This is an unpublished, original courts story written for the Reporting and Writing I class of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.
New York City police officer Ruslan Matdiip couldn’t remember much of anything about what he did on Nov. 28, 2005.
On that day – the same day that fellow officer Dillon Stewart was gunned down on the job for making a routine stop in the Flatbush neighborhood of Brooklyn — Matdiip knew he had looked for evidence at the scene of the crime. He was sure that he followed department procedure, and he knew that eventually, a spent Luger nine-millimeter shell casing was found at the scene, three short blocks away from Prospect Park.
He just couldn’t remember exactly what happened in between. And it couldn’t have made defense lawyer John Burke happier.
“I do not recall that,” Matdiip said after nearly every question about his activity that day. “Not that I recall.”
In fact, Burke seemed so pleased by the officer’s sudden absence of memory that the cavalier attorney chose to pose the rest of his questions from behind the courtroom bar – among the police officers, family and public in attendance at the State Supreme Court of Brooklyn. The irony of the defense attorney examining a witness among “the people” the prosecution is tasked with representing was striking, and the trial judge, Justice Albert Tomei, tried to appeal to Matdiip directly in an effort to keep his courtroom in order.
“What, you can’t remember anything?” Tomei asked.
“Not that I remember, no,” Matdiip said.
“Do you have a prior history of memory problems?” Burke asked, to laughter in the courtroom.
But in the rest of the day’s proceedings of the trial of Stewart’s murder, little spectacle was to be had. Without a witness willing to place the 29-year-old defendant, Allan Cameron, at the scene of the crime and firing the shots that killed the 35-year-old police officer, prosecutors Mark J. Hale and Thomas C. Ridges had to rely on a combination of forensic evidence and circumstance to prove their case of first-degree murder.
With only a day remaining, however, it looked as if the defense was the side working to soften the blow.
Earlier in the day, forensic science technician Kecia Harris all but concluded on the stand that Cameron’s DNA matched that found on the trigger of the gun found on the scene, prompting defense attorney Edward Friedman to vigorously cross-examine her for loopholes in the testing results.
“Can DNA be manually placed?” he asked.
Harris responded, “Um, I’m not quite sure I understand what you’re—”
“Yes or no,” Friedman demanded. “You don’t go out and pick it up off the street?”
Harris responded again, exasperated. “Look, I really think—”
“Yes or no,” Friedman said.
Harris replied, her brow furrowed. “Well, it’s poss—”
“If you don’t know, that’s OK,” Friedman said.
“Well no, then,” Harris said.
The defense tried every angle in an attempt to prove that it was inconclusive that Cameron fired on Stewart from his car in the early hours of Nov. 28 before fleeing to a garage on East 21st St. and closing the door as the police gave chase. The charge carries a maximum penalty of life in prison.
But yesterday’s testimony from Harris, Matdiip, Det. Michael D’Arbanville and Det. Keith Reccardi offered few revelations about the evidence – which ranged from spent shells to a piece of chicken – and intense discussion about the inner-workings of the human genome left more than a few jurors puzzled, with some trying to stifle an occasional yawn.
When asked by Hale what the odds were of finding a duplicate DNA type in the world, Harris said they were about 1 in 1 trillion each for whites, blacks, Hispanics and Asians.
“What is the probability of seeing this DNA profile recur in nature?” Hale asked.
“You’d need approximately 166 planet Earths to see this DNA profile again,” Harris said.
The defendant, Cameron, didn’t flinch. But from the somber look on his face, you’d think he thought his odds were similar.