We study pseudo-geometric strongly regular graphs whose second subconstituent with respect to a vertex is a cover of a strongly regular graph or a complete graph. By studying the structure of such graphs, we characterize all graphs containing such a vertex, and use our characterization to find many new strongly regular graphs. Thereby, we answer a question posed by Gardiner, Godsil, Hensel, and Royle. We give an explicit construction for q new, pairwise non-isomorphic graphs with the same parameters as the collinearity graph of generalized quadrangles of order (q, q) and a new nongeometric graph with the same parameters as the collinearity graph of the Hermitian generalized quadrangle of order (q 2 , q), for prime powers q. Using our characterization, we computed 135 478 new strongly regular graphs with parameters (85, 20, 3, 5) and 27 039 strongly regular graphs with parameters (156,30,4,6).