Seven months after the Culver City police fingered already-jailed gang member Myron DeShun Grant as the killer of City Hall consultant Paul Bilodeau at a lonely construction site, doubt, in the form of a potential bombshell, was cast on the identity of the killer this morning at the suspect’s preliminary hearing.
Mr. Grant’s attorney, alternate public defender Robert Conley, suggested shifting the culprit focus to half-brother Davonte Hatcher, and he asserted evidence.
Meanwhile, the state of the relationship between the brothers so far is unknown.
At issue at this early stage is disposition of the victim’s cell phone.
Police said that the pawning of Mr. Bilodeau’s phone, weeks after his murder, the night of Jan. 2, 2009, led them to Mr. Grant’s cell at County Jail, where he already had been incarcerated for 3½ months on a separate charge.
If the Bilodeau phone were pawned so soon after the homicide, it is not yet clear why nearly a year and a half passed before Mr. Grant was formally charged.
Thick Files
The case is moving more slowly than the normally slow pace of Los Angeles courts because, say attorneys, the case is top heavy and bottom heavy with thousands of pages of testimony to be pored over and analyzed.
Further, Mr. Conley only was assigned to the complicated case late last year. He has been playing catch-up since. When he was new to the case, he informally indicated that there was so much discovery to be studied that it probably would be March before any measurable headway would be detected — and that is the way it is working out.
Monday, March 21 is the next court date for Mr. Grant.
Even though Judge Keith L. Schwartz became annoyed with Mr. Conley this morning when he did not produce a precise estimate of how much longer he would need to sift through testimony, the judge acknowledged the density of the case. He indicated that he had signed “at least 10” search warrants for the murder site, the grounds of Fire Station No. 3, Bristol Parkway, Fox Hills. At the time of the crime, the fire station was just getting under construction at a fairly remote site, acutely so after dark, when the murder took place.
Mr. Conley told Judge Schwartz that he already has reviewed 2,000 written pages of discovery. But he said he has no idea how much remains to be combed through. “I have not listened to a single tape recording, and I have 36 or 37 of those to listen to,” the defense lawyer said.
The Pawn Transaction
Returning to his client, Mr. Conley said that Mr. Hatcher, the half-brother who has not been charged, was actually the person who pawned the Bilodeau phone approximately Jan. 23, 2009, three weeks after the murder.
Remember the date.
Said Mr. Conley: “Jan. 23 was two days before the records indicate Mr. Hatcher took a Sim card from a pre-existing cell phone he owned and put the card in the victim’s cell phone, and they matched the pre-existing phone to a cell phone of Davonte Hatcher.
“Mr. Hatcher also had a .357 Magnum portrayed on his personal cell phone at a later date — in April 2009 — which would have been of the make that was used on the victim.
“Those and other problems in the case create serious issues for proving the case,” the public defender said.
Mr. Conley was asked if he was suggesting the half-brother is the true culprit.
“I don’t know,” he told the newspaper. “But many issues have to be threshed out in the course of the investigation.”
