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Hearing held over murder dismissal
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Brown
By Joe Gorman
Youngstown
Police and prosecutors said at a hearing Tuesday they could prove a cellphone that was key to a murder case dismissed last month was not tampered with.
Instead, testimony showed at a hearing before Judge Maureen Sweeney in Mahoning County Common Pleas Court, the wrong phone records were supplied for the phone of Paul Brown — and the person appointed by the court to retrieve a voice mail on the phone did not notice the mistake.
Brown, 33, had a charge of murder dismissed by Judge Sweeney on Sept. 16 after a hearing where it was strongly suggested police tampered with a phone belonging to Brown by switching the SIM card in the phone, which rendered it inoperable. Prosecutors asked Judge Sweeney to reinstate the charge, and she had a hearing Tuesday on their request.
A SIM card is a card unique to a phone that allows that phone access to the provider’s network.
Brown was arrested May 25, 2009, accused of the murder of Ashten Jackson on the East Side. His attorney, Anthony Meranto, claimed that Brown had a message on his cellphone that would’ve cleared him, and he told detectives to check the phone.
Judge Judge Sweeney’s ruling touched off an investigation by the Internal Affairs Division at the Youngstown Police Department and the county prosecutor’s office.
When the consultant received a court order to get records for the number for Brown’s phone, however, he was provided records for a phone with that number that was issued in 2013, not 2009. The 2013 number was assigned to a different SIM card.
During a three-hour hearing Tuesday, Lt. Brian Butler, head of the department’s Internal Affairs Division, testified that he read the detectives’ notes on the case and watched a video of Brown’s interview with detectives, and nowhere did he tell detectives that he had a message on his cellphone that would clear him.
Butler said he did mention speaking to another person, but that conversation was not on a phone, Butler said.
He said he watched the video several times and never heard Brown claim a cellphone message could clear him.
An expert from the state Bureau of Criminal Investigation, Jo Ann Gibb, said she examined the phone and records showed the card that was in the phone matched the number in 2009. She said the records provided for 2013 for the same number show a different card, and that card was not in the phone police took off of Brown.
She said the card in Brown’s phone is unique to that phone only and would not work in a different phone even if it had the same number.
She also said voice mails are not retrieved from SIM cards but from servers belonging to the phone company.
She also said she was able to check the phone and find out none of the messages on it were retrieved by Brown from May 20 to 25, 2009.
Richard Rococi, the consultant appointed by the court to examine the phone in April, testified that when he tried to get the message he plugged the phone into a computer and a message came back that the SIM card was not registered.
He said he reinserted the card then called the provider and read the number of the card off, and was told by the company that the number on the card did not match the number the phone was assigned to.
However, records from the provider showed that the phone number was issued to someone in January of this year, and Gibb testified that since Brown was arrested at least two other people have had that number.
Rococi said he did not tell the provider he was looking for records from 2009 but he did tell them the phone was an “older phone.”
“I never mentioned 2009,” Rococi said.
Rococi said he did not check the records or analyze the phone or card to see if they matched. He said he was only asked to recover a voice mail and when he could not, he made his report.
He said he did not know what year to ask for because he was never instructed to ask for a specific year and he knew no details of the case.
“When they told me the SIM card did not work in that phone I did nothing else after that,” Rococi said.
Rococi said he had access to the records but did not realize he needed to check records from 2009.
Meranto said at the beginning of the hearing police and prosecutors had months to check the phone and failed to do so, and both Gibb and Rococi said authorities never came to them until the case was dismissed.
Judge Sweeney said she would issue a ruling shortly.