Josh Powell: 911 dispatcher admits to being 'clumsy,' 'faltering'

In the days after Powell killed his two young boys and himself in a fiery explosion, public outcry has condemned how social services, family courts and emergency responders handled the long-troubled Powell family saga.

But much ire has been directed at the 911 dispatcher . At first he did not seem to take seriously the initial phone call by the social worker, who said Powell locked her out of his home when she arrived with the boys for a supervised visit.

In an interview that aired Friday night, the dispatcher said, "I just wish that I had understood better what the circumstances were and the lethal quality of this call and all the dangerous potential that was there."

Elizabeth Griffin-Hall, the social worker, became increasingly frustrated as the phone call went on, with the dispatcher asking her what color car she was driving, how to spell Powell's last name and his date of birth.

In his first interview, the dispatcher said he missed cues about the emergency in the call by Griffin-Hall.

"As I re-listen to the call I recognize now that I missed, for example, the fact that she said that she smelled gas. Now I heard her say that, but she... immediately followed that comment with 'I want to move my car out of the driveway.' Well, sitting in an idling vehicle, you would smell gas, so I didn't give it the significance that it deserved. I should have asked her more about that."

The dispatcher also said that despite his second-guessing, he believes that a quicker response time would not have helped much.

"What if we had gotten deputies there two minutes later," he said. "They would not have immediately kicked the door and rushed in. They would have staged and cordoned off the area and treated it like a hostage situation."

When asked by Morrison what his response was when he later learned that Powell blew up the home with the boy inside, he said:

"It was horrible... especially for someone who has done this as long as I have and to re-listen to the call and to hear how clumsy and faltering I sounded and laboring with what turned out to be a horrible situation but that I didn't recognize as such."

The story of the Powell family began the night of Dec. 7, 2009, when Josh Powell, living with his wife in Utah, packed his two boys into the car in the middle of the night -- in the midst of a heavy snowstorm -- purportedly to take them camping. His wife, Susan Powell, has not been seen since.

He initially told authorities that his wife may have decided to disappear, or perhaps committed suicide.

Josh Powell, who was described by Griffin-Hall, the social worker, as "really, really evil," initially had custody of his boys and moved with them to his father's house in Washington state not long after his wife's disappearance.

But in September, police executing a search there allegedly discovered thousands of pornographic pictures and videos -- including furtively taken shots of neighbor children in various states of undress -- on a computer belonging to Powell's father, Steven.

On Saturday, a funeral was held for Charles, 7, and Braden Powell, 5, in Tacoma, Wash., where hundreds turned out.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/nationnow/

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'Speed Freak Killer' was paid $33,000 to guide search for victims

Guided by a serial killer on death row, San Joaquin County sheriff's deputies and public works employees were digging Saturday at suspected dumping grounds in two counties in search of the remains of victims of the notorious "Speed Freak Killers."

Condemned serial killer Wesley Shermantine, 45, drew maps of where he and late accomplice Loren Herzog buried as many as 20 victims of their drug-fueled murder spree that began in the mid-1980s and terrorized San Joaquin and Calaveras counties for more than a decade. Shermantine gave up the information in exchange for $33,000 provided by Sacramento bounty hunter Leonard Padilla, Padilla told The Times.

On Thursday, remains tentatively identified from dental records as those of Cyndi Vanderheiden, a 25-year-old Linden woman who disappeared from her home in 1998, were found in a remote area of Calaveras County, said San Joaquin County Sheriff's spokesman Les Garcia. Authorities are still awaiting the results of DNA analysis to confirm the identity.

Searchers using heavy equipment operated by county workers found the remains of another young woman Friday near the same site to which Shermantine had directed Padilla with maps mailed to the bounty hunter from San Quentin State Prison.

Investigators haven't yet identified the remains found Friday, but information provided by Shermantine to Padilla indicated they could be those of 16-year-old Chevelle "Chevy" Wheeler, who went missing from Stockton in 1985.

"We have information that we may have 10 to 20 bodies in that well," Garcia said of the focus of the search Saturday, a site identified by Shermantine on farmland in the town of Linden, about 13 miles east of Stockton.

Padilla and Stockton Record reporter Scott Smith had provided the information to sheriff's officials months ago, Padilla said. Law enforcement authorities only initiated their search, Padilla said, after he took cadaver-sniffing dogs to the sites identified by Shermantine and "got a lot of hits." Prison screening of the communications sent through the mail by the death row inmate also put pressure on authorities to reopen the cold case, the bounty hunter said.

Herzog, Shermantine's childhood friend and partner in crime, committed suicide last month after learning that Shermantine was providing authorities with information that could lead to new charges. Herzog, 46, was living in a trailer at High Desert State Prison in Susanville, where his body was found Jan. 16. His initial conviction and sentence to 77 years to life was overturned when an appeals court deemed his confession to the crimes coerced. He served 14 years under a plea deal and was released in 2010 but had been required to live on prison property under the terms of his parole.

Shermantine was motivated to help locate the bodies of his victims by the $33,000, Padilla said, because he still owes $18,000 in restitution ordered by the court that sentenced him to death in 2001. As long as the judgment remains unpaid, any money deposited into Shermantine's prison account gets confiscated by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation to be put toward the restitution debt, the bounty hunter explained.

Shermantine believes the remaining $15,000 will be at his disposal, Padilla said, and has asked that part of it be used to buy head stones for his parents who died while he was in prison. Padilla speculated, though, that other family members of victims may seek restitution awards from the condemned prisoner's remaining funds.

Shermantine was at first reluctant to help authorities locate the remains of his victims, fearful that he could face additional murder charges, said Padilla, who said he financed the inducement to the condemned prisoner with proceeds from his less high-profile locating jobs.

"He said this could be very incriminating for him to do, but I told him he's already on death row and they're not going to kill you more than once," the bounty hunter said.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2012/02/speed-freak-killers-paid-search-victims.html

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From Google News

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Following N.C. 'recipe' requires all-in effort

Wilmington leaders told that teamwork is the key

In the past seven years, more than 75 cities nationwide have been where Wilmington finds itself today.

They've been frustrated by seemingly intractable street violence and drawn to the promise of the so-called "High Point strategy" to dramatically cut it.

Not all of them have succeeded, and experts on the strategy say there are a variety of things that have tripped up those efforts.

The most common is skipping or changing one of the eight steps that are crucial to the strategy, said James Fealy, the police chief of High Point, N.C., where the method got its start.

"If you take an ingredient out of the recipe, it doesn't work as well," Fealy said.

Fealy was one of several High Point leaders who spoke to a Delaware group that visited the city last week to see if the strategy, which combines police work with community support, could be applied to Wilmington's violent crime problem.

Wilmington had the nation's third-highest violent crime rate among similarly sized cities in 2009 and 2010.

Wilmington Police Chief Michael Szczerba said the department would try it, possibly as early as next month.

In October, The News Journal traveled to Providence, R.I., a city similar to Wilmington that had seen success using the High Point strategy to eliminate two violent, open-air drug markets. Szczerba initially rejected the strategy, but later said he would look into whether police could apply the strategy in Wilmington.

Experts said Wilmington shouldn't rush the process.

It took High Point about four months to execute the city's first initiative in May 2004, said Jim Summey, executive director of the nonprofit High Point Community Against Violence. It would have taken longer if community groups weren't already in place and organized into a coherent voice.

Wilmington Police Capt. Marlyn Dietz, who heads the department's community policing unit, said last week that the city's roughly 40 community groups aren't organized yet, which is one of the first things he and others plan to work on.

High Point has used the strategy -- formally called "focused deterrence" -- to eliminate five violent drug markets, cut gang crime and reduce robberies. It plans to target chronic domestic-violence offenders later this month.

Open-air drug markets are essentially the same everywhere and respond to the same treatment steps, Summey said. He, too, compared the strategy to a recipe.

"You can flavor it, you can marble it, you can ice it, but underneath it all, it's still a pound cake," he said. "I haven't seen [the drug-market initiative] fail anyplace where they followed the recipe."

Belief in strategy

A shift in police or political leadership can pose another challenge to the effort, especially if the department's top commanders haven't bought into the idea, said High Point Police Lt. Col. Marty Sumner.

"It doesn't take that many [supporters], but there have to be those people who believe in it," he said.

Wilmington's commitment to using the strategy will be tested in about 11 months, when Mayor James M. Baker's term expires. Baker appointed Szczerba when he became mayor, and the city's next mayor will likely name a new police chief.

The Wilmington department's two inspectors and two of its seven captains also made the trip to High Point last week.

High Point will undergo its own leadership change when Fealy, arguably the department's most fervent believer, retires at the end of this month. Fealy said he isn't worried because Sumner, Capt. Larry Casterline and the rest of the department's command staff are full believers, too. Sumner is in line to become the new chief.

"From the chief down, they have to say, 'We're going to do this and if you want to work here, you're going to do this,' " Summey said.

David Kennedy, the criminal justice professor whose work underpins the strategy, said it has to be viewed as a fundamental way of doing police work, not a special project.

"When it becomes a program or a grant-funded project or somebody's pet, it gets swamped by business as usual," said Kennedy, of John Jay College in New York. "It is a tough switch to make, but lots of people have made it, so it's far from impossible."

While Delaware officials were visiting High Point, the strategy was also a topic of conversation at the Guggenheim Symposium on Crime in America, held at John Jay College.

Connie Rice, a Los Angeles community activist, said police there experienced "a lot of pushback" against the strategy from some political and police-union leaders. Resistance may also come from community members who feel the police are trying to shift the crime-fighting workload onto them, said Donyee Bradley, a former gang member who is now a gang-outreach worker in Washington, D.C.

Risco Mention-Lewis, an assistant district attorney in Nassau County, N.Y., said she and some law-enforcement officers initially dismissed the strategy as "hugs for thugs."

"But you plow ahead and get it done," she said.

Those detractors will come around to the idea when they see it work, Mention-Lewis said.

Providing a chance

One element of the strategy involves the police acknowledging that they've made mistakes in the past in dealing with the community.

Fealy said zero-tolerance sweeps, for example, sometimes do more harm than good because they reinforce the community's perception that police just want to give everyone a criminal record. And because the sweeps rarely have a lasting effect, the community doesn't see their value, he said.

Kennedy said admitting those failings isn't as hard for police to do as it might seem. Officers often talk behind closed doors about how frustrated they are that their work doesn't permanently improve a neighborhood, he said.

"It's become almost a commonplace thing for police to say in public, 'We can't arrest our way out of this,' " Kennedy said. "This is really just saying that to the community."

Once the strategy begins, police have to maintain control and not let it become an expansive social service program, Sumner said. The focus has to remain on reducing crime for the whole community, not saving a few people from a troubled life.

"If you're overfocused on the offender, you'll lose the effectiveness of it," Sumner said.

Kennedy agreed that's crucial.

"Everybody wants to see the guys turn their lives around, but the goal is to shut down the market and keep it shut down," Kennedy said.

Kennedy said the social-service element is more important for the community than for the individual offenders. Some offenders will take advantage of the help, others won't, but at least the community knows the offer was made.

"Whether it's accepted or not, it takes away the excuses that the offenders use in which they say, 'Nobody ever gave me a chance, so I have to keep doing what I'm doing,' " Kennedy said.

Following through

The community has its own responsibilities, experts said.

Summey, a former Baptist minister, said many community groups, social-service agencies and churches want to get involved in the initiative at first, then can't follow through on the help they promised.

"Church groups want to say, 'Trust Jesus and you'll be fine,' " he said. "But trust in Jesus won't pay your utility bill or erase the charges from your criminal record."

The community also has to be willing to support the whole effort by helping low-level dealers find jobs, housing, education and other services, Summey said.

High Point City Manager Strib Boynton said Fealy asked him before the initiative to hire one of the West End neighborhood's former crack dealers. It was a high-profile risk to do it, Summey said, and Boynton weathered criticism from city residents who complained that a criminal had been given a good city job ahead of other applicants.

"The kid was wonderful," said Boynton, who later hired another former dealer. "You have to put your faith with [the police] who are doing the job."

Maintain progress

Because the strategy targets the entire drug market, it usually dries up overnight, experts said.

Then the work begins to maintain the peace. Sumner said police have to be ready to jump on problems quickly and show the community they'll respond to their calls, otherwise they'll lose the community's trust.

Linda Hodgson, a former High Point police officer who worked undercover, compared it to a military operation to gain control of a piece of land. "Once you take it, you have to keep it," Hodgson said.

That goes for the community, too.

In High Point's West End neighborhood, Annie Martin could look out her bedroom window and see blatant drug dealing and prostitution. That disappeared almost overnight in May 2004 after police targeted the drug market there, she said.

Police later aimed at a drug market in the city's Southside neighborhood, which, again, dried up overnight. But the dealers slowly returned because residents weren't calling police to report them. At one Southside community meeting, Martin, 79, went to talk to residents to urge them to speak up.

"It works, but it does take the cooperation of the people in the community," Martin said.

THE EIGHT STEPS OF 'FOCUSED DETERRENCE'

These are the steps High Point, N.C., police used to apply "focused deterrence" to eliminate five violent open-air drug markets. They've also adapted the steps to reduce gang violence and robberies, and later this month will apply them to chronic domestic-violence offenders.

1) Target a specific offense in a specific place, such as drug dealing in a neighborhood, by looking at several years of crime data.

2) Identify the key offenders through surveillance, undercover work and criminal histories. This is often a surprisingly small number of people; police say many drug markets involve fewer than two dozen dealers.

3) Study the problem to know exactly what's happening there. Who are the suppliers and the sellers?

4) Make an example of the worst offenders (what High Point police call the "A list") through swift and aggressive prosecution.

5) Pick the low-level offenders (High Point's "B list") who'll get a second chance -- typically those who have not committed violence.

6) Organize social services to be prepared to help that second-chance group get jobs, education, housing, transportation and other services. Make sure those agencies can and will follow through on their promises.

7) Organize the community's "moral voices," such as parents, grandmothers, ministers and victims' families. They'll deliver the message that they care about the offenders, who must stop their destructive behavior.

8) Conduct the dramatic call-in meeting. Show the offenders the surveillance video of their actions so they can't deny them. Tell them to stop immediately or face certain prosecution based on the evidence police have against them. Offer them help to straighten out their lives.

http://www.delawareonline.com/article/20120212/NEWS01/202120351/Following-N-C-recipe-requires-all-effort

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