The N.Y.S. Police Failure to Check the Phone Records for the Night of Mark’s Truck Fire

A recent post (December 31, 2018) pointed out an inconsistency between the witness statement of my brother’s wife Susan and EMT Cheryl Simcox’s recollection of events the night of Mark’s truck fire.  In her witness statement, Susan says that she was on the phone when she saw the fire and then called 911 before rushing out to help Mark.  However, according to Cheryl, Susan told the State Police officer in her presence that she had been watching television right before the fire, not that she had been on the phone.  When I brought up Susan’s statement to Cheryl, she was very surprised, and it was clear that she herself knew nothing about this alleged phone call, even though she arrived on the scene just after 11 p.m. and stayed with Mark’s wife until about 1 a.m.

As a matter of proper investigative procedure, when a person is killed under suspicious circumstances and when that person’s marriage is known to have been particularly troubled, phone records are routinely checked.  The circumstances of Mark’s death certainly fall into that category.  Atty. Tony Tanke, who spoke by phone with then Cattaraugus County D. A. Edward Sharkey when the investigation had just concluded, reported that the District Attorney “could not describe how Mark came to be where he was or offer a plausible scenario of his death.”  Since it was well known that Mark’s and Susan’s marriage was in very serious trouble and their relations were acrimonious (see esp. post of May 26, 2014), the phone records should have been examined at least to determine if the call actually took place, to learn if it was made by landline or cell phone on both ends (for Susan and for Pete Rapacioli, who claimed that he had called), and to determine how long the call lasted.

Furthermore, the phone records would have helped to clarify the time frame in which Mark returned home that night, received a series of head wounds, left a pool of his blood in the driveway, was saturated with gasoline, and ended up on fire in the field across from his house about sixty feet from his burning truck.  The person whom Mark had reportedly visited that evening (see esp. post of August 14, 2015) could have provided the approximate time when my brother returned home, but that individual did not come forward.  The phone records, then, should have been considered essential for establishing a clear time frame for what happened that night.  Yet, according to Atty. Michael Kelly, who in 2005 had a meeting with Edward Kalfas, the lead investigator on Mark’s case, and his then superior John Wolfe, it appeared that the State Police had not constructed a time line of events for the night of the fire and had not done any drawings of the scene.

It is difficult to comprehend why the New York State Police have taken such a hard stand against examining the phone records.  According to Kelly, that should have been a routine part of the investigation, and he was baffled by the refusal of the State Police to rectify that initial lapse.  I sent a letter to Sen. Inv. John Wolfe in October 2005 requesting that he get the phone records.  Not long after, he informed me in a phone conversation that he would not get the phone records unless the case was re-opened, which he would decide after obtaining Mark’s medical records.  Subsequently, although acknowledging that he could not decipher much of the doctor’s handwriting in the medical records, he decided not to re-open the case or to obtain the phone records (see esp. post of December 27, 2012).  Similarly, when I brought up the phone records with Capt. George Brown in February 2006, he insisted that they were not significant.  In a phone conversation with me in April 2007, Lt. Allen completely dismissed the relevance of the phone records, insisting that they “would not prove anything.”

My continued efforts concerning the phone records were met with deaf ears.  In July 2014, I spoke with a member of the N.Y.S.P. Internal Affairs Office, John Aquilina, who simply did not respond when I brought up the importance of the phone records as well as Mark’s head injuries and the pool of his blood found in his driveway the night of the fire.  Finally, in August 2014, in response to that issue, Capt. Steven Nigrelli strangely claimed that the New York State Police cannot get phone records.

Were the New York State Police afraid of what they might actually find in those phone records?  One need only recall their failure to look into a potential involvement by Salamanca police officer Mark Marowski, even though they knew that, after a personal argument, he had set my brother up for a DWI the very day before his truck fire (see esp. post of September 14, 2014).  Had they been told, as was later reported to me in an anonymous letter (see post of August 11, 2014), that Marowski was having an affair with my brother’s wife?

The remainder of this post is a notice about the fact that certain documents that I have compiled related to the investigation into my brother Mark’s death are missing from a locked desk in my office.  It appears that someone may have tampered with the lock.  I want to make it very clear that I am not the author of anything about Mark’s death that does not come from this blog.