Nick Rollins, owner of the former Oxnard area consulting firm that employed Fire Station murder victim Paul Bilodeau, said this morning that the construction trailer where Mr. Bilodeau was shot to death indeed was visible from the other side of the security fence on Bristol Parkway.
“The trailer was right at the front of the property, and it was quite high,” he said. “I had been in the trailer on numerous occasions. You could see the street from the windows of the trailer.”
With defendant Myron Grant’s second arraignment scheduled for next week, a question had arisen as to how a killer, unknown to the victim, could have found Mr. Bilodeau or would have known he was working after dark if the sightlines obscured.
“I have been working very closely with the detectives from Culver City,” Mr. Rollins told the newspaper from North Carolina, where he relocated after the Bilodeau tragedy 2_ years ago. “They have done a very thorough investigation. Because they are heading up the investigation, I wouldn’t be competent (to comment).
“I am very happy about the correspondence I have had with them during this entire situation.”
In the last hour and a half of Mr. Bilodeau’s life, on Jan. 2, 2009, the construction supervisor for City Hall’s Fire Station 3 project in Fox Hills fired off a half-dozen mails to his sometimes-adversary, Gabriel Fedida, owner of FEI Enterprises, the starting builder of the $5 million station.
Respectfully but firmly, Mr. Rollins seemed to wave off the potential tension-citation as an insignificant landing point. “Construction, inherently, is high stress,” he replied. “Six emails between Paul and the contractor is not uncommon. It certainly happens more often than that on occasion.
“As I said, I have dealt with the Culver City investigators on this. In my opinion, they have done a good job of looking at all that was there.
“Again, this is based on my limited knowledge of what they have asked me on occasions, what they have shared with me through questions.
A Time for Silence?
“But since there is a trial, I am not sure I am at liberty to talk too much about what I know.”
A $300,000 supervisorial contract between Mr. Rollins’s company, Rollins Consulting, Inc., then based in Southern California, and the city of Culver City was for one year, and it was signed in the late summer of 2007.
When the project ran well behind, the agreement twice was extended, expiring again days after Mr. Bilodeau, whose title was construction manager, was shot twice by an assailant. The extensions cost City Hall 50 percent of the original agreement, an additional $150,000.
“I opted not to renew the contract,” Mr. Rollins said, “until we had clarification of what actually transpired out there. We wanted to have the ability to put someone on that job who would be safe.
“I just didn’t feel comfortable at that time. What happened was quite a shock.”
Public Works Director Charles Herbertson earlier had told the newspaper that, following the city-imposed month-long hiatus after the Bilodeau murder, the Rollins company returned but only briefly. He said Mr. Rollins indicated he was too broken up by his friend’s violent death to continue.
The one-year Fire Station project, ultimately and most unhappily, ballooned into three years. Eventually, FEI Enterprises, the builder, was dismissed by exasperated City Hall officials in the third year. Mr. Herbertson, a stoic man, said working with FEI was the single “worst” experience in a quarter-century of overseeing construction.
Mr. Rollins, who never had worked with FEI before the Fox Hills tragedy, was asked if he concurred with Mr. Herbertson.
He answered diplomatically and succinctly. “Every contractor is different,” he said. “Paul spent a lot of time, an enormous amount of time, working to help this contractor out so the job would move along in as efficient of a manner as possible.
“Would I want to work with (FEI) again? No.”
