Wednesday, Nov. 1, 2006 | 7:20 a.m.
The parking garage surveillance tapes that have become critical evidence in the Gibbons-Mazzeo incident will be difficult to authenticate because they could have been faked fairly easily, security experts said Tuesday.
Unless police can establish a rock-solid chain of custody for the tapes, which were turned over to police just last Wednesday, 12 days after the incident, the videos almost certainly should be regarded as inconclusive, those experts said.
Their statements cast a cloud over the hopes of Rep. Jim Gibbons and his supporters, who have said the tapes would exonerate the Republican candidate for governor just a week before the Nov. 7 election.
For three days, the Gibbons camp - and police sources - have said the surveillance tapes showed neither Gibbons nor his accuser, Chrissy Mazzeo, inside the parking garage where she alleged that he pinned her against a wall in an attempt to coerce sex. Gibbons rallied behind that news Sunday and Monday, saying the tapes vindicated him.
The Gibbons camp was dealt another blow late Tuesday afternoon when Metro Police issued a brief press release revealing that, despite widespread media reports, detectives had not completed their review of the tapes.
"Detectives still have many days of work left to do before it can be determined whether either of the subjects appear on the video," the statement said. The department "is still investigating this matter and has reached no conclusions."
And in yet another twist late Tuesday, Metro revealed a fourth 911 call related to the incident the night of Oct. 13. That call, at 11:32 p.m., came from a woman identifying herself as a sister of Mazzeo's. The Sun had asked Metro about that fourth call two weeks ago but was told police had no record of it.
On a tape of the call, the sister pleads with a police dispatcher to find out if Mazzeo had called 911 to report "a rape by Sen. Gibbons." The sister said Mazzeo had called her an hour earlier. Mazzeo placed her first call to police at 10:23 p.m.
But questions about verification of the tapes overshadowed those developments because those videos could provide the only independent evidence of what occurred.
According to Mazzeo's original police statement, she and three other women were drinking with Gibbons and campaign adviser Sig Rogich at McCormick and Schmick's restaurant when Gibbons made a series of unwelcome flirtations.
As the group dispersed between 9:30 and 10 p.m., Mazzeo told police that she found Gibbons waiting for her outside the restaurant as she began looking for her truck. Gibbons offered to help, and soon the two were heading toward the parking garage. Mazzeo's truck, however, was parked behind the restaurant in another lot.
She says Gibbons wanted to go to the parking garage to get his car to drive her to her truck. Gibbons says Mazzeo told him her truck was in the garage.
Once inside the garage, she alleges, he accosted her.
Gibbons said he walked her to the garage entrance, but not inside. She tripped, he said, and he innocently grabbed her to stop her from falling down.
Mazzeo said police told her several times during their investigation that they would get custody of the surveillance videos, which Mazzeo urged them to do in one of her three 911 calls to police.
The next day, she said, police told her no tapes existed. At that point, she said she decided not to file charges against Gibbons because of his powerful status. Police halted their investigation.
But the mystery surrounding what occurred continued. The parking garage is owned and managed by Crescent Real Estate Equities. Despite intense media coverage over the next two weeks and repeated phone calls from the Sun and trips to the Crescent security office, the tapes were nowhere to be found and Crescent officials refused to comment.
Then, last weekend, law enforcement sources said Crescent did in fact have the tapes and had turned them over to Metro.
On Monday, irritated by statements from the Gibbons camp that she felt sullied her name, Mazzeo formally filed charges and police reopened their investigation.
To gain access to the tapes, Gibbons' lawyer Don Campbell filed an emergency motion in District Court, demanding that police release the tapes to clear Gibbons' name.
"In this case, justice screams, screams for the release of these tapes," Campbell said.
Judge Douglas Herndon agreed and ordered police to make copies available to Campbell; Mazzeo's attorney, Richard Wright; and to the district attorney's office.
Police, however, did not do so. Deputy Chief Greg McCurdy told the Sun on Tuesday night that detectives needed time to review and to try to authenticate the tapes.
Security experts said that could be a significant challenge.
Severin Sorensen, vice president of an Iowa-based firm that installs and monitors video security systems, said that to have faith in the tapes' accuracy, police need to take four steps:
If the chain of custody cannot account for the 12 days the tapes were not in the hands of police, however, the possibility arises that they could be fake.
Roger Schmedlen, an expert witness in more than 60 court cases and operator of a Michigan-based security consulting firm, said anyone wishing to doctor or fabricate tapes would have one of two options, both of which are nearly impossible to detect.
In one scenario, the images of Gibbons and Mazzeo could have been erased. This would be a costly and time-consuming effort, Schmedlen said, and there are very few people who could pull off such a feat.
An easier method is for someone to set a false time and date on the video recorder and then simply make a new tape of the garage .
"If they did it the way I just described, there is no way to prove when a tape was made," said Schmedlen.
After the court hearing Tuesday, Campbell said such talk of altered or incomplete tapes was nonsense.
Marshall Allen contributed to this report.
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