Friday, April 17, 2015

Problematic Redactions in the Police Report


The police report on the investigation into my brother Mark’s death raises more questions than it answers.  (For the police report, see the link at the top right.)   Previous posts have referred to the problem of redactions in the report. In the copy that I received through a FOIL request, not only the names of individuals who were interviewed but also items of information related to those interviews are blacked out.  To judge by a letter to me from N. Y. State Police official Sandra Croote in 2004, information related to “non-routine police techniques and procedures” is kept confidential.  However, as Atty. Tony Tanke pointed out, individuals who give information in police investigations of this kind should not be entitled to anonymity or privacy about their statements.

Two entries for 9/25/03 on comments by Holy Cross Athletic Club members illustrate the problem not only of names redacted but also of significant misinformation included by the investigator.  The first reads, “Member interviewed [ . . .three-inch reaction . . .] at the Holy Cross Club, Salamanca.  They stated that the victim had been in the day before the fire and was acting ‘strange’ and ‘not like himself.’”  What specifically was this “strange” behavior that showed Mark “not like himself”?  Kalfas’s report of insinuations that Mark’s behavior at the club the day before the truck fire was somehow odd and inappropriate seems especially disingenuous because the investigator makes no mention in the entry for 9/25/03 (or elsewhere in the report) of the heated personal argument between my brother and Salamanca police officer Mark Marowski that very day at the Holy Cross Club and of Marowski’s call to the Salamanca police to arrest Mark on his way home to Great Valley.

I won’t reiterate here the problem of Marowski’s own heavy drinking (reportedly on that day, as usual, at the Holy Cross Club) or the report that Marowski was having an affair with my brother’s wife Susan (see posts of August 11, September 14, October 17, and December 14, 2014; January 16 and February 17, 2015).  But in light of Kalfas’s suppression of any reference to the quarrel between my brother and Ofc. Marowski, the redaction of the names of the Holy Cross Club members who made those statements about my brother’s behavior is outrageous.  It is all the more troubling in that no one who was at the Holy Cross Club that day has been willing to admit to being there (see post of November 16, 2014), despite efforts by me and others to find out.

A number of reasonable inferences can be drawn: (1) the individuals who made those statements are unwilling to stand by them; (2) Kalfas did not record their statements accurately; or (3) these individuals are afraid of the consequences of telling the full truth about what really went on at the Holy Cross Club that day between my brother and Ofc. Marowski and what they observed when Marowski made the phone call to the Salamanca police and apparently a call to someone else immediately afterward (on the latter, see April 8, 2013, and October 17, 2014).  On the possible third inference, it is understandable that people would be afraid of retaliation if they revealed damaging information about a police officer, especially when it is clear that the investigating authorities, in this case the New York State Police, did not want the local police officer implicated in any way in their investigation into a suspicious death.  But, then, what happens to justice?

The second entry for 9/25/03 on comments by Holy Cross Athletic Club members reads as follows: “Member interviewed numerous Holy Cross Athletic Club members who were all in agreement that the victim had been behaving unusually and was very upset about getting arrested for DWI the day before the fire.”  Here, there are two problems.  First, although there is no redaction per se, Kalfas’s failure to mention specifically who these “numerous Holy Cross Athletic Club members” were functions in a similar vein: the individuals who reported information about Mark’s allegedly precarious state of mind are given anonymity.  Second, and far more troubling, this information is inaccurate.

As pointed out previously, the truck fire was the day after my brother’s argument with Marowski and his subsequent DWI, and Kalfas acknowledged to Atty. Michael Kelly in 2005 that he could not find anyone who had seen Mark out the day of the truck fire (see September 22, 2010).  In addition, Mark did not go back to the Holy Cross Club after his DWI the day before but rather, according to his friend Todd Lindell, remained at Todd’s house in the evening after his release from his arrest.  Therefore, Holy Cross Club members could not have been able to comment on Mark’s state of mind following his DWI arrest.  Atty. Kelly surmised that Kalfas was perhaps referring to Mark’s feelings about his son Brian’s DWI (rather than his own) a week earlier.  Was Kalfas’s entry here the result of sloppy record keeping, or was it intentional?

A redaction in an entry for 10/25/03 is also troubling.  The relevant entry reads as follows: “Member interviewed [ . . .redaction of the specific names . . .].  The three are friends and neighbors of the victim. Each agreed that the victim used to hang around their residences a lot and was often drinking.”  The redaction of the three names here is problematic because it is very unclear who these individuals (“friends and neighbors”) could possibly be.  I asked virtually all of Mark’s neighbors, including those with connections to my brother, if they had been questioned by the State Police investigator and was told without exception that they had not been interviewed.

Two of these neighbors, Dan Smith and Eugene Woodworth, are themselves problematic because of statements they made about the scene of the fire (see posts of April 20 and November 30, 2011). Smith was certainly not a friend of my brother’s, but Woodworth had at least known Mark for a long time, since they had both worked on the railroad.  Smith and Woodworth explicitly stated to me that they had not been interviewed by the State Police investigator.  Neighbor Cheryl Simcox’s witness statement is in the police report: it says nothing about Mark’s drinking.

More recently, I contacted Mark’s neighbors Marilyn Siperek, Mary Ellen Collins, and Christine Rinko and was told in each case that they had not been questioned by the State Police investigator. Mrs. Collins and Mrs. Rinko were clear that their husbands had also not been questioned.  The neighbor next to the Rinkos said that he had not lived there when Mark was killed and that he bought the house from a local police officer named Drew Rozler (apparently a deputy sheriff), who I was later told was not actually living there at the time.  I did not have the opportunity to ask Shawn Gregory, a deputy sheriff who lives on Whalen Rd. (Mark’s street), if he was interviewed, but this much younger man was not known to be a friend of my brother’s.  Nor did I ask Peter Rapacioli’s daughter and son-in-law (brother of a veteran Salamanca police officer) if they were interviewed, though they too were certainly not friends of my brother’s.

One individual who lived in the general neighborhood, on the road parallel to Whalen Rd., but a bit farther away, was in fact a long-time friend of my brother’s and even served as a pall bearer at his funeral.  But when I recently asked now-retired deputy sheriff Sidney Lindell if he had been interviewed, he stated clearly that he had not.  Mark’s friend Todd Lindell also lived in the same area, on or near the same road as his cousin Sidney.  When I spoke to Todd in November 2003, he did not indicate that he had been interviewed.

Although I had been led to believe that the State Police investigator had questioned most of the neighbors, that does not appear to be the case, according to what these neighbors told me.  Kalfas himself stated to me in October 2003 that he was interviewing my brother’s friends to obtain relevant information.  But if that is the case, how is it that he did not learn the identity of the neighbor (and presumably friend) whom Mark was visiting immediately before the fire (see post of August 11, 2014)?  Could that person have failed to mention such significant pieces of information as Mark’s whereabouts right before the fire and his lack of any noticeable intoxication?

This post by no means exhausts the problems of the police report on Mark’s death.  But, at the very least, it is certainly clear that Inv. Kalfas made an effort to cast my brother in a negative light and to keep Ofc. Mark Marowski, well known as an alcoholic and an unscrupulous individual, out of the picture.  The police report on my brother’s death is not just sloppy.  It is insidious.