ARTILLERY FIRE ESCALATES IN UKRAINE; FEARS OF WAR SPUR EVACUATIONS

BY STEVEN ERLANGER

MOSCOW Artillery fire escalated sharply in eastern Ukraine Saturday, and thousands of residents fled the region in chaotic evacuations two developments rife with opportunities for what the United States has warned could be a pretext for a Russian invasion.

The spike in violence pushed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to call for Russian President Vladimir Putin to meet him and seek resolution to the crisis.

“I don’t know what the president of the Russian Federation wants, so Iam proposing a meeting,” Zelenskyy said at the Munich Security Conference where he also met with U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris. Zelenskyy said Russia could pick

SEE UKRAINE • A9

The Series

“One of Their Own” concludes today with part III.

Today: “They are not going to get away with this. A widow’s quest delivers a dramatic courtroom twist.

Part I: A cold case. A DNA hit. And finally justice. Or was it?

Part II: “I must have had sex with her.” Doubts creep in as a detective springs his trap.

• Parts I and II can be read online by going to sandiegouniontribune/ cold-case

BYVIK U-T

BY JOHN WILKENS

Two days after her husband hanged himself, Rebecca Brown went to a mortuary to make final arrangements. She was awash in grief and fury. She felt her spouse of 21 years, Kevin Brown, had been driven to suicide by San Diego police detectives investigating the 1984 murder of a 14-year-old girl at Torrey Pines State Beach

When she got home from the mortuary on Oct 23, 2014 her despair mounted. There was a phone message from a news reporter, asking about a news release police had issued about the murder case It said Kevin Brown had killed himself as “preparations were being made”for his arrest.

His widow phoned then-Chief Shelley Zimmerman’s office several times and asked for a retraction

“I was very angry,” she recalled later “because they kept trying to pin this on him when he was alive and they never could, never did. They never arrested him And once he was dead, they wanted to say he did it.”

Kevin Brown had been implicated in Claire Hough’s killing by anew round of forensic testing in 2012 He’d worked in the police lab when the case was first investigated, and believed inadvertent contamination explained how his sperm cells wound up on vaginal swabs collected during the girl’s autopsy Detectives didn’t.

Police weren’t the only ones

Rebecca Brown lashed out at after her husband’s body was found hanging from a tree in Cuyamaca Rancho State Park. She sent an email to her sister, one of several relatives who had made it clear to Kevin Brown that they thought he was somehow involved in the teen’s death.

“He couldn’t bear the thought of being locked up, and your words sent him over the edge,” Brown wrote. “Don’t you see how you added to his fragile state?

It all added up to be too much for him And now he is gone forever.

Oh, my God.”

God is a big deal to Brown, a devout Catholic. After her husband died, in keeping with ancient traditions, she had a Mass celebrated for him for 30 straight days, believing it would free his soul from purgatory She went to the tree where he died, said a prayer, picked up leaves from the ground and put them in his Bible.

When her spiritual adviser, Monsignor Richard Duncanson, came to visit, she learned something that added to her anger

After her husband died, the priest was interviewed by Detective Michael Lambert lead investigator in the Hough murder who wanted to know if Kevin Brown had ever confessed to the crime.

Duncanson was upset by the request he told her no police officer had ever asked him to breach the confidentiality of the confessional in 45 years as a priest and he refused to dis- close what Brown said.

But he was willing to tell Lambert this: Brown never confessed to sexually assaulting or murdering anyone, or to having sex with a minor.

Rebecca Brown also learned that investigators obtained a search warrant for a cabin in Julian that her family owns not far from where Kevin Brown killed himself. He’d gone there shortly beforehand.

Police searched the house for anything that might connect him to the Hough case, a suicide note maybe. They found nothing.

Rebecca Brown, meanwhile, found a purpose. “They are not going to get away with this,” she said

Suing police officers is an uphill battle. It’s hard to get past the courthouse door because of legal precedents that give officers qualified immunity, even when there is wrongdoing. And it’s hard to sway juries, who are often sympathetic to police because of the importance of the job and its inherent dangers

Brown was told as much by Eugene Iredale, a San Diego attorney she consulted about filing a lawsuit. He also played devil’s advocate. Don’t you think police should have investigated your husband after the DNA came back? If it was your daughter who had been murdered wouldn’t you want justice?

But Iredale thought she had a winnable case, and he took it on.

Educated at Columbia University and Harvard Law School, Iredale has been an attorney for almost 40 years, specializing in criminal defense and civil rights cases. He has tried more than 200 cases to verdicts in state and federal courts and has twice participated in oral arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court. Bearded and often bemused, self-deprecating and quick with a quip, Iredale is respected in local legal circles for his courtroom skills. His closing arguments sometimes draw spectators.

On Dec. 17, 2014, a claim was filed against the city of San Diego, arequired precursor to a lawsuit.

Lodged on behalf of Rebecca Brown and her husband’s estate it accused detectives of illegal search and seizure, investigative misconduct, and wrongful death.

The city could have settled. Brown said she would have been satisfied with an apology and enough money to cover her legal costs She got neither Seven months later a 67-page suit was filed in federal court. It named Lambert as the main defendant and said he had botched the investigation, ignoring both the possibility of contamination in the lab and Kevin Brown’s fragile mental state.

Zimmerman, the police chief responded with a statement praising her team for solving the case. “The Claire Hough murder investigation is an example of the San Diego Police Department’s relentless pursuit to hold murderers accountable for their actions no matter how much time has passed,” she said.

In the City Attorney’s Office, the case was assigned to Catherine Richardson, a litigator with more than 30 years of trial experience. Born in the Bronx, raised on Long Island, she went to the other coast for college, earning a bachelor’s degree at the University of California San Diego and a law degree at the University of San Diego. Her proudest moment as an attorney she once told San Diego Lawyer magazine, came when she was in private practice. She filed suit and won a six-figure verdict for a female pedestrian hit by a car “It was extremely rewarding to have been able to provide a measure of justice to my client and to show her that the system does work,” Richardson said.

Her defense in the Brown lawsuit was built around the idea that police had to investigate the former criminalist, lest they be accused of protecting their own, and that Lambert went where the evidence led him. She said in her court papers that whatever pressures drove Brown to kill himself came mostly from his own actions and those of family members who thought he might be guilty.

Pretrial wrangling went on for almost five years depositions, motions to exclude evidence, rulings on qualified immunity before potential jurors filed into the San Diego courtroom of U.S. District Judge Dana Sabraw on Feb. 3, 2020

By then, the case had been narrowed to a handful of constitutional claims for relief. Three alleged violations of the Fourth Amendment’s protections against unreasonable search and seizure. Another sought compensation under the 14th Amendment for the loss of love and companionship suffered by Rebecca Brown.

Sabraw is an 18-year veteran of the federal bench. His American father and Japanese mother gave him the middle name Makato, which translates to “truth.” He made national headlines in 2018 when he ordered the U.S. government to stop separating families caught trying to cross the border

Although he is married to Summer Stephan, the county’s district attorney, Sabraw has a reputation for fairness to both sides of the aisle. Soft-spoken but forceful, he runs a tight ship He set aside two weeks for the Brown trial and kept the attorneys on a running clock. He also instructed them to stay behind the lectern while presenting their cases.

That was a challenge for the animated Iredale, who likes to wander Less so for Richardson, who is lower key and almost professorial, reading glasses perched at the end of her nose or on top of her head As the trial opened Iredale set out to paint a picture of a Police Department that didn’t want to admit it accidentally contaminated evidence in the Hough case, did a reckless investigation, and bullied Kevin Brown into killing himself.

He went first after the public perception, created through television shows like “CSI,” that police labs are pristine places of white-coated, hair-netted perfection. Witness after witness acknowledged that contamination happens in even the best facilities, and no reputable forensic scientist would claim otherwise.

But Richardson also made this point repeatedly:

None of the witnesses had ever heard of a case in which the contamination involved a lab worker’s sperm on vaginal swabs.

So that was another hurdle for Iredale He had to show how it might have happened, which meant talking about criminalists bringing into the lab their own semen.

“Forgive me for the grossness of what I have to say,” Iredale told the jury James Stam, who retired in 2008 after 30 years in the SDPD lab, testified that analysts need to make sure chemicals are working properly before they examine evidence for the presence of sperm. They cut out a piece of cloth with semen on it, put it in a vial, and add the chemicals to see if the solution turns the right color Labs could buy semen stand-