Previous posts have discussed various problems concerning omissions and misstatements in the police report on the investigation into my brother Mark’s death (see esp. April 17 and May 24, 2015; January 31, February 28, March 31 and October 31, 2021). This post examines the issue of two specific entries that concern statements by members of the Holy Cross Athletic Club who reportedly saw my brother in the immediate period prior to his truck fire.
In two entries of the police report for 9/25/03, Kalfas reports the reactions of members of the Holy Cross Athletic Club to my brother’s attitude and behavior in the day or two before his truck fire. Here are Kalfas’s summaries:
(1) “Member interviews [names redacted, that is, blacked out] 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.’”
(2) "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."
It is clear that the first summary represents the views of HCAC members who saw my brother at the club on September 22, the day before his truck fire. But the date referred to in the second summary is less clear. Kalfas certainly gives the impression that his interview of these “numerous Holy Cross Athletic Club members,” whose names oddly do not appear even in redacted form, took place after the truck fire, that is, on either September 24 or 25, 2003. Both summaries, however, are problematic.
In the first of these two entries, Kalfas fails to record any possible explanation for my brother acting “strange” and ‘’not like himself.” There was, however, a perfectly plausible reason for his reportedly unusual behavior. September 22 was the day when Mark was involved in an argument with off-duty Salamanca policeman Mark Marowski. Furthermore, after my brother left, Marowski called in to the Salamanca police to stop him on his way home, resulting in Mark’s arrest for DWI (on this incident, see esp. posts of July 28, 2011; April 18, 2013; September 14 and October 17, 2014). Various individuals reported motives for that argument.
Since Kalfas claimed early in the investigation that it looked as if Mark had committed suicide, I called people who knew my brother to find out if they had observed any evidence of depression on his part or if they had any information relevant to his horrific death. I was soon told that Mark had argued with Marowski over his son Brian’s recent DWI, insisting that the police should have gone more easily on Brian because he had just come home from college to attend the funeral of a high school friend killed in a car accident.
My brother would certainly not have been correct in that view of his son’s DWI, but while polite and reasonable in his normal social behavior, he was, whether justifiably or not, strong in defense of his children. If the issue of his son’s recent DWI was at least a factor in the argument with Marowski, Kalfas should have made that clear, and Mark’s behavior on that day would have seemed understandable, if out of character for him in general.
Another possible motive for the argument concerned pool tabs at the Holy Cross Club. Reportedly, Mark won a sizable pool that day, which Marowski thought my brother should split with him. Not surprisingly, Mark refused. If that incident is true, one can imagine how a person might react to a demand like Marowski’s. My brother was overall a generous person, as even one of the bartenders at the HCAC at that time pointed out. However, although he had known Marowski since grade school, they were definitely not friends, and Marowski’s own poor conduct and dishonesty is well documented (see posts of September 14 and December 14, 2014; and February 17, 2015).
Why, then, did Kalfas fail to mention Marowski’s name in his report of my brother acting “strange” and ‘’not like himself” at the Holy Cross Athletic Club the day before the fire? It seems difficult to believe that Kalfas wasn’t aware that Marowski was a Salamanca police officer with well known drinking problems.
Kalfas’s second entry (#2 above) is problematic beyond the lack of clarity about the date of the interviews and the failure to record the names of any of the HCAC members who reported that Mark was “very upset about getting arrested for DWI the day before the fire.” It, too, makes no reference to Officer Marowski, whose phone call to the Salamanca police station resulted in Mark’s arrest for DWI.
Furthermore, it is difficult to comprehend how Kalfas could possibly have learned from members of the HCAC that Mark “was very upset about getting arrested for DWI the day before the fire.” In September 2005, Atty. Michael Kelly met with Kalfas and his superior John Wolfe to discuss the investigation. As Kelly reported, Kalfas stated that he had found no one who had seen Mark out drinking at the Holy Cross Club or anywhere else the day of the fire.
In addition, following his arrest for DWI the day before the fire, Mark himself did not have the opportunity to go to the club because he had to get his friend Todd Lindell to retrieve his truck from the impoundment and then, as Lindell informed me, he stayed through the evening at Lindell’s house. Moreover, the writer of an anonymous letter to me states that Mark was at the house of a neighbor just before the fire (to read that letter, which also reports an affair between Marowski and Mark’s wife, see post of August 11, 2014).
Atty. Kelly suggested the possibility that Kalfas might have confused Mark’s DWI with his son Brian’s DWI a week or so earlier. However, the phrasing in the relevant part of the entry (…”was very upset about getting arrested for DWI the day before the fire") argues against a simply careless error. If Kalfas had written only the phrase ”was very upset about getting arrested for DWI,” one might assume that he had unwittingly left out the words “his son” before “getting arrested for DWI.” But by adding the phrase “the day before the fire," Kalfas was obviously referring to Mark’s own DWI as if it was a probable basis for my brother’s supposedly depressed state of mind.
These two entries for 9/25/03 illustrate a recurring tendency in the police report to distort information and emphasize unsupported claims about my brother’s allegedly aberrant behavior or depressed mental state and thus to reinforce the N.Y.S.P. investigators’ view that Mark caused his own death and thus was not the victim of foul play.
