With a judge rather than a jury scheduled to decide the guilt or innocence of murder suspect Myron DeShun Grant in the coming months, a bizarre notion recently was raised:
If FEI Enterprises of West Los Angeles had come vaguely close to completing Fire Station No. 3, Fox Hills, on time, Paul Bilodeau might be alive this afternoon.
Is that irrational?
This story is full of such notions.
He would not have been in his office on the fateful evening of Jan. 2, 2009.
Mr. Grant, called a gang member by police and a veteran of three felony convictions before he was 25, might not have been in the neighborhood that evening — as the prosecution charges — and allegedly pulled the trigger.
Numerous unanswered questions surround Mr. Grant, who appears to have unusually strong family support, with 12 relatives and friends at his preliminary hearing two days ago.
According to co-prosecutors Keri Modder and Heather Steggell, Mr. Grant was involved in a dozen cellphone calls in the neighborhood of the Fire Station before and after the murder.
Perhaps the most daunting unanswered question is:
• Why would Mr. Grant have assaulted Mr. Bilodeau at all?
• There is no public evidence that the gentlemen from vastly different strata of society, ever knew or had heard of each other.
• Why would Mr. Grant, who lived on 58th Place, be spending three hours in the vicinity of the Fire Station — if cellphone records and conclusions are accurate?
• Of all of the people in West Los Angeles, why would Mr. Grant have singled out Mr. Bilodeau, whose presence on the grounds, in the pitch dark, was invisible from the street?
The neighborhood, distant from commercial businesses, features roomy office buildings. If you think pedestrians are scarce during the day, at 7 o’clock on a Friday evening after a holiday, the street was throbbing with emptiness. Nearly all buildings were dark.
Hardly a likely target for a gang member roaming to find a potential robbery victim.
To access Mr. Bilodeau, Mr. Grant would have had to scale a chain-link fence, which admittedly was pliable.
But if he could not see him from the street, didn’t know Mr. Bilodeau was on the inside, and didn’t know Mr. Bilodeau, why would he have gone to such extraordinary trouble?
This story is full of such scenarios.
In the summer of 2007, FEI signed a $5 million contract with City Hall to build the new fire station on Bristol Parkway in 12 months.
Two and a half years later, City Hall, out of patience, fired FEI and finished the job itself in the next six months.
Construction problems routinely occur, and agreements typically run over, says Culver City Public Works Director Charles Herbertson, the boss of Mr. Bilodeau, who was hired to supervise the project on-site.
Starting in late summer, it became common knowledge that the unmarried and “dedicated” Mr. Bilodeau, 45 years old, was on the grounds day and night.
His birth family was his life. For the length of the project, he was living with an elderly uncle in the Valley for the sake of convenience, and he often weekended with his parents in the Ventura area.
But a year after the project was under way, it was a long distance from being finished, a fact to be remembered.
Sixteen months after the fire station was started, early on the evening after New Year’s 2009, Mr. Bilodeau was shot and killed by two bullets while at work in his office, the construction trailer, in a fenced-in, closed-off corner of the grounds.
Not unusually, he had returned to his desk following dinner with his uncle.
Even though Gabriel Fedida, owner of FEI, told the newspaper days after the homicide that the project was “80 percent” completed, it still was not very close 14 months later when Mr. Herbertson finally dropped the hammer and canned the company.
(To be continued)
