Friday, Oct. 27, 2006 | 7:36 a.m.
At his news conference Thursday, Sheriff Bill Young made a surprising concession: Metro Police made minimal effort to determine whether a videotape existed of the late-night parking garage encounter between Republican gubernatorial candidate Jim Gibbons and Chrissy Mazzeo.
Finding a tape will be crucial to determining exactly what happened if police move closer to reopening their investigation into the Oct. 13 incident in a parking structure across the street from McCormick & Schmick's restaurant in the Hughes Center.
In one of three 911 calls that night, Mazzeo expressed hope that police would discover videotapes of the incident. At a news conference this week Mazzeo said police told her on the night of the incident that a tape would be forthcoming the next day. When she left the scene at 3:30 a.m., she said, they assured her the tape would be in hand within an hour.
But later that Saturday, Mazzeo was told by police that no tape existed to verify her accusations. She then declined to press charges.
Thursday, Young's explanation made police sound less than vigilant about the tape.
"I'm unclear about all the video surveillance that was there," Young told reporters, adding that the video cameras and parking structure are managed by private companies.
"We were told by one employee ... that there was no tape there," he said. "And I think, in order to proceed further in this case, I'd like to see that. Eventually, if we do proceed with this case I think we're gonna, we're gonna have to try to see that, because we haven't been able to find any eyeball witnesses to this crime."
The search for videotape evidence is just one of the challenges police face in this case if Mazzeo decides to press charges. Getting to the truth will be difficult given all that has occurred over the last two weeks.
Both Gibbons and Mazzeo have hired lawyers to protect their interests in a politically charged atmosphere that could influence the race for governor. The election is Nov. 7, and the two political parties have been spinning their versions of what happened - sometimes publicly, sometimes behind the scenes.
Private investigators have spoken to witnesses, some of whom have given signed statements outside the presence of police. Saturated media coverage and dueling news conferences by Gibbons and Mazzeo made their versions of what occurred plain for all to know. Witnesses may well be influenced by it all.
Mazzeo and her lawyer, Richard Wright, said at a news conference Wednesday that she is willing to cooperate with police, an offer Young accepted Thursday.
"Let me make this point clear," the sheriff told reporters. "Bring it on. Come forward, sign the crime report, and I'll guarantee you an aggressive investigation. You ain't seen nothing yet ... There will be no stone unturned."
Wright gave no indication Thursday when or if his client will talk to police.
"I don't know whose court the ball is in," he said. "I will consult with my client in due course."
The official explanation from police about the videotape evidence has been that a Metro patrol officer contacted a lone Hughes Center security officer, who informed him that "they do have video of the parking structure but that the video was not recording at the time of the incident."
During his press conference, Young conceded that Metro has a lot of work to do to try to see if that explanation is true.
Police said they made one initial sweep of the five-story Hughes Center parking garage in question, which serves employees and customers of nearby restaurants. It also is the main parking structure for nearby office buildings, including the building at 3980 Howard Hughes Parkway that houses the office of Gibbons' political consultant Sig Rogich, who was socializing with Gibbons, Mazzeo and three other women at McCormick & Schmick's before the parking garage encounter.
Immediately following their interview of Gibbons during the afternoon of Oct. 14, two Metro Violent Crimes unit detectives canvassed an area including the garage, they wrote in their report. They found one camera in the southeast area of the first floor of the garage. But they noted that they couldn't locate any other exterior cameras in the area.
The report makes no mention of additional cameras inside the garage, however, even though those could be important because Mazzeo and Gibbons have differing accounts about where in the garage the incident occurred.
Gibbons told police that Mazzeo tripped at the entrance of the garage. Mazzeo said she walked down a staircase with Gibbons, and that the incident occurred near an elevator.
A Sun reporter who looked over the garage found 11 cameras inside the structure, including one directly at the bottom of the staircase Mazzeo most likely was referring to in pinpointing the location of the incident - at the southern corner of the structure off of Hughes Center Drive. That camera faces in toward the garage, and would appear to capture any pedestrian coming or leaving from that entrance.
Farther into the garage heading north, at the first of two elevator banks, another camera is overhead, aimed right at the elevator - but far enough back that even if the incident occurred off to the side of the elevator by a couple of feet, it appears the camera could have captured the image.
Police have referred questions about the garages' videotaping system to Crescent Real Estate Equities, the Texas-based real estate investment company that owns and manages Hughes Center.
That has proved to be a dead end.
Robert Clavier, the director of security for Hughes Center, declined to comment. "It's an ongoing police investigation, and I can't talk to you now," he said before hanging up. A new investigation is not under way. The office has refused to comment about its system in the two weeks since the incident.
Clavier referred questions to Crescent. Jennifer Terrell, a company spokeswoman in Fort Worth, Texas, declined to comment other than to say: "We do not comment on security matters."
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