Detective got tough with Duke students (Herr Gottlieb's Record)

DURHAM - If three Duke University lacrosse players face a jury this spring, defense attorneys likely will take aim at Sgt. Mark Gottlieb, the Durham police officer who supervised the investigation into the March 13 party at which an escort service dancer says she was raped.

The 43-year-old detective could be the prosecution's most important witness aside from the dancer herself.

In recent weeks, an attorney for one of the lacrosse players questioned the plausibility of Gottlieb's case notes, provided to the defense as evidence. Attorneys also have criticized Gottlieb for not following the Durham Police Department's guidelines in a photo lineup that he showed the accuser.

Members of the defense team are now closely examining the arrests Gottlieb made before the rape case. Records show that the sergeant arrested a disproportionate number of Duke students, all on misdemeanor violations such as carrying an open beer on a public sidewalk or violating the city's noise ordinance.

Such charges usually earn an offender a pink ticket such as those issued for speeding. But court records show Gottlieb often arrested Duke students on such charges, taking them to jail in handcuffs.

Reached by telephone, Gottlieb declined to be interviewed for this story. A department spokesman said this week the sergeant is on leave, though what kind was not disclosed.

Some residents of neighborhoods where Gottlieb worked and victims' advocates say that the sergeant is a dedicated and fair officer.

A native of Ohio, Gottlieb is married and the father of young twins. The couple is expecting another child soon. Over the past 18 years, Gottlieb has worked as a paramedic in Wake and Durham counties, as well as a Durham police officer.

A barrel-chested man, Gottlieb tends to walk with his shoulders back and chin up. Among his colleagues, he is known as outspoken and sometimes headstrong. In a 2005 court affidavit that noted his qualifications, Gottlieb listed several community colleges he has attended and professional certifications. The affidavit did not mention an academic degree beyond high school.

Gottlieb got the lacrosse case weeks after serving 10 months as a patrol shift supervisor in police District 2, which includes about a quarter of the city. The district has neighborhoods as disparate as the crime-ridden Oxford Manor public housing complex and Trinity Park -- the blocks of historic homes across from a low stone wall rimming Duke's East Campus.

From May 2005 to February 2006, the period during which Gottlieb was a patrol supervisor in the district, court and police records examined by The News & Observer show that Gottlieb arrested 28 people. Twenty were Duke students, including a quarterback of the football team and the sister of a men's lacrosse player. At least 15 of the Duke students were taken to jail.

In comparison, the three other squad supervisors working in District 2 during the same 10 months -- Sgts. Dale Gunter, John Shelton and Paul Daye -- tallied a combined 64 arrests. Two were Duke students. Both were taken to jail.

Gottlieb often treated Duke students and nonstudents differently. For example, Gottlieb in 2004 wrote a young man a citation for illegally carrying a concealed .45-caliber handgun and possessing less than a half-ounce of marijuana, but records indicate he wasn't taken to jail. He was not a Duke student.

Trinity Park residents have long complained to university and city officials about the boisterous parties thrown by the students who live there. That spurred Duke in February to buy a dozen rental properties in the neighborhood, including the house where the lacrosse team threw its spring break bash two weeks later.

The Durham police officers who responded to 911 calls about the parties were sometimes on the receiving end of defiance and disrespectful taunts. Trinity Park resident Ellen Dagenhart praised Gottlieb's get-tough tactics as a direct response to community concerns about disruptive, drunken behavior.

"There were a lot of homeowners and taxpayers who were calling the cops saying, 'Please come and make yourself seen,' " said Dagenhart, who has known Gottlieb for years. "Anyone who's seen kids passed out in a puddle of vomit is certainly happy to see the police show up. You can't blame Mark Gottlieb for that."

Durham City Manager Patrick Baker said that cracking down on Trinity Park partying was a priority for police last year.

The police department's official policy gives officers discretion in whether to transport someone to the lockup downtown. Factors other than just the "elements of the crime" can be considered, such as whether the suspect is belligerent.

"Our general order, it basically gives the officer room to use his or her own judgment," said Cpl. David Addison, a police spokesman.

But a standing order encourages officers to use alternatives to arrests for misdemeanors, including the use of written citations because of "jail overcrowding, crowded court dockets, staffing problems and the intrusiveness involved in a physical arrest."

On Oct. 8, Gottlieb and officers he supervised responded to a call about a rowdy student at a duplex at 203 Watts St. -- a Trinity Park address familiar to the police as a party house.

In an affidavit, Gottlieb wrote that officers arrived about 6:30 p.m. and told partygoers to be quiet. After the police left, party-goers urinated on neighbor Lee Coggins' home and threw a beer bottle in her direction that shattered on the sidewalk, Gottlieb wrote.

Police obtained a search warrant, and Gottlieb's squad entered the duplex at 3:19 a.m. They seized three beer kegs -- one empty -- and "beer bong tubing." On the wall was what Gottlieb described as a "stolen Duke flag." A Duke flag had been reported stolen from an administrative building on campus the previous spring.

Five students there were arrested by Gottlieb for violating the city's noise ordinance and alcohol-related misdemeanors. Another housemate, Mike Kenney, was arrested the next day.

Kenney, then 21, was charged with a noise ordinance violation and possession of an open container of alcohol on public property and taken to jail. Two days later, records show, Kenney was arrested a second time and taken to jail on charges of possession of stolen property. The flag had been in his room.

When the case went to trial in January, Gottlieb testified that in the wake of rowdy parties in Trinity Park, the department's policy was to take alcohol-related violations seriously. But the judge threw out the charges against Kenney, citing a lack of evidence.

Glen Bachman, Kenney's attorney, successfully argued that Gottlieb couldn't prove the college senior was home during the party or that the flag in his room was the same flag that had been stolen.

Coggins, the woman who called police about the party at the duplex, said Gottlieb's actions seemed responsive and professional. He doesn't have a vendetta against Duke students, she said.

"It's not like he's hanging out at their house waiting for them to do something," Coggins said.

Kathy Summerlee, Kenney's mother and a lawyer in Minnesota, called the arrest and prosecution of her son "frivolous."

Though the charges were thrown out, Kenney could have faced suspension if convicted. He graduated from Duke in May and now is looking for a job, she said.

"It was clear to all of us that the police were feeling a lot of pressure to make a difference in the behavior in that neighborhood," Summerlee said this week. "I think there was a lot of damage done in this process. It cost us money. It cost us a lot of worry. It rearranged Mike's life."

Still, some in Trinity Park cite Gottlieb as a dedicated officer. He prides himself on being a victim's advocate, often recounting stories from his years as a domestic violence investigator.

Dagenhart said she remembers seeing him at a vigil for domestic violence victims.

"This was not something he had to do as a part of his job," she said. "It's something he did as someone who cared. I know he cares about Durham. It's not just a job for him."

(News researchers David Raynor and Denise Jones contributed to this report.) Staff writer Michael Biesecker can be reached at 956-2421 or mbieseck@newsobserver.com. News researchers David Raynor and Denise Jones contributed to this report.

Baker to release internal Blinco's investigation report

By Ray Gronberg, The Herald-Sun
September 8, 2006 9:16 pm

DURHAM -- Elected officials have given City Manager Patrick Baker the green light to discuss the still-pending results of an internal-affairs investigation into the conduct earlier this summer of six off-duty Durham Police Department officers outside a Raleigh sports bar.

The unanimous City Council vote, taken Thursday, waives the usual personnel-privacy restraints imposed by state law and allows Baker to release information on any disciplinary action taken against the officers, including the reasons for those actions.

Baker said he expects to release the information next week.

Council members agreed that the move would help "maintain public confidence in the administration of city services," a phrase that mirrors the provision of state law that allows them to formally waive confidentiality in personnel matters when they and the manager deem it necessary.

The six officers are tied to an incident that occurred July 20 outside Blinco's Sports Restaurant and Bar, 6711 Glenwood Ave., Raleigh. A Blinco's cook has alleged that several men surrounded and assaulted him after an exchange of racial slurs.

The cook is black, and most of the current or former Police Department officers linked to the case are white.

Raleigh police have filed misdemeanor assault charges against two officers, Gary P. Lee, 38, and Scott C. Tanner, 33. They are scheduled to appear in court on Sept. 25. The other officers still on the Police Department payroll could face disciplinary action once administrators finish reviewing the findings of an Internal Affairs Unit investigation.

Thursday's council vote occurred at Baker's request and came two days after the manager said he was convinced that the circumstances surrounding the case merited disclosure of the investigation's results.

In addition to the alleged racial epithets -- the cook has said one of his assailants called him the N-word and "boy" -- the case has drawn notoriety because two of the officers caught up in it, Sgt. Mark Gottlieb and Officer Richard Clayton, are working on the Duke lacrosse rape case.

The other two officers whose disciplinary records were affected by Thursday's decision are James Griffin and Daniel Gomez.

Gomez, 35, is a former Durham Police Department officer who turned in his resignation July 19 and left the city payroll on Sept. 1.

The appearance of his name on Thursday's disclosure resolution cleared up the last mystery surrounding the identity of the men involved in the case.

It has been known for a while that seven current or former Durham officers were present that night, and that they were there to attend a going-away party for an officer who was leaving the department.

The remaining member of the group, James Kennedy, is a former motorcycle officer who left the department late last year. His identify and tie to the case was disclosed to The Herald-Sun in late July by his attorney.
URL for this article: http://www.heraldsun.com/durham/4-768137.html

Official explains bond foul-ups

By Ray Gronberg, The Herald-Sun
September 8, 2006 10:11 pm

DURHAM -- Severe understaffing and a balky computer system are two of the big reasons that account for the mistakes Durham magistrates sometimes make in setting bond for criminal defendants, the county's chief magistrate and his subordinates say.

Addressing members of the Durham Crime Cabinet Friday, Chief Magistrate Chet Dobies acknowledged that one of his magistrates erred recently in setting a $10,000 bond for a murder suspect who had been re-arrested on a charge of discharging a weapon into an occupied dwelling.

But Dobies said mistakes happen in part because Durham County has only 11 criminal and two civil magistrates to serve its 243,000 residents -- far fewer, proportionately, than the six counties that received permission and funding from the General Assembly this summer to hire additional magistrates.

"I apologize for that one error we committed," Dobies told the Crime Cabinet, which includes an array of elected officials, administrators and community activists. "We've committed a whole lot of other errors that nobody has paid attention to, but not intentionally or through stupidity. We just get overloaded. We deal with [cases involving] everything from mental illness to two cousins fighting on a couch over the television."

Another magistrate, Eric Van Vleet, echoed Dobies' comments on workload, noting that on one day recently he had to deal with 30 criminal defendants, 18 bail bondsmen, four or five mental-health commitment cases and two applications for search warrants.

Van Vleet said that out of all that, in only one case did a law-enforcement officer come to the magistrate's office with information to share about a defendant's prior criminal history. He added that while magistrates do have access to a computer network that in theory should allow them to conduct their own background checks, in practice the system is prone to breaking down.

The system's software is badly outdated, and its administrators frequently take it offline for maintenance on weekends, the peak work time for Durham's magistrates, Van Vleet said.

Dobies, Van Vleet and two other magistrates attended Friday's Crime Cabinet meeting to answer questions about bond policies that arose in the wake of published reports that three accused killers had been let out of jail on relatively low bonds after being arrested on new charges.

Two of the men, Anthony Liven Copeland and Roy Oswald Bodden, are back in jail and are each now being held in lieu of $1 million bonds.

But the third, Breon Jerrard Beatty, is free after posting $10,000 bond on the firing-into-a-dwelling charge.

Dobies said that while the other two men were given bonds that were more than in line with the policies established by Durham's chief judges, Beatty's bond, set by Van Vleet, was an error. Beatty should have received at least a $30,000 bond under local policy, Dobies said.

Beatty, an alleged member of the Folk Nation youth gang, is accused of killing Antonio Demetrius Dent on Jan. 11, 2005, after a quarrel between two groups of teenagers.

News of the three releases, temporary though two of them were, provoked complaints from activists and elected officials who said the incidents show that the court system is doing a poor job of dealing with repeat criminals.

One Crime Cabinet member, Newman Aguiar, said the Durham Roundtable Committee on Crime has been monitoring cases involving about 300 felons. Its tracking revealed that 41 were arrested on fresh charges, with 22 of those arrested and released more than five times and 10 arrested and released more than eight times.

"We're not going to reduce crime if our worst offenders are getting back out on the street and with impunity committing new crimes," Aguiar said. "Clearly, the message sent [to them] is that there's no accountability."

Aguiar and cabinet members, however, agreed with Dobies that something has to be done about staffing in the magistrate's office and that they should prepare an aid request for the 2007 session of the General Assembly.

Durham County this year won a long campaign for money to hire an additional district judge, but it missed out when the General Assembly gave Carteret, Greene, Alamance, Robeson, Montgomery and Gaston counties permission to add magistrates.

Durham has one magistrate for every 18,660 residents. All six of the counties that got additional magistrates from the General Assembly this year had better ratios, even before the vote. The high county, Alamance, now has one magistrate for every 11,711 residents. The low county, Greene, has one for every 4,005 residents.

Dobies and cabinet members agreed that the problem is political. "Cumberland County has 19 magistrates," Dobies said. "Why do they need 19 to do what we do with 13?"

"They have Tony Rand," answered cabinet member Matt Yarbrough, referring to the majority leader of the N.C. Senate, who represents Cumberland County in that chamber.

A Durham legislator interviewed after the meeting, however, said there's no mystery about the discrepancy and that the onus is on local officials to take the first steps to begin fixing it.

"The sooner the local courts and elected officials draw this to our attention, the sooner we can rectify the issue, simple as that," said state Rep. Paul Luebke, D-Durham. "The General Assembly is like any other elected body: The squeaky wheel gets the grease. When we in the Durham delegation learn from our local elected officials that they're concerned magistrate staffing, we can go to work."
URL for this article: http://www.heraldsun.com/durham/4-768151.html

http://www.newsobserver.com/1185/story/484084.html

Off-duty activities looked at
Lead investigator in case has issues

Matt Dees, Staff Writer
DURHAM - Durham police Sgt. Mark Gottlieb's off-duty activities have been a matter of intense interest among people following the lacrosse rape case in which he is the lead investigator.

Most recently, he was placed on administrative duties in July after he and four other officers were questioned about an assault outside a Raleigh sports bar. After an investigation by Raleigh detectives, two of the Durham officers were charged with misdemeanor assault.

Gottlieb and the others were returned to active duty, though an internal Durham police investigation of the incident is under way. A report is expected to be made public next week.

Gottlieb ran a red light and struck another vehicle last year but did not receive a ticket.

Gottlieb struck Joseph George Stevens on March 30, 2005, on Creedmoor Road in northwest Raleigh. He caused $7,000 in damage, according to an accident report that faulted Gottlieb. No injuries were reported.

In 2004, Raleigh Police Chief Jane Perlov said the department's policy was "to take enforcement action by issuing citations in traffic accident cases where probable cause exists that a violation has occurred and a responsible subject is identified."

Still, said Raleigh police spokesman Jim Sughrue, the handling of the Gottlieb accident was not unusual. For many years, he said, the unwritten rule among Raleigh police officers was to not issue citations in wrecks unless there was a serious injury or alcohol was involved. That continued even after Perlov's policy change, Sughrue said.

Sughrue doesn't see any evidence that Gottlieb was treated differently than most people involved in wrecks. "It was not the exception," he said.
Staff writer Matt Dees can be reached at 956-2433 or matt.dees@newsobserver.com.

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