Last March, Debra Brass bought six tickets from Ticketmaster. She planned to attend a Lady Gaga concert for her birthday with friends including Nicole Lagrotta and Lyndsay Eisenberg. By April, Ms. Brass’s friends had dropped out of the plans.
Not wanting to attend the concert alone, Ms. Brass sold the six tickets she had purchased from Ticketmaster on craigslist to four people.
About a week before the concert, she received telephone calls from unknown persons claiming they had purchased tickets with her name on them from Craigslist. They said they had been provided with her contact information.
The four callers said Ticketmaster was claiming that the electronic ticket order had been cancelled, and thus voided.
Realizing something was wrong, Ms. Brass attempted to return the money to the people to whom she had sold the tickets. Ultimately, she wanted to discover what had happened and rectify the situation.
She reached one of the four persons, David Lassiter. Ms. Brass told him she believed the tickets had been duplicated. She offered a refund to him. He understood the situation and accepted her offer. Ostensibly, he had no intention of filing legal action against Ms. Brass, and signed a receipt confirming so.
Drama Was Only Beginning
However, on the night of the concert, two men who had bought tickets from Ms. Brass sent her an email threatening her that they would go to the police, believing she had duped them. Ultimately, she spent the night of her birthday with her family at Kate Mantelini Restaurant in Woodland Hills. Afterward, Ms. Brass said she went to stay with a friend in the South Bay. She was afraid to go home because of the threatening email.
Distraught, unable to sleep, she went to the Hermosa Beach Police Station the following morning. Ms. Brass told officer Lance McColgan what happened. He told her to go home and not worry.
Ms. Brass said that less than an hour later, officer McColgan showed up at her apartment saying a police report had been made against her. He asked her to go to the police station and she complied.
When she arrived, she was taken into an interrogation room and questioned for almost two hours by Detective Mick Gaglia. Detective Gaglia told Ms. Brass he had received a police report from a Hermosa Beach resident regarding the tickets. Ms. Brass said she cooperated, answered all of the detective’s questions, repeated the events and again was sent home.
Later that same day, Ms. Brass received an email from a girl to whom she had sold two tickets. The girl said she saw other people at the venue with the same ticket numbers. At that point, Ms. Brass said she realized that when distributing the tickets she had purchased, she had inadvertently sold only four of them to six people, having accidentally deleted one set of tickets and accidentally reproduced one set.
Trying It Once More
When Ms. Brass received a call from the girl, she met with her and her mother, refunded the money. Mother and daughter signed a receipt that they would not pursue civil charges and that they would notify the detective they had received refunds. That same day, immediately after refunding the girl’s money, Ms. Brass met Detective Gaglia again at the station and handed over a copy of the receipt. For the third time that day, she left the station of her own volition even after being informed that many more persons had come forward saying they received duplicated tickets. She promptly retained attorney Allison Margolin.
Ms. Margolin told Detective Gaglia Ms. Brass was still concerned with the situation and that she would cooperate with detectives to get to the bottom of it. The lawyer also suggested to the detective that they should pursue the real perpetrators.
Last week, Detective Gaglia said that the case would go to his supervisor this week and then to a filing deputy. Although he maintained that the detectives had probable cause to make an arrest after Ms. Brass’s original statements, he never indicated an intention to make an arrest, according to the lawyer. Allowing Ms. Brass to leave the station seemed to indicate the opposite.
Time to Go
Last Friday, Detective David Bohacik and two other Hermosa Beach plainclothes officers went to Ms. Brass’s workplace, stood in the doorway of her office and handcuffed her. Officers seized Ms. Brass’s phone and purse from her desk despite her request that the items be left at the office, she said. Officers refused to let her call her attorney, and allegedly bruised her right arm as they led her out of her office. Officers declined the opportunity to take Ms. Brass to the police vehicle through a side door of her office, instead taking her in handcuffs past over 50 co-workers. She was booked at the Hermosa Beach Police Dept. for allegedly obtaining money by false pretenses. During the booking process, she was informed that if she couldn’t bond out, she would be transferred to County Jail Downtown and kept until after the long holiday weekend.
Subsequently, she made bond. Upon her release, Ms. Brass said she was so traumatized that it was hard for her to speak. Around 11 p.m., Ms. Brass discovered that someone had gained access to her email account and forwarded all emails, including her privileged correspondence with attorney, to an email supplied by the city of Hermosa Beach and the Hermosa Beach Police Dept.
She contacted a private investigator, Yvette Cesario-Smith of SCS International Investigations and her attorney to relate the latest bizarre turn. The Hermosa Beach Police Dept., according to Ms. Margolin, has issued a press release crediting officers with apprehending the suspect.
Ms. Margolin said that Hermosa police “at best rushed to judgment. They failed to investigate other potential perpetrator(s) despite the probability of the case involving multiple suspects.
“While the police planned and executed a public arrest, and failed to pursue or recognize other leads, the real culprit(s) are getting away scot-free.” Persons with information are asked to contact Ms. Margolin at 323.653.1850 and/or Ms. Cesario-Smith at 310.947.5449.
