In the semi-informal setting of a preliminary hearing this morning for Fire Station murder suspect Myron DeShun Grant, a Culver City police officer appeared to give conflicting testimony when the prosecution sought to place the defendant around the crime scene by tracking a steady steam of cellphone calls through technology and a sometimes dense web of tekkie talk.
Police Det. Ryan Thompson, the lead investigating officer in the homicide of City Hall construction consultant Paul Bilodeau, on Friday, Jan. 2, 2009, first said that Gabriel Fedida, owner of the construction firm building the Fire Station in Fox Hills, told him, he spoke with and received an email from Mr. Bilodeau at 7:04 p.m., the approximate moment of the murder.
Moments later, Mr. Thompson said a legal compliance person at AT&T assured him that “the last call registered” to Mr. Bilodeau’s cellphone was at 5:28 p.m., an hour and a half before the victim was killed in the doorway of the construction trailer.
At the outset of the hearing, the first prosecution witness, Andre Williams, employed in the open, airy office building next to the Fire Station, testified that he was working at the 7 o’clock hour on the Friday evening after New Year’s when he heard three shots.
He recalled the time 2½ years later, said Mr. Williams, because when his cellphone ran out of juice, he checked the time on his watch, stepped out of his office and went downstairs to the parking lot to charge his phone at his truck.
Mr. Williams’s description of the parking lot takes considerable imagination today because the adjoining property has undergone dramatic landscaping.
In January of ’09, the partially completed station resembled a hollowed-out, uneven hulk that sat atop dirt and mud. Today the streamlined grounds are paved and sleek-looking. In the property’s more primitive state, a temporary, evidently pliable chainlink fence divided the established office building from the embryonic Fire Station.
It was theorized that Mr. Bilodeau’s assailant slipped through the flexible barrier without unnecessarily exerting himself.
On the winter’s night of the still mysterious homicide, Mr. Williams said that as he entered the nearly empty parking lot, he heard a rustling, a shuffling somewhere away from him. It was closing in, though. Apparently a single light illumined the parking lot, and Mr. Williams was more concerned about his cell than anything else. As he opened his passenger door, the sound he described as between a “fast walk” and “a shuffle” grew louder and soon enveloped him.
Eventually, the advancing noise came to within 10 yards of him, a dark man of average height, 5-10 to 5-11, wearing a black hoodie, with the hood drawn over his head, partially obscuring his face, and he was wearing dark trousers.
Mr. Williams quickly identified the stranger as African American. All of this seemed to be leading up to him pointing at 26-year-old Mr. Grant, who was charged with murder and special circumstances, a year ago today.
But Mr. Williams did not say it was Mr. Grant. He said the man’s skin was “dark,” and Mr. Grant’s attorney, Robert Conley, pointed out that his client’s African American skin is “light to medium,” a judgment to which the witness assented.
(To be continued)
