Melanie Alnwick FOX 5 DC
2 hrs ·
Facebook Creator
10/15/18
A couple of questions answered today in the #MansionMurders trial.
One, why didn’t Daron’s brother Darrell testify to the grand jury?
This revelation came out of earshot of the jury, when attorneys for the prosecution and the defense were arguing over language regarding how Darrell’s phone had been searched.
Assistant US Attorney Laura Bach said of Darrell: “he has been cooperative, he has been willing to provide testimony, he didn’t ask for immunity. WE decided not to have him testify to the grand jury. He hid nothing.”
The story about a housekeeper who saw a man watching the Savopoulos house was also clarified.
Turns out it was a woman who worked on Garfield Street NW. She testified that she saw a man who she was afraid of, two days before the murders.
Maria DaSilva spotted him around 5:15 pm on Garfield Street, near the intersection with Cleveland Ave and 32nd NW.
“He was pacing back and forth,” she told defense attorney Jeffrey Stein. “He was spitting on the ground, I had a great deal of fear.”
DaSilva said she saw him go around some bushes, then back into Cleveland Avenue and turn up 32nd - which is a short walk from the Savopoulos’ home at 32nd and Woodland.
She told the defense that she didn’t see the man’s face, and that he was wearing a baseball cap. He did not have long hair, or any hair that could’ve been tucked under cap, she thought - because she “saw him very well from behind.” She told the defense the man she saw was not Daron Wint - but that when her employer showed her the news reports of a suspect captured on surveillance video fleeing the scene of the burning Porsche, DaSilva thought that “could” have been the odd man she saw days earlier.
She admitted on cross-examination that the man could have been on drugs, based on his behavior, and that she never saw the face of either man.
The defense brought on other witnesses, who didn’ advance their cause very well.
Orlando DeLeon testified he was repairing a bus out on the street near where the minivan was set on fire late in the evening on May 15-16. He said he had his back turned, then saw a car fire behind him.
When he turned around, he saw a man wearing a white shirt get into the passenger side of a white pick up truck, and then the truck drove off.
Defense attorney Jeffrey Stein argued back-and-forth with DeLeon, challenging his testimony, because in grand jury transcripts DeLeon said the man got in the driver’s side. “I told them I assumed two people because the person I saw got in the passenger side and drove off“ “There is something wrong here, because I, as I said, saw the man get in the passenger side,” DeLeon asserted. He told prosecutors on cross-examination he could not say the man’s race or the length of hair, only that it was a white vehicle with no logo on the side, the man was wearing a white shirt, and that’s it.
An ATF expert in firearms and toolmarks testified about items she examined. Jennifer Owens looked at a box cutter, a knife (the one from the basement window), and a pair of scissors. Then she compared them to some cables taken from the house. The only thing she could say definitively, was that two gray cables recovered from the basement, were cut by some kind of a shearing tool like scissors or perhaps a special kind of wire cutter - not the basement knife with Daron Wint’s DNA on it. She also could not say when those cables were cut. As far as a telephone network cable - the markings were so small Owens could only say it was cut - but no tool could be eliminated.
The defense also wanted to introduce testimony that perhaps evidence was contaminated during the packaging process. Danyce Edwards worked for a brief time in the Central Evidence Unit. Defense attorneys wanted her to talk about the processing room, where items of evidence are brought in, sealed, and logged into the system, But Edwards didn’t work in the processing room, she could only see the processing room from her desk in the Central Evidence Unit.
Public defender Jeffrey Stein asked her if she had been terminated from CEU. “Yes”, she replied. Edwards said she was fired because of a gun (in an unrelated case) that should have been cleared of ammunition, but wasn’t. She also denied she was responsible for that error.
Prosecutors pointed out that Edwards really had no knowledge of what goes on in the processing room.
We expect another witness in the afternoon, a man known to us so far only as “Garnett”. Daron testified that Darrell stopped at Garnett’s house with him on the morning of May 13, before Daron was allegedly stranded at Ed’s house.
My colleague
Paul Wagner FOX 5 DC is covering the afternoon session.
Fox 5 DC
Melanie Alnwick FOX 5 DC