Have Another Donut, Officer – Simply Not Credible
Part 2
On January 6, 2005, my attorney met with the opposing counsel and the judge for what would be the umpteenth wasted pre-trial conference. I knew there would be no trial because the Defense attorney was avoiding providing discovery and Judge Larry Schwartz was continuing to ignore his obligations to enforce court and ethics rules.
The next day, I received an email from my attorney which I quote, not to abandon attorney client privilege, but because it illuminates at least one crime against me and perhaps two:
Following yesterday's trial prep conference, the judge entered the attached
order. At least we'll now get rulings on the discovery with the appointment
of a master.
Also, Duitch brought up the police complaints and said his client was being
harassed by the police. (Which indicates something more may be happening
than is in the report.) He stated he may seek injunctive relief or seek to
add counterclaims on this basis. He also plans to discredit you through
these items.
Robert Duitch has since been disbarred, in part for theft. In 2006, in a successful attempt to get the lawsuit reinstated after a default judgment, he claimed in an affidavit that at this meeting he had paid my lawyer $150 in cash at this meeting for a 2003 sanction. He regretted that he had not asked for a receipt.
I doubt that Duitch has the credibility to sue me for stating that this email doesn’t mention $150, and that perjury should be added to his many charges.
The other interesting event involves a Police Sergeant of the Colorado Springs Police Department. The email plainly states that Duitch’s client is being “harassed” by the police. At a meeting a week later, the Sergeant stated emphatically that he wouldn’t investigate my reports of burglary even if a neighbor saw someone enter my house.
That meeting began inauspiciously with the Sergeant setting it up for 2pm. I told him that my attorney would attend. Instead of being available for the meeting the Sergeant went to the gym. When I arrived at 2, without my attorney, who was sick, a receptionist announced that “Sgt XXX said you would think the meeting was at 2 but it is at 2:30.” Two police officers were in the lobby with no apparent purpose other than to see my reaction. One never took his eyes off me. How convenient if they could have charged me with disorderly conduct. The situation seemed so obvious that I broke out laughing. We don’t have cops, we have comedians.
When I came back at 2:30, Sgt XXX’s hair was wet and another officer asked him how his trip to the gym was. I could go on, but I am certain that what I wrote here was the subject of an internal investigation as I reported it to the mayor at the time. At the very least, Sgt XXX’s behavior was disrespectful of my time and, considering that he thought my attorney was coming, of my money.
The timing of the Duitch threat was suspicious as Duitch should not have had time to get the police reports and should not have known that he might be able to “discredit me though these items.” It takes ten days to get a police report. My complaint to then Councilman Richard Skorman wasn’t yet ten days old (I chose Skorman because he and I had known each other for several years).
The Defense attorney seemed to know a lot about what the police thought about my complaint at a time when I didn’t think he should know anything. Further, instead of being on the defensive, he was on the offensive. My attorney asked me to ask Sgt XXX if he had contacted the individual. Sgt XXX told me that he had contacted the builder once and his attorney once.
We have a police officer with a very bad attitude about doing any investigation and a lawyer who is making threats at a time when he should know nothing. That combination suggests that no serious investigation was ever contemplated and that XXX was doing everything in his power to ensure that no investigation ever took place. Some legal references define that as obstruction of justice, but I have no idea what the Colorado law is and wouldn’t claim that XXX had committed a crime if I did.
Of course, I am not an admitted paranoid, but that factoid managed to make it into my initial June 2000 police report. The officer is now deceased, but I assume he was following standard police procedures. In any event, the procedures he did follow were validated by Sgt XXX, so what I write is about the procedures he followed and not him personally.
In fairness to the police and the deceased officer, I knew that I was being burglarized and since the burglar ignored the Y2K funds that I still had laying about and was only interested in my lawsuit paperwork, I associated what was happening with my lawsuit. (Again, I am not accusing the defendant in my lawsuit of any crime, just relating the facts.) That meant that I couldn’t give the officer information relating to my lawsuit.
What I didn’t know then was that I would continue to be burglarized over the next few years. The burglaries went through four distinct phases: From mid 1998 – mid 2000 I didn’t know I was being burglarized, but documents were disappearing; From mid 2000 when I nearly caught the burglar in my home until December, 2000, burglary was being used as a form of intimidation; From January 2001 until January, 2005, the tempo of the burglaries would follow the tempo of the lawsuit. The fourth phase followed my interaction with Sgt XXX when most, but not all of the documents that I had specifically identified as being taken in the first phase magically appeared in my lawyer’s files, available for trial.
I had begun re-examining my paperwork upon receipt of the lawsuit answer because of the forgery that had been provided in the answer. I first went to my bank and discovered the similar forgery there. About half of the paperwork I would need to prove the costs of the damage had disappeared.
One Sunday morning, I awoke early to find lights on in the house that shouldn’t have been on and my paperwork askew. The officer who responded at one point asked how long I thought I had been being burglarized, and I answered “Two Years.” He said “That sounds paranoid, doesn’t it? I said “yes.” From that point on, I was an “admitted paranoid,” and that item went in the police report. The officer did no neighborhood canvass. His total investigation was a phone call to the builder’s now disbarred attorney who assured him that the builder was reputable.
The document that had disappeared two years before was my copy of the architectural control committee (ACC) plans that showed all casement windows in the house. The document had to disappear because it demonstrated that the builder had intentionally introduced an “error” in the plans that were submitted to Regional Building (Item 3 in part 1) and hadn’t existed in the ACC plans. When I asked the ACC document custodian for their copy, it too had disappeared. I knew this had happened in 1998 because I had saved the document and wanted to look at it again then. That story only sounded paranoid to me because I couldn’t tell it without making him a witness in the lawsuit.
Now that the lawsuit is over and the whole story can be told, I think it fits in the context of the other things that were happening, and couldn’t be considered at all paranoid.
Some of the other documents that were taken in 2000 were:
1) my copy of the first draw that showed the builder had tried to collect twice on the $7,000 tap fee (Item 4) In its place was left two different versions of a similar document but with the line payable to me. Also, the second page of the new version had a proprietary notice, which hadn’t originally been there. (Item 14). For five years we tried to use discovery to get the original of the draw I had signed and given to the builder. The builder could never produce it. At trial, neither the builder nor his lawyer challenged my claim that a different version existed with the line payable to the builder.
2) Every plan set that showed the existing soil level. This included two stamped plan sets that were used for the framing inspection (I got one set from the builder and one from Regional after they microfisched it) as well as the set that I had been given by the builder and had used to discover that every door but one was below ground level. Substituted for the latter was a set with the two “Revision 1” plans (Item 3) that I had not ever seen before and the elevation page (Item 6) that I did not discover until trial.
3) Photographs of repairs being made. When the window headers were changed out, it took a five man crew all day to do it. I took photographs but did not have them developed (this was 1998, pre digital). When I did have them developed, I discovered that the film cartridge had been replaced and the same number of photos had been shot of the floor and lower furniture in the family room in my completed home. I wouldn’t include this as I can’t prove it except that the Defense Attorney made a big deal of my not having photos at trial. I told the jury that I had taken these photos and said only that they didn’t come out.
I have listed other things that were taken elsewhere, and see no need to repeat them here or comment on them except to say that in phase 4 of my burglary experience, many of them materialized in my attorney’s files. If my report to the police had been admitted, which it wasn’t, the Defense attorney could have discredited me by pointing out, quite correctly, that documents that I had claimed to have been stolen were in the exhibits, and how could that be?
The Revision pages and the unmarked elevation pages can be tied directly to the builder. Two weeks before trial, he gave us a set through his attorney that he called “the latest version.”
Phase 2 of the burglaries started about two weeks after my June 2000 police report. I had moved my documents to my storefront which was alarmed. On the last Friday night of June, 2000, the front window was broken out, something that had not happened in the four previous years I had owned the building. It happened twice more from 2000 to 2002. I sold the business on January 1, 2003 and it hasn’t happened in the six years since. From July through November, 2000, I got neat little packets of four items each month that had been previously taken from my home. One of the four items was always tied to the lawsuit. In December, a letter I had written in 1996 was printed out and left on the floor of my office closet. When I checked the file on my computer, two more files of different vintages had been saved within a minute of each other.
The printed out file, which I have never before identified, was a letter I had written to Judge Gilbert Martinez identifying myself as a reformer. The second seemed to suggest that I had been arrested for shoplifting as the nearly empty folder was titled “shoplifting appeal,” and the third was a chapter of a book that I had tried to peddle to ten literary agents in 1993. The chapter dealt with how to fix the legal system.
While I never dreamed that documents that I had written so many years earlier would come back to haunt me, the burglar had a different view. It was pretty clear that he thought I wouldn’t get a fair trial. It was blackmail without the incriminating mail. The scary part of it is that he had gone through every document I had ever written on that computer and probably elsewhere to find those candidates. The tactic would have been very effective if I were a fan of child porn or had a bunch of emails to my three mistresses on that computer, but I am not a fan of child porn and I am too old and ugly to have three mistresses.
Completely by coincidence, the Defendant in my lawsuit chose that very same month, December, 2000, to offer through his attorney to let me drop my lawsuit and go back to arbitration where I would have no rights of discovery or deposition. If one were a cynic and believed the two events connected, one might consider that offer essentially a physical blackmail note, but we won’t draw that conclusion here.
In January, 2001, I had my locks changed in my house for the second time by Paul Henley, a well known locksmith. He reported that two of the three locks in my house were being picked and offered to save the tumblers for the police. He observed that the one lock that wasn’t being picked was on a door that was blocked, and whomever was doing the picking knew that. The police were uninterested.
To keep this already long document short, I will not discuss phase three of my burglary experience except to say that documents continued to move in and out of my house. I thought of it as harassment with a purpose rather than intimidation. I have already said what needs to be said about phase four.
Part three of this “Have another donut” series examines Judge Larry Schwartz’s conduct to see if it was out of character. I can’t prove that he ever got the letter that the burglar printed out, but most of the rulings were strange enough that I think he needs to explain them in that context. While I have never met the judge or been in the same room with him, he should have had no reason to side with the Defendant if the Defendant were obviously in the wrong, and yet he did that consistently. His conduct is circumstantial evidence of something, but what?
I believe that I have accomplished the purpose of this writing. I wanted to illustrate that Sgt XXX simply didn’t know enough to testify that my report wasn’t credible and that he was completely unwilling to do enough investigation to find out.
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