Friday, Feb. 2, 2007 | 7:08 a.m.
Excerpts from police interview:
Q: When was the first time you found out about this incident?
ROGICH: The next morning.
Q: And who made you aware of it?
ROGICH: Well, I called Bill, you know, Young, and I couldn't find him. And then Chris Cole, my assistant, called me and said Michelle had called him (and) said Pennie called her late at night and they couldn't connect. And Michelle said she called to be sure Pennie was home safe. And then Pennie called her later and said, you won't believe what's happened. This girl filed this - this girl is crazy, she filed this report. And Michelle said, this is nutsy. You know, it's late and I'm goin' to bed. She said, this is ... she laughed about it - she thought it was kind of just like a surrealistic dream. And then Michelle called Chris Cole and he told me that this girl had done this stuff. But I didn't know any of the detail.
Q: So you heard from Chris about it.
ROGICH: Well, in between that, I could've heard from Bill that there's somethin' goin' on and I don't know enough about it.
Q: Did Mr. Gibbons ever call you and tell you anything about this incident?
ROGICH: Later that day, I talked to him, you know, and I said, what the hell is goin' on?
Q: And what did he say?
ROGICH: He said nothing. He said, "This girl fell and I picked her up and she looked at me crazy. I thought maybe she was gonna get sick on me. I didn't realize she had been drinking until she fell."
Several witnesses to the Oct. 13 incident involving then-gubernatorial candidate Jim Gibbons and his accuser, Chrissy Mazzeo, gave statements to Metro Police that shed new light on what happened at McCormick & Schmick's restaurant and afterward.
Julie Vick, the waitress who served Gibbons, Mazzeo and four others that evening, said at one point she thought about cutting the table off from alcoholic drinks because they had all been drinking heavily.
Although she said it appeared that Mazzeo and her friend, Pennie Puhek, had been drinking more than Gibbons or his campaign consultant, Sig Rogich, Vick suggested during a Nov. 6 interview that at one point she considered cutting the whole table off.
"I wouldn't say that either Sig or Jim seemed inebriated at all," Vick told police, "but there was a point where I was kind of like, should I cut them ... but I didn't want, you know, it's very awkward to cut ... I didn't want to cut anyone off."
When police asked her to elaborate on just how the atmosphere of the table was "flirty," as she told police the night of the incident, Vick told them one of the first two women who had joined Gibbons and Rogich - Michelle Diegel and Georgeanne Bradley, who worked in a law firm near Rogich's office - had put her foot on the table and told the men to "look at my new high heel shoes."
In another interview released Thursday, a parking valet named George Garcia told police Nov. 7 that he saw Gibbons and Mazzeo outside the restaurant with Gibbons "holding her or hugging her or something" and that the two were either laughing or yelling at each other - he couldn't tell which.
"I turned around immediately and I looked at them and I recognized them," Garcia told police. "And once I recognized him, I'm like, 'Did you park your car in valet?' And he just kind of like shushed me away."
Garcia added that after the incident a friend of his from a college fraternity who is "very political, Republican and stuff," told him that a Gibbons aide was trying to reach him to talk about what happened that night. But Garcia said he never called the Gibbons aide back.
A third witness was one of the many friends and family members Mazzeo called that night after she claimed to have been attacked by Gibbons in a Hughes Center parking garage sometime shortly after 10 p.m. The witness, Stefanie Damelio, gave an account of Mazzeo's calls very similar to what Mazzeo has said happened in the hours following the incident.
Damelio said that Mazzeo told her during several frantic calls the night of the alleged assault, and in one call the next morning, that Puhek had told her not to call the police. Damelio had worked with Mazzeo as a cocktail waitress at Wynn Las Vegas.
Mazzeo has said Puhek, a Gibbons supporter, was speaking on behalf of the Gibbons campaign.
During the call on Oct. 14, Damelio said Mazzeo told her that Puhek had relayed threats to her. "She said, well, Pennie is calling me telling me if I don't drop the charges, you know, something's going to happen to myself and to" her 3-year-old daughter.
Damelio added that Mazzeo told her that Puhek told her to sign a confidentiality agreement. Puhek had been paid for signing a statement that backed the Gibbons camp's version of events, Damelio said Mazzeo told her.
Another witness, Joyce Williams, a night clerk at the Hughes Center Residence Inn by Marriott, where Gibbons was staying, told police that she saw Gibbons and chatted with him the night of the 13th as he walked through the lobby toward the hotel elevators.
She said she recalled seeing him sometime between 9:30 and 11 p.m. Electronic hotel records show that Gibbons entered his room at 10:47 p.m., about 45 minutes after Gibbons and his staff originally claimed he got to his room.
Williams told police that she and Gibbons talked for about five minutes about the upcoming debates between he and Democratic gubernatorial contender Sen. Dina Titus, D-Las Vegas.
Gibbons appeared "perfectly well groomed" and acted normally, Williams told police.
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