Sunday, November 15, 2015

More on the Issue of Who Was on the Scene of Mark’s Truck Fire and What They Said


This post takes up the issue of specific individuals who were on the scene of my brother’s truck fire in Great Valley, N.Y.  The subject is discussed in an earlier post (December 31, 2011), which mentions those known to have been on the scene as emergency workers and raises questions about certain others who were reportedly also there.  Among the latter were two individuals identified as Salamanca police officers: Steve Arrowsmith and Patrick Welch.

Several months after I put up that post (June 20, 2012), Mr. Welch sent in a lengthy comment to the blog stating that he had been a police cadet at the time and joined the Salamanca police force two months later and that he had been on the scene as “a friend of the family.”  After I posted the relevant part of his comment, another individual replied, observing that Mr. Welch had not really responded to my concern in the post and posed a question about “what he [Welch] was doing during the time that he was on the scene of the fire.”  Mr. Welch did not reply.  I have also learned nothing further about the reason for Mr. Arrowsmith’s presence on the scene.  However, I have since learned that another member of local law enforcement, Robert Buchhardt, a senior member of the Sheriff’s Department, was also on the scene.  The post of December 2011 mentioned Shawn Gregory as another individual on the scene, who reportedly was also a deputy sheriff.

Subsequently, I learned that Shawn Gregory in fact not only was present on the scene and employed as a deputy sheriff but also was a close neighbor of my brother’s on Whalen Rd.  In addition, it turns out that Shawn Gregory’s wife is the daughter of another close neighbor of Mark’s, a woman (recently deceased) named Alana Lindell Cloud, whose house on Hungry Hollow Rd. was directly opposite Mark’s across the open field on Whalen Rd.  Alana was the sister of Sidney Lindell and the cousin of Todd Lindell, both of whom were also neighbors and close friends of Mark’s.

Todd Lindell, furthermore, has been mentioned on this blog as the individual who said to me that “Mark would be alive today if he had not gotten the DWI,” yet did not return my calls when I tried to get clarification on that statement (see posts of September 23, 2010; March 3, 2014; and August 14, 2015).  The elder Sidney Lindell and his wife, parents of Mark’s friend Sid, also resided close by on Hungry Hollow Rd.  In addition, the Lindells, I have been told, are related to the Mendells, an elderly couple who lived on Cross Rd., adjacent to the field where Mark’s truck went up in flames.  Thus, Shawn Gregory is related by marriage to five separate families in Mark’s neighborhood.

That striking nexus of family relationships in a sparsely populated rural neighborhood is not per se my concern here.  Instead, I am concerned about statements that Alana Lindell Cloud reportedly made to a friend of hers named Linda Askey Albrecht, who conveyed them in an e-mail to another individual and gave him permission to pass the e-mail on to me.  According to Linda in her e-mail, Alana told her the following: “Mark was a serious serious drinker and had been since that horrible train [a]ccident in which Sid Smith and the others were killed.  The survivors has [sic] all [s]uffered from PTSD.”  She added that “Mark never went back [t]o work.”

Unfortunately, all of this supposed information is demonstrably false.  First, Mark was not involved in that terrible train wreck and thus never had any post-traumatic stress syndrome related to it.  Second, Mark stayed off alcohol for many years (certainly over a decade), which included the period around and after that train accident.  Third, Mark continued to work for several years, until he himself suffered an eye injury on the job.

There is no reason to believe that Linda Albrecht failed to report Alana’s statements to her accurately.  But unfortunately she accepted false statements about Mark without question as true. Certainly, as numerous individuals who knew my brother well have said, Mark began drinking alcohol again to some extent around two years before his death and more heavily in the last six months or so.  My brother’s friend Sid Lindell in fact told me in November 2003 that he had been surprised to learn that Mark had started drinking again since he had stayed off alcohol for so long.  The claims about Mark in Alana’s reported statements are very damaging and clearly false.

Did such distorted views about my brother affect what was said publicly and privately during the investigation into his death?  Linda’s e-mail also reports that Alana herself was interviewed about Mark.  Did Alana make such statements to the State Police investigator?  Had she said similar things to others, including her daughter and her son-in-law Shawn Gregory?

The question is relevant for at least two reasons.  First, negative remarks about Mark’s drinking by “neighbors” were cited by Inv. Kalfas in his narrative in the police report, yet the people who made them have not been held accountable for those statements, since their names have all been blacked out (see post of April 17, 2015).  Was Alana one of the neighbors who reported such information?  Statements of that nature had a significant impact on the investigation, making it appear that Mark was responsible for his own death, whether by suicide or by accident.

Second, in the investigation conducted by Nationwide Insurance, according to a company representative, their investigator interviewed certain individuals who had been on the scene but who agreed to speak with him only “off the record.”  These individuals insisting on anonymity told the insurance investigator that it looked like a suicide (see post of January 27, 2014).

Did these individuals fail to see the pool of blood on the section off Mark’s driveway where he normally parked his truck?  Or had they already made their minds up in advance?  Who were these individuals?  Were they exclusively emergency workers?  Or did they also include law enforcement officials (deputy sheriffs or Salamanca police)?  Was Shawn Gregory among them?  As mentioned previously (January 27, 2014), Gary Wind (firefighter and deputy sheriff), Wayne Frank (firefighter), and Cheryl Simcox (EMT) are certainly not among those who told the investigator for Nationwide that it looked like a suicide.

According to the company representative with whom I spoke, Inv. Kalfas refused to let them see the police report, and therefore they did not know about the pool of Mark’s blood on the driveway.  If Nationwide had had full knowledge of the facts, there might well be a report on Mark’s death that draws a very different conclusion from that of the State Police.  One must wonder what the motive was for individuals who insisted on anonymity and why Alana Lindell Cloud herself reported such distorted and inaccurate information about my brother.