Phone info can’t pinpoint Levi Chavez for 15 hours
By Jeff Proctor / Journal Staff Writer on Fri, Jun 28, 2013
POSTED: 12:05 am
Katrina Garley, the fourth of Levi Chavez’s paramours to testify in his murder trial, said Thursday she had spent time with Chavez in the home he had shared with Tera Chavez. (Dean Hanson/Albuquerque Journal)
Katrina Garley, the fourth of Levi Chavez’s paramours to testify in his murder trial, said Thursday she had spent time with Chavez in the home he had shared with Tera Chavez. (Dean Hanson/Albuquerque Journal)
Copyright © 2013 Albuquerque Journal
BERNALILLO – It’s impossible to say based on cellphone records where Levi Chavez was for 15 hours near the end of the three-day period during which prosecutors say he killed his wife in 2007, according to a cellphone company analyst who testified Thursday in the former APD officer’s murder trial.
In all likelihood, Chavez’s cellphone was turned off between 12:27 a.m. and 3:32 p.m. on Oct. 21, 2007, said Jody Citizen, a senior analyst for the Verizon Wireless company’s legal department.
Chavez could spend the rest of his life in prison if convicted on charges that he killed Tera Chavez, 26, in the couple’s home near Los Lunas and tried to make it look like a suicide.
He and his defense attorney, David Serna, maintain that Tera shot herself with Levi’s Glock 9 mm. Chavez called 911 to report the alleged suicide around 9 p.m. on Oct. 21, 2007.
Serna on Thursday spent two and a half hours cross-examining Citizen.
After the two reviewed numerous pages of Verizon records showing calls made to and from both Tera’s and Levi’s cellphones, as well as cellphone tower records, Serna declared that the records supported his client’s story about where he had been the weekend of Tera’s death.
Indeed, the records appeared to show that Levi Chavez’s cellphone was in Valencia County early on Oct. 19 and that he was on Albuquerque’s West Side, where he was working a swing shift for APD, later that day. The records also show that following the end of the shift at midnight, the phone was in the far Northeast Heights, near the home of a fellow APD officer with whom Chavez was having an affair.
The records show roughly the same pattern for Oct. 20: Levi Chavez’s cellphone was on the West Side during the hours of the swing shift, then in the Heights shortly thereafter.
And then there’s a 15-hour gap.
On redirect examination, Assistant District Attorney Anne Keener asked only one question.
During the gap, Keener asked, “You have no idea where the cellphone of Mr. Chavez was?”
“Correct,” Citizen replied.
Earlier Thursday, the fourth of Levi Chavez’s many paramours to testify in the murder trial took the stand.
Three weeks after Tera’s death, Levi Chavez was having sex with another woman in the home near Los Lunas from which authorities had removed Tera Chavez’s body, according to the mistress’s testimony.
Katrina Garley testified that she met Levi Chavez when he walked into the Verizon cellphone store in Los Lunas to buy a phone in early October 2007.
After Chavez left the store, Garley sent him a text message on his newly purchased phone to “tell him he had nice eyes,” she said from the witness stand.
The two met twice thereafter to have sex – before Levi Chavez called 911 to say his wife had shot herself in the head.
But on direct examination by Bryan McKay, senior trial attorney for the 13th Judicial District Attorney’s Office, Garley testified that she also went to the home the Chavezes had shared at 11 Ash Place on the weekend of Nov. 11 and 12, 2007. She said she knew Tera had died and Levi Chavez told her the couple’s two children were home that weekend.
“But I didn’t see them,” she said, adding later that she also didn’t see any items that looked like they had belonged to Tera.
After Garley’s testimony, Serna and Keener argued for more than 45 minutes outside the presence of the jury about which of the cellphone data examined by an FBI analyst should be shown to the jury.
Prosecutors had sought to keep from jurors what Serna described – in explicit detail – as sexual photographs and videos Tera had taken of herself and sent to Levi.
If the scores of text messages, call logs, pictures of Tera’s children and photos of her “kitties” were going to be admitted as evidence, Serna argued, so, too, should the “naked” pictures and videos.
State District Judge George Eichwald ruled that one nude photograph would be available only to the jury – that it wouldn’t be shown in open court – and that the lawyers could ask questions of witnesses about the videos “without getting into the details.”
gahhhh feel like making a confession here...but...not sure if I should
