James compared to wildlife camera picture of stalker caught in the driveway
Comparison of the Stalker Caught in the Driveway
Tag Archives: dr phil show
Wylah is Spending Happy Time with Special Friends
Wylah is helping Morgan’s friends get ready for the Carbondale Mountain Fair
Is it Too Much to Ask to Err on the Safe Side?
Morgan deserves answers, not denial – Is that too much for her to ask???
Counting the days,
We have hopes, Steve and I, and realistic expectations. The Blog is quiet, but we are working hard, and the United States Postal Service, and FedEx deliver letters, with plenty of documents for us. We want Morgan’s case opened, we want the truth to come out, and we want justice for Morgan.
Morgan is, and will always be on our mind, along with the next young woman whom we so fervently work to prevent a repeat of what happened to Morgan, and as it turns out this week – another young woman who disappeared, under suspicious circumstances, in Garfield County, only to have her family receive a quick, “no foul play here,” from our Garfield County Sheriffs department.
Sound Familiar?
Her remains were discovered close to where she initially went missing and, thanks to the CBI, oh what I would not give for their presence at Morgan’s death scene, the remains were identified, and our most heartfelt condolences goes out to her family. It is a day even I can only imagine what it is like as they were wishing it were not true.
Her story of the moment is here, Young woman’s remains found near where she went missing have been identified. And with two young children left at the wayside, and wondering, I can only pray that the long overdue justice for a missing young woman, that was both a mother, and a daughter, comes swiftly and atoning for the callous undeserved treatment of the past.
Garfield County again displays its indifference to Crimes Against Women and what a total lack of regard for Constitutional rights goes on, unless it involves a gun, portending nothing encouraging for all the women, young and old, who live here.
On the morning Morgan was found, dead, to err on the side of too much, instead of too little, should have come with no question. Instead it did not come at all for Morgan, and how long it takes for grieving parents to fully realize that is just amazing. I have recently taken delivery of the “FBI handbook of crime scene forensics,” and once again get to read about all of the essential actions that did not take place at Morgan’s crime scene, so far they are innumerable.
They, being the Garfield County Sheriffs Department, could have made one phone call, to the CBI, the agency that Pitkin County, a Garfield neighbor that takes crime seriously, would call without question, in fact it is not only without question, it is protocol, the rules. For a microscopic evaluation of a suspicious death scene that Morgan deserved after four months of stalking, and a worry on the mind of her felony stalking Detective who warned us, “if anything her stalking will escalate,” and three days later, Morgan is found dead.
Months later I deal with the threats of the contracted forensic pathologist to change her cause of death to suicide, but he couldn’t find any pills or residue of pills in her stomach, threats which are ignored when I report this to the Coroner who hired this man, and the Sheriffs who, actually I don’t really know what they do, except to stand up for your right to bear arms. Even write essays about it.
But you know what? When your daughter is murdered and the Sheriffs and Coroner ignore the threats you are reporting; but detectives run, two at a time, to record the report of your gnome gone from your porch, but still refuse, yes blatantly refuse, to report the burglary of Morgan’s jewelry on the night she was killed – something is not right. When that is your reality – the right to bear arms becomes but soft whisper in the far distance.
It did not take a gun to protect Morgan, as her stalking was expected to escalate. It took something that Garfield County did not have, and does not have today, it took simply the knowledge of how to effectively deal with stalkers, especially the kind that was stalking Morgan, one of the most dangerous typologies.
I have recently read protocols that explain what to do if the first attempt to catch the stalker failed, how attempts could be completely changed for the next stalking incident. Morgan’s protocol was based on the lie that some unwritten law in the State of Colorado required seven weeks, 49 days, before it could be considered a stalking case.
As if that lie was not bad enough, in the non-attempt to protect Morgan, it was actually 68 days before I received a phone call from the Detective that was finally assigned to the case. Even with their total misconception of the laws they are sworn to uphold, they thought somehow 49 days being the requirement, it became over 70+ days before we even had a case number, and so then the fact that Morgan was a stalking victim was not a complete shock to the new Deputy arriving to answer a call of yet another stalking incident. A call not to 911, as this was not necessary, they answered a call from the Sheriff’s dispatch number.
If my math is correct that was three weeks longer than their incorrect knowledge of Colorado Law, the ones they were sworn to uphold. Ten weeks of stalking, ten weeks of oh, we are not allowed to collect evidence until a Detective is assigned to the case. Ten weeks of complete terror for Morgan. Then at the end, three days before she was killed it was, “if anything it was going to escalate.” And Morgan was dead, of natural causes, until her doctors told me it was all wrong, and I told the contracted forensic pathologist, “Excuse me, due to this fact, and that fact, a few very prominent doctors in the country think you might have made a mistake here?”
A Mesa County Investigator shook his head and told me, “Oh Dr. Kurtzman does not like to be wrong.” And I say, what about Morgan? What about my 20-year-old daughter that was killed – according to what every other single person reviewing her autopsy is telling me. I say that is not denial!!! Not a mother who can’t accept! It is simply the truth, and it never changes. Her Amitriptyline blood level of 7,909 will not change. It will always be very, very astronomical. Morgan weighed 115 pounds. So in another report a woman who weighed 171 pounds was the highest yet recorded, would Morgan’s blood level (if you took into account her weight and the fact that her blood was drawn approximately 12 hours after her death) not be the equivalent of 11,863+? Absolutely one of the highest levels ever recorded at a top lab in the country. But it was being called insignificant according to the contracted forensic pathologist who did her autopsy. A fact that the officials in Garfield County chose to ignore. Then let’s add in the five date rape drugs found in her gastric fluid, seven months later, and those numbers or detectability of the drugs present will not change. The astounding malpractice of the contacted forensic pathologist to jump into this evidentiary quagmire that exhausted her sample, when the truth is supposed to be somewhere within his scope, or sphere of influence, just has everyone asking why?
And, why oh why, does a contracted forensic pathologist suddenly take it upon himself to run more tests on a, “closed case.” After threats to me that he could do just that, and another prominent forensic pathologist assured me that he can not. But out of fear, and worry I reported to the Sheriffs department, and the Coroner his threats, then he carries through on his threats. Is there justice for Morgan somewhere in all that? Because if there is I must have missed it…completely.
And last week another set of bones was discovered (see the link above), a young woman labeled as, “no sign of foul play.” And NOW there is an investigation, eight years after her death. Why don’t they just amend the Garfield County sign on the highway to include the warning that if you are a woman, you might want to keep driving, because you are not very safe here?
If you are missing you will be called a runaway (even if you have never run away before, even if you are a straight A student – doesn’t matter they won’t look in to it), unless you are 22 with 2 children, then it will simply be called no sign of foul play, so no investigation, basically the same thing. If that is not blatant discrimination against women, then what would it take? Really, what would it take to correctly label what is going on here?
Was it Arrogance, or Something Worse?
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…
For all the times she helped me…
Morgan Sharing her love with the world
The days are long and I am not sure myself if, like Steve, the realization that she is really gone is stronger now than it has ever been…
There is however, one big shining glow that both of us have to acknowledge – even just yesterday, one of Morgan’s friends expressed, “You should remember that Morgan inspires me to this day to do my best, she was my mirror, reflected who I was when I couldn’t see.” I thought that was so beautiful and I just wanted to share that with you all. More than anything in the world, Morgan CARED. She cared about everyone, she loved so many people, and wanted to help the world.
To all of you who have expressed in some private moment how much Morgan changed your life – for the better, forever – I just want you to know as parents, Steve and I will cherish those very meaningful feelings always, and we love you all for your willingness to tell us about our daughter.
So sincerely,
Steve and Toni