Good bad news

Although legally still attached to the "alleged" preface, it looks like Madison police have Joel Marino's murderer in custody. And thank goodness for that. I extend my heartfelt compliments to the MPD for sticking with the case and tracking down the responsible party. Hopefully now the Marino family can begin the healing process more in earnest. Of course, who knows if there will ever be a clear motive. As it's shaping up, this sounds like it might just be a tragic case of someone going wrong in the head and taking it out on a random stranger. Still, all the "whys" in the world won't make Joel Marino's death any easier for anyone to take. It's terrible, plain and simple.

While I want to congratulate the MPD on a case (apparently) well solved, I also want to make a point of stating that it's important to keep up pressure on the department over how they've handled the recent spate of murders. I don't advocate witch hunts, but there's a difference between that and simply demanding accountability. We still have almost zero information regarding Kelly Nolan's death, and the bumbled handling of Brittany Zimmermann's case was and is inexcusable. A full accounting must be made so that everyone involved can improve and deal with this sort of thing more effectively and sensitively in the future.

Still, it's a relief to finally have some...I won't say "good" news, but progress for sure.

Good intentions don't always equal effectiveness

Every new day seems to bring further news of deeper problems and outrages regarding the Brittany Zimmermann case and the overall ability of emergency and police services to do their jobs well. With all of the conflicting stories, it's hard not to be confused about what you can believe. These are the people that are supposed to be watching our backs, and while I don't doubt their sincerity, all the good intentions in the world aren't always going to be enough to get the job done right. There needs to be appropriate experience, accountability and a certain degree of openness, too.

And yet, and yet....

Yesterday, Joel Marino's grandmother broke her police-requested silence in telling Isthmus that she had been on the phone with him at the time the break-in occurred.

[Marino's grandmother] says she told Detective Matt Misener about this.

“I said, I heard the killer you know. And he said, yes, I know. But he said you can’t tell anyone about this. So for all this time, I’ve not said anything.”

She says she’s talking now because, “I think we’ve given the police every opportunity to do some things that we felt were necessary.”

A witness who claims to have twice seen Marino's killer says that both times he reported it the police failed to act.

Another witness saw someone the night before Zimmermann's murder who closely resembled police sketches of the suspect in the Marino case. He snapped a few pictures of the man and hand delivered them to the police, only to have them pretty much ignored and brushed off. The witness also gave copies of the photos to Marino's parents, who were so struck by the resemblance that they called Misener and asked him about them. He "admitted that he hadn't seen the photos."

It took the recent publication of an Isthmus article breaking the news about the Zimmermann 911 call to prompt any action and/or follow-up by the center and officials, but not before several misleading (whether deliberate or not) and contradictory explanations were given.

And now, more stonewalling. Plus, word that Joe Norwick, director of the Dane County 911 Center, had no direct experience managing such a call center prior to being hired:

Dane County Executive Kathleen Falk hired Joe Norwick as 911 center director last year at a $100,000 annual salary even though he did not have the experience in "public safety communications management" the job description specified.

"He did not have five years of management experience in a 911 center," acknowledged Topf Wells, Falk's chief of staff. But county officials said Wednesday they gave Norwick, a longtime sheriff's deputy and former chief deputy, credit for his five years as chairman of the 911 oversight board, which generally meets once a month.

The article goes on to note that one of Norwick's top references for the job, Dane County Sheriff Dave Mahoney, was "also a member of the hiring subcommittee that picked and ranked the four finalists — ranking Norwick No. 1." Mahoney, however, "didn't see a conflict of interest."

While Norwick's supporters tout his law enforcement experience as good enough reason for him to hold the position, Norwick continually seems to shoot himself in the foot with incidents like this:

Last week, in a news conference about the mishandling of the 911 call, Norwick wouldn't answer a technological question about whether the center had features that would remind dispatchers to call back when they are disconnected from a caller.

"Please excuse me," Norwick told reporters. "My background is not sitting in a communications chair. My background is with the Sheriff's Office and law enforcement. If there's some question that are technical questions about the operations, I'll have to get back to you on that."

Shouldn't the director of the 911 center have at least a passing familiarity with the technical aspects of their systems? While I can understand why questions about the exact content of the Zimmermann call may not be answerable, I see no reason why this question couldn't be answered other than lack of knowledge. That's just unacceptable.

There are technically 5 unsolved homicides from the last year in Madison. The Zimmermann and Marino cases are eerily similar, with both likely having been stabbings and both occurring in a similar location. Killed in late June of 2007, Kelly Nolan's case also remains unsolved, with few details about the case having ever been released. The August '07 murder of George Thomas at the Kings Inn (a motel on the Beltline) also remains unsolved, as does a homicide that took place on Cypress Way in November.

While part of me wants to rant and rage against the machine, I do also understand that certain sensitive information must remain undisclosed for the sake of the investigation. I know that such crimes are not always terribly easy to solve. I know that police have a lot on their plates.

I know all of this, and still what has happened recently looks more and more like stonewalling, incompetence and mismanagement with each passing day and each new breaking story.

It's one thing for a person or organization to want to prove that they have the wherewithal to successfully tackle these problems. It's an entirely different matter when those people or organizations get in over their heads and still refuse to ask for help or admit mistakes.

Politics and personal pride need to go right out the window when it comes to the safety and well-being of your fellow citizens. No more hiring unqualified people to important positions simply because you're good buddies (gee, this sounds familiar). No more stonewalling the community when it comes to crucial details that might help improve their personal safety (another recent case of this came up recently in Fennimore, and is pretty blatantly shitty).

Hire more dispatchers for the 911 center, implement more thorough and up-to-date training with clarified procedures, seriously consider bringing on a new director (sorry Norwick, but you've had your chance and pretty spectacularly failed), and maybe bring in outside units to help assist the MPD in solving these cases.

And for crying out loud, LISTEN to people when they tell you they've seen someone matching the description of the killer. I can't even begin to wrap my head around how that all worked out.

Serious changes need to be made, and they need to be made yesterday. The MPD and emergency services want us to place our trust in them? Then they need to continue to earn it.

Unacceptable

UPDATE (1:59PM):

Isthmus is reporting on a press release received from the Madison Police Department with some very interesting information, namely that "there is evidence contained in the call which should have resulted in a Madison Police officer being dispatched."

(older updates at bottom of post)

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There's a part of me that hopes this isn't true, that it's all just some weird misunderstanding or miscommunication, and not our city's 911 service fucking up so royally. From Isthmus:

Madison police believe Brittany Zimmermann called 911 before she was stabbed and beaten to death inside her Doty Street apartment, but the 911 Center failed to send help after erroneously concluding the call was a mistake.

...

The most significant is that the 911 Center received a call from Zimmermann before she was killed, did not dispatch police, and then did not immediately or accurately inform the Police Department about the call after cops found her body, law enforcement officials tell Isthmus.

Sources suggest the center may have made a call-back to a wrong number, where the person who answered assured that no crisis was occurring. One source says cops might have been better situated to make a quick arrest had mistakes not been made by the 911 Center.

Over the past two and a half weeks, the 911 Center has refused requests for basic information about the calls. This week, Joe Norwick, director of the Dane County 911 Center since July, declined further opportunities to comment after being provided with a written summary of parts of this story.

In an email, Norwick said he was basing his refusal on a request from the Madison Police Department to withhold all information "pertaining to this matter" because release would "seriously impair" the murder investigation.

Madison police officials vigorously dispute this. While declining to call the 911 Center's action a cover-up, they suggested that Norwick is improperly using the department as an excuse not to own up to his agency's mistakes.

There's been a lot of talk about who's to blame for the recent run of as-of-yet unsolved murders, with a lot of blame being placed on the area's homeless population. Frankly, a lot of it sounds like a lame excuse to bash the transient population as entirely made up of shiftless, violent crazy people, which we really ought to know better than. But beyond the debate about the homeless, and separate (if not more important) from the question of who committed these terrible crimes, there is also a debate about the effectiveness of our local police and emergency services.

I've bitched and moaned in private about why it might be taking so long for these cases to be investigated, why certain leads seem to have been nearly ignored, why the public has been privy to so little information about certain cases, etc. But in the end, it's mostly just speculation on my part. I don't know anything about the inner workings of these investigations, or indeed any kind of investigation.

What I do know is that, if true, the mishandling of a 911 call made by Zimmerman and the seeming dismissal of a good lead brought to the detective in charge of the Marino case should raise some serious alarm bells.

That the director of the Dane County 911 Center, Joe Norwick, has so far refused to comment at all about this incident, falsely blaming it on a request from the MPD, should cause the community to seriously question who we've placed in charge of such a vital service.

If you make a mistake, especially one pertaining to such sensitive issues, you owe it to yourself and to your community to own up and make amends, working to see that such mistakes don't happen again in the future. There's no hyperbole involved when I say that people's lives are at stake here. We can't afford to fuck around.

Thankfully, reporters with Isthmus have been dogged in their determination to follow up on these cases, actually following leads and doing some hard-hitting reporting. It's reassuring to know that there are still journalists out there willing to ask the hard questions and write about stories that matter. I can only hope that further public pressure will bring some accountability to people like Joe Norwick, and help spur more vigorous investigation into these unsolved murders. We owe it to ourselves, but most of all, we owe it to the victims and their families.

Further info.

UPDATE (12:25PM):

The Capital Times is reporting that, in a press conference today, Joe Norwick has confirmed that Zimmermann made a 911 call the day she was murdered. Further, he explains that "Brittany Zimmermann made a 911 call on April 2, but the dispatcher taking the call immediately received another call that was a non-emergency call and did not immediately return the 911 call made by Zimmermann." She "apparently didn't answer a few minutes later when the dispatcher finally did call back. If a dispatcher takes a 911 call and doesn't hear anything, the policy is to call back."

This all smells pretty bad to me. First, why on earth did the dispatcher give precedence to a non-emergency call over hers? Second, the final sentence makes it sound as though she wasn't saying anything when she first called. This needs to be more clear. Regardless, if a 911 dispatcher gets a call and no one's talking, shouldn't they ask for a squad car to check out the situation? I'm not up on my dispatcher procedure, so if anyone can explain how this works to me, that'd be great. All in all, though, this whole thing is pretty infuriating, and we should be pressing Norwick to release the recordings of said calls. Then maybe we could make some sense of it all.

UPDATE (1:38PM):

Just noticed that the Cap Times updated their news story on this, which notes a few new details in Norwick's story about the call:

The Dane County 911 dispatch center director said a UW-Madison student slain in her campus area apartment April 2 made a 911 phone call on her cell phone, but dispatchers failed to call her back.

Director Joe Norwick said today that when Brittany Zimmermann made the call, the dispatcher, who was unnamed, had no way of knowing the call wasn't one of many non-emergency or misdialed phone calls that the center receives every day.

Norwick declined to say how long Zimmermann's phone call lasted, or whether there was any communication from Zimmermann. He said the dispatcher, after a time, discontinued the call to answer another 911 call, which turned out to be a non-emergency call.

The dispatcher then called back on the second 911 call, discovered it wasn't an emergency, then took another 911 call regarding an unwanted person in a residence. The dispatcher failed to get back to Zimmermann's call and never made a call back, even though 911 center policy dictates that return calls be made.

I'm still very curious to know if anything was said or could be heard during the first call Zimmermann made. Also of interest is how long the initial call lasted, how accurate GPS information from cell phones really is, and why in the hell the dispatcher failed to follow-up properly?

It might help if Norwick would actually release this information. Being that it's a vital public service, I think we have a right to know about procedure and potential mistakes so that the right people can be held accountable and the problems can be fixed.