a vocal coach for the All-American Boys Chorus in Buena Park in 1998, according to the FBI. He sexually abused the boy from May 1998 through May 2002, police said.
Giese "befriended" the family through their church and told the teen he was involved in an elite military unit called the Delta Force, and that he could get the victim into the unit if he supplied various "bodily fluids," police said in 2018.
The family came forward with a complaint in September 2002 and authorities served a search warrant on the defendant's residence in Irvine, police said.
Giese's jury trial was about to begin when he disappeared.
An Orange County district attorney's investigator contacted the U.S. Department of Homeland Security on March 13, 2007, when records showed Giese had caught a flight two days earlier from Charlotte, North Carolina, to the Cayman Islands, according to an FBI search warrant affidavit.
Giese was found in Hampshire, working for a public relations firm and living under a different name with a woman who did not know his true identity, Senior Deputy District Attorney Erin Rowe said in 2018.
Prosecutors "endured many hurdles" legally in their effort to extradite Giese, former Orange County District Attorney Tony Rackauckas said in 2018. British authorities were concerned that Orange County prosecutors would seek to have Giese committed to a state mental health facility indefinitely as a sexually violent predator following any prison term if convicted — a move UK officials consider to be a human rights violation. So Orange County authorities had to assure them that Giese's crimes did not quality for the SVP designation, Rowe said.
The SVP petition is handled in criminal court with prosecutors, but the legal proceedings follow civil court rules. A sexually violent predator can win a trial seeking release from custody when mental health professionals agree the defendant is suitable for release. The SVP petition is generally reserved for defendants with multiple victims and a lengthy history of sex crimes.
As Giese fought extradition he was out of custody while being monitored by British authorities. Rackauckas told reporters that when he was found, he was doing work for a church, but there was no evidence Giese committed any similar crimes in the United Kingdom.
