“While I appreciate your service and respect your opinion, I stand by what I said in HPD’s investigation of this particular crime. Hopefully it is the exception to the rule, but based on what both attorneys told us after the trial and the evidence presented by the responding officers during the trial I cannot say that they did even an adequate job. There were no ballistics done, they didn’t talk to any of the witnesses until they had been arrested for other crimes and they found them in the jail 2-2 ½ years after the murder – just before the case was supposed to go to trial. The officers couldn’t even agree on what the weather was like that night – did it rain or not. The two witnesses, who were in the auto with the shooter should also have been arrested and tried for this murder as one of them was driving the SUV hunting down the victim and the other one was telling them where to look for her. These criminals couldn’t even believe that this crime was being investigated. All of the people involved were Katrina evacuees and in the area of New Orleans that they used to live, the police do not investigate these type of murders, they just send the morgue out to pick up the bodies.
Again, I pray this is the exception and perhaps because the excessive crimes committed by the evacuees the investigators were not as persistent as they should have been. Houston did an exceptional thing in trying to help the evacuees and I know not all of them were drug addicts and many were thankful for the help, but as you know most of them were a huge drain on our resources and in the opinion of the 12 people that sat on that case the investigation was not handled well.
I have many friends that are first responders and I have nothing but the greatest respect for them, but even they agreed with me and said it was not the first time they had heard of things like that happening when it came to investigating this type of crimes committed by evacuees. I do not believe that CSI is the norm for everyday crime scene investigations but I do know when a job has been done poorly and such was the case in this specific incident.”
That was the response to my remarks in "It Ain’t Like CSI” (11-30-09) by the lady from the jury that acquitted a murderer who had previously killed seven other people. Her detailed description does put a different light on the case. In fairness to her I had to post her remarks in this blog. There are cases where the police do screw up and this does sound like one of them. But I would like to think that it was not typical of the investigations done by HPD.
I also received this message from a reader who has been following this exchange: “I want to talk with you regarding my experience on a murder jury and the dogshit job the HPD crime scene unit did...in my opinion, either these guys are not properly trained or they are grossly incompetent. Both the prosecution and defense claimed bad CSI. The main investigator said the reason they did not perform a GSR on the shooter (but they did on the decedent at the morgue) was ‘that we had our man.’ They sent a magazine from a 32 found at the scene to ballistics...not to fingerprints, to ballistics. I don't know shit about CSI, but I do know bullet, cartridge, magazine, fingerprint...ain't no ballistics on a magazine and on and on.............DOGSHIT!”
My response to him was: It would be nice if HPD would allow you to observe a homicide crime scene investigation in person. It might give you some insight into what you describe as dogshit. Sounds to me like they screwed up their testimony rather than the evidence.
There may be many reasons police screw up a crime scene investigation. The circumstances surrounding an investigation differ from case to case - circumstances that a jury will not be made aware of and that have little to do with the competence of police personnel. One of the biggest factors leading to a poor investigation is the heavy case loads carried by investigators. When prosecutors lose a case they should not blame the police since they have their own investigators to tie up any loose ends. In the testimony about “bullet, cartridge, magazine, fingerprint,” the prosecutor seems to have done a really lousy job of questioning his own witness, thereby damaging the state’s case.
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