Surveillance tapes shed dim light on parking garage incident

Sam Skolnik and Jeff German

Friday, Nov. 3, 2006 | 7:21 a.m.

After all the fuss, the parking garage surveillance tapes released Thursday yielded little more than dark and sometimes blurry images - and no sightings of either Jim Gibbons or Chrissy Mazzeo.

The tapes showed images from 14 cameras, switching from view to view in a constant rotation, stamped with the date and times that would have included the time the incident occurred.

The Sun saw just small portions of the tapes. They showed no people or even any parked cars.

Aside from the inconclusive images, the tapes present many other questions, veteran Nevada trial lawyers said. Using the tapes to prove that Gibbons and Mazzeo were not in that garage on Oct. 13 may be a steep legal challenge, they said.

"You're proving a negative. That's a very difficult thing," longtime Las Vegas defense lawyer John Momot said.

Metro Police reopened the investigation this week into Mazzeo's claims that Gibbons assaulted and sexually threatened her inside the garage after drinking at a nearby restaurant.

The Reno Republican has claimed that as he walked Mazzeo up to the entrance of the garage, she tripped and began to fall when he grabbed her to help her stand up. The two parted ways at that point, he said. Gibbons has not been charged with any crime.

On Thursday morning, police released two VHS tapes, each with footage of the parking garage from about 1:30 a.m. on Oct. 13 to 1:30 a.m. the following day.

In keeping with a court order from District Judge Douglas Herndon, the tapes were released by police to three parties: Gibbons' attorney Don Campbell, Mazzeo's lawyer Richard Wright and District Attorney David Roger.

Campbell, who had filed the motion to have the tapes released, gave a copy of the videos to the Associated Press for distribution to the rest of the media. But making copies of the unusual recordings proved more difficult than simply dropping them into VHS duplicating machines.

The media scrambled through the day to find equipment capable of showing the tapes clearly. The Sun, at times aided by video experts familiar with the recording system, viewed two portions of the tapes, one at television station KLAS Channel 8, and the other in the presence of a source.

The tapes were grainy and distorted in many shots. Experts said the recording system appeared to be old and outdated, and that the tape had been recorded over many times.

According to veteran local criminal litigators, what the tapes apparently show - or don't show - presents legal challenges to both sides of the case.

On the one hand, if full viewings of the tapes do not show any images of Gibbons or Mazzeo, as sources have claimed, the case could become a he said-she said argument.

"Police are going to have a very weighty decision as to whether they want to send this to the DA," Momot said. "And the DA, if (he gets) the case, would then also have a tough decision on whether to file charges."

But questions are sure to linger about the tapes' authenticity, attorneys said. A judge would likely admit them into evidence in a criminal proceeding, the lawyers said, despite clear "chain of custody" issues.

In Mazzeo's first 911 call to police at 10:23 p.m. on Oct. 13, she tells a police dispatcher that security cameras should have captured the assault. But police said that a security officer for Crescent Real Estate Equities, which owns and manages the parking garage, told them the night of the incident that no surveillance tapes existed. Eleven days later, however, Crescent said it did, indeed, have the tapes.

"Admissibility of the tapes really comes down to whether someone can testify that they're authentic," Las Vegas defense lawyer and former federal prosecutor Charles E. Kelly said. "Someone's going to have to get up on that witness stand and say those tapes are what they say they are. Otherwise, they're committing perjury."

Defense attorney Tom Pitaro noted that attorneys wanting to use the tapes in court would not only have to worry about authenticity, but "time calibration issues," meaning they would need to make sure the times on the two tapes agreed with each other and with the actual time.

"How are you going to authenticate that this camera took those pictures at this exact time?" he said. "If a tape shows something, then you can say it would be relevant. But if it doesn't show something, then you get into all these other issues."

Security experts have told the Sun that fabricating tapes could easily be accomplished by resetting the time and date stamps to the days in question and running the recorder at a time when the garage was desolate.

That possibility underlies concerns about the 11 days that elapsed before police received the tapes.

Soon after Crescent turned the tapes over to police, the Gibbons camp said it was delighted because the tapes would show that neither Mazzeo nor Gibbons had entered the garage that night, vindicating Gibbons.

Police, however, said as late as Tuesday that they had not completed their review of the videos and could not say whether they showed either of the two parties the tapes. The Sun attempted to determine Thursday whether police had completed the review of the tapes, but Metro did not return repeated phone calls.