Just What is Going on Here?
I feel like I am re-writing the entire stalking case for the third time! First I compiled what evidence we collected into a timeline, day-by-day because Morgan’s stalking was not once a month – it was almost every day, and sometimes two or three times a day. Then a year later, I wrote a blog from my notes. And after all that, with help from the Honorable DA to enforce the Colorado Open Records Act, I finally got Sheriff’s reports, and I was sickened. But rather than explain that – let me give you an example, just one single example.
It was early November, after 68 days of nothing but different Sheriff’s Patrol Officers coming to our house every time we had an incident, never taking evidence, when Colorado law calls for quick intervention before stalking can escalate into something more serious, we were finally assigned a Felony Stalking Detective and a case number. We were always encouraged to call dispatch, and not 911, whenever anything happened, because it was easier for them, and so we did. Now I know why – but that is for another blog. Keenan VanGinkel, and Brooke Harris were the suspects, a fact known through the neighborhood, to Morgan, as well as by the Sheriff’s Department. And if you ever watched Brooke’s dad, James Harris on the Dr. Phil show exclaim that he knew nothing about a stalking – click here – for my response. And now, on to that single example.
Keenan was traveling to a hunting trip in Texas, a fact we would find out from neighbors soon enough, and it would be a busy night in our neighborhood. After nightfall a person walked from the back door of the house James, and Brooke Harris were living in, along the edge of the berm in our backyard, turning and coming up to the corner of the our house, right where an Aspen tree stood against the back corner of our house – we would later learn it was used to climb up onto the roof – and then this person doubled back over the berm, stopped to send a text message or two, and then came back over the berm, walked alongside our house, across our driveway and front yard, across our next door neighbor’s driveway and front yard, to just before the Harris’ house. Then a car (seen on our camera) left the neighborhood from the direction of Brooke’s house.
How do I know this? Or, where’s the proof…as Brooke would say. Well that is simple. It snowed that night, starting an hour before the walk, or march as it became known as, about two to three inches of thick, heavy snow. A very odd storm actually, as if it happened just to catch the events of the night. Our video surveillance camera mounted up on the eaves was high enough to clearly show the person texting from behind the berm. (Please note that I told our Felony Stalking Detective about the text caught on camera and showed him, and asked right then and there if he could get Brooke’s cell phone records, because our camera caught the exact time of the text, and he could see who she sent the text to – and if it was her on camera, but he told me it is almost impossible to get those kind of records, and he would not be able to obtain them). Other cameras would show the person, whom everyone who has seen the camera footage believes is a female, and not Keenan. So not only did we have the footprints with a very visible trail the next day, but our cameras captured good footage of the event as well as a car departing at the end of the “march” or can we say alibi? Evidence.
This series of events included everything except the usual terror. No tapping or banging on Morgan’s window. No footprints up against the house while the predator tried to peer into Morgan’s windows, only footprints right up to our Master bedroom window. No scraping noises, no beeping of the front door lock. Steve and I slept through it all, as did Morgan, and until I saw the tracks through the snow in the morning we didn’t even know it had happened. Then it became more and more sinister, from every angle.
I called dispatch and then Steve, and he came home from work, easily arriving twenty minutes before the responding Garfield County Deputy. Enough time (before the footprints melted) to start on a map of the trail (from a safe distance) that the footprints took – from start to finish, including the tire tracks. He finished the map with the Deputy after he finally came to our house, while walking with the Deputy around the entire trail, absolutely no doubt that it started at the Harris’s house, and then went to various places at our house then circled the front and stopped where a car had been parked. If fact here is a second map Steve drew up for the Detective after the map he gave the Patrol Deputy was, “misplaced.” Map given to Detective Glassmire.
After the Deputy looked and nodded he left, but nothing else. Not so much as a knock on the Harris’ door to ask about this trail that started at their back door, in the middle of a felony stalking case at the house the trail led to, and circled. But all was not lost, I realized that the Sheriff’s wildlife camera had just been moved to the perfect spot to catch this walk, right along the berm, it could not have missed. I called Detective Glassmire to tell him the very potentially revealing news and expected he would come right over to retrieve the pictures of this suspect, but he would not, saying he was very busy and he would do it when he came on his regular Sunday meeting. He would later cancel the regular Sunday meeting for a week, which meant not reviewing the camera pictures for another week also. Then the day finally came and we were excited that we were going to see the pictures on the Sheriff’s camera. The moment Detective Glassmire looked down at Steve and I from atop our ladder and said there were no pictures, the batteries must be dead, we just crumbled – how could this be?
A few days after the walk recorded in the snow, Keenan, all the way in Texas still, officially no longer dating Brooke for many weeks, and moved out long before this happened, was on a facebook conversation and said he had, ”heard,” about the stalker at our house, but it could not be him because he was in a truck headed for Texas at the time it happened.
Just days after that, Steve and I pulled alongside our subdivision road for a rather impromptu conversation with Brooke and her friends, as they walked down the street, we were talking about the stalker – now, for the record, this would be exactly the only time ever, we were talking to Brooke in the subdivision, about anything – and Brooke just had to tell us that she had “heard” that there was new video evidence that exonerated her boyfriend Keenan as the stalker. And I have to say it – the stalker that she didn’t know that we had, and wasn’t dating, and was not being harassed by as her father James thought, that was someone else. ????
So, sinister, malfeasance, incompetence. guilty as guilty can be, you decide.
But:
- The trail started right at the Harris’ back door, at the beginning of month four of a Felony Stalking case, and nobody, Deputy or Detective questions anybody about anything related to this incident?
- There are tire tracks preserved in the snow, and nobody, Deputy, or Detective orders or makes a cast of them?
- Keenan knows about the, “stalking incident that proves it’s not him,” within hours of the event and brags about it on Facebook – all relayed to the Detective, but no questions, no report, no copies of what was said, nothing.
- Brooke knows there is new video evidence that exonerates her boyfriend, or ex-boyfriend, before Steve and I have even had a chance to review all the footage, and send it on to the Sheriff’s Department, as was our normal procedure. How did Brooke know about this so soon after? Who told her? Was she the one on camera like I suspect?
- Why does the Detective in a Felony Stalking case not rush out to review the camera for timely evidence, and a possible arrest, or at least come the next day, but instead he waits almost two weeks only to find out the batteries are dead in his camera and there is nothing?
- Why did our batteries in every wildlife camera we purchased last the entire four months of the stalking before being recycled into another use with plenty of life left in them, and the Sheriff’s batteries went dead in a few weeks?
- Whatever happened to the first map that Steve drew for the Deputy, and reviewed on scene that same day with the Deputy, before the snow melted? I mean should he have had the Deputy sign a copy and we maintain all the evidence ourselves?
- Why were phone records for the suspects for that day never even requested? If Brooke wanted to prove her innocence it would be a great start. It would be a tiny part of their records because we could tell right to the second when the person behind the berm was texting.
- AND, why is there no Garfield County Sheriff’s Department official report of this stalking report???
- And remember this is just one example, just one.
- Were it not for the keen memories of Brooke talking to us in the subdivision, and Keenan talking about it on a private message to one of Morgan’s friends on Facebook – it’s as if it never even happened. Except it did happen, Steve and I were there. Morgan was there too, only our daughter Morgan is now dead…
