Problems with Susan’s Witness Statement

Recent posts have examined more closely circumstances surrounding my brother Mark’s truck fire that are unclear or confusing in the report of the N.Y. State Police investigation and related documents (see posts of July 30, August September 29, October 30, and November 30, 2018).  As those posts point out, there are significant issues that the State Police apparently either failed to investigate fully or ignored altogether.  This post continues along those lines by considering some problems with the witness statement of Mark’s wife Susan.

According to her witness statement, my brother's wife was on the phone when she saw Mark’s truck on fire in the field across from their house.  She states, “At around 10:30 p.m. I was on the phone and waiting for Mark to return home….At around that time I saw fire out the window of our house, and after taking a closer look I could see Mark’s truck across the street from our driveway on fire.  I immediately called 911 and then went out to the fire.”  As mentioned in the previous post, Susan’s witness statement was taken by N.Y. State Trooper David Chandler, who records that it was begun at 11:30 and ended at 11:45 p.m. on the night of Mark’s truck fire.  (Witness statements are included in the file of the police report, attached to this blog).

Yet not everything that Susan said to Trooper Chandler appears to have been recorded in his narrative of her witness statement.  Cheryl Simcox, an EMT and a neighbor who was the first emergency worker on the scene, remained with Susan until about 1 a.m.  Cheryl mentioned that she had been with Susan when she gave her witness statement to the Trooper.  As I had obtained through a FOIL request the police report and related documents, including several witness statements, I relayed to Cheryl the content of Trooper Chandler’s narrative of Susan’s witness statement.  She expressed some concerns.

Cheryl pointed out that Susan had told the State Police officer in her presence that she had been watching television in the period immediately before the fire.  Cheryl mentioned that the television set had in fact been on when they went into the house.  She added that the television was in the living room, where a large picture window looked out to the driveway and the field.  (Photos of the property are in a file attached to this blog.)   Cheryl observed that one could not have been watching television there and not have noticed Mark's truck come up the driveway.  As mentioned in previous posts on this blog (see esp. May 29 and September 22, 2012), my brother left a pool of blood that night in an extension of the driveway where he normally parked his truck; so he presumably drove his truck up the driveway when he returned home that evening.

It is surprising that Trooper Chandler did not include that piece of information from Susan about what she had been doing just before the fire when he wrote up her witness statement.  All potentially relevant information should have been put in that narrative from a major witness, in this case the victim’s wife, who made the 911 call and was the first person on the scene of the fire.

More surprising, however, is that in her conversation with me Cheryl contradicted a point made in Trooper Chandler’s narrative of Susan’s witness statement.  According to Cheryl, Susan did not say anything to the Trooper about being on the phone when she gave her witness statement that night.  Why, then, does that information appear in the witness statement that Trooper Chandler wrote up?

It is unclear whether Trooper Chandler actually wrote up the narrative of Susan’s witness statement that same night or did it another day.  There is no indication that Trooper Chandler interviewed Susan a second time; so it is not likely that he combined his notes from two separate sessions with Mark’s wife.  The principal investigator Inv. Edward Kalfas interviewed Susan himself on September 25 (less than two days after Mark’s truck fire), but records in his narrative in the police report only that “[n]o new information was developed.”  The contradiction between Cheryl Simcox’s statement to me and Susan’s witness statement as written up by Trooper Chandler is unresolved.