ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Friday, November 8, 1996 TAG: 9611080087
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: LAURENCE HAMMACK STAFF WRITER
"THIS IS KIND OF AN UNUSUAL CASE," Prosecutor Ann Gardner told the jury. "But strange people do strange things."
A regular shopper at Valley View Mall, known by employees as "the shoe man" for his keen interest in women's footwear, was convicted Thursday of stalking a 21-year-old sales clerk with whom he became fixated.
After finding Dennis L. Sikora, 50, guilty of the misdemeanor offense, a jury in Roanoke Circuit Court fined him $1,000.
A sales clerk at J.C. Penney testified that Sikora harassed her verbally and physically from July to November of last year - starting with inappropriate comments about her shoes and escalating to an incident when he rubbed himself against her while on a mall escalator.
The clerk and other employees testified that they called Sikora "the shoe man" because of the inordinately large number of women's shoes that he purchased, and the comments he often made about their own shoes during the sales.
"He has a shoe fetish to the point that he will go up to perfect strangers and tell them that their shoes aren't high enough, and they need to wear 4- or 5-inch heels," Assistant Commonwealth's Attorney Ann Gardner said.
At first, the sales clerk testified, Sikora seemed harmless enough. "He seemed to be very nice, very talkative; he would talk about his family and his girlfriend," she testified.
But as she waited on him one day in July 1995, the woman said, Sikora began to comment about how he thought high-heeled shoes were sexy on women. He then asked to touch her shoe, the woman said.
"I was insulted, and I felt a bit degraded," she said.
On another day, Sikora asked the woman to try on some lingerie he brought to her to be gift-wrapped, saying he wanted to see how it looked on her - causing her to flee her work station in tears, she testified.
Then, one two occasions later in the year, Sikora approached the woman outside J.C. Penney and touched her inappropriately, she said. After touching her buttocks as she shopped in a gift store, Sikora later came up behind her on an escalator and rubbed his groin against her back, the clerk testified.
"When you're in a public place and someone is touching you there's nothing that you can do; you feel so helpless and so scared," she said.
Sikora did not testify Thursday. His lawyer, Wayne Inge of Roanoke, characterized the comments Sikora made about shoes and lingerie as something that most sales clerks tolerate as part of their jobs. "This is retail," Inge said. "If you're at a cash register out there, you talk to all types."
But because the sales clerk was "hypersensitive," Inge suggested, she quickly concluded the Sikora was a "dirty old man" and then either fabricated or embellished her reports about the touching that followed the comments.
Inge also raised questions about the wording of the stalking law - which, as its name might suggest, does not require proof that a defendant followed his victim. Stalking is defined as any conduct that, on more than one occasion, is done "with the intent to place, or with the knowledge that the conduct places, [another] person in reasonable fear of death, criminal sexual assault or bodily injury."
Prosecutors thus "have to prove what was inside [the victim's head], and that Dennis Sikora knew about it," Inge said.
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