Massachusetts DA Rips Gap In Amy Bishop Police Report
The Norfolk district attorney ramped up his criticism of the 1986 investigation of Seth Bishop’s death yesterday, saying that it was “glaring’’ and “striking’’ that local police accounts of Amy Bishop’s armed standoff at a local business were not included in the State Police report or considered as part of the prosecutor’s decision about whether to pursue charges.
“It was a glaring omission that . . . there wasn’t the inclusion of the shooter who exited her house with a gun, leveling the gun at an innocent bystander, and making demands on that bystander,’’ William R. Keating said in a telephone interview.
Although Braintree police had documented in great detail how Bishop had pointed a 12-gauge shotgun at two employees at a local auto body shop and demanded a getaway car, there is no indication in the final State Police report that they shared this information with the troopers who worked out of the district attorney’s office and were assigned to the case.
Keating also revealed yesterday that the state trooper who wrote the report, Brian L. Howe, has told investigators in Keating’s office that he “did not have a recollection’’ of Braintree police telling him of the incident. That backs up the repeated assertions of the assistant district attorney assigned to the 1986 case, who also said he was never made aware of the second assault.
Last Friday, 23 years after Bishop escaped charges in the shooting death of her brother and her armed encounter at the body shop, police say the Harvard-educated neurobiologist fatally shot three of her colleagues at the University of Alabama at Huntsville and injured three others.
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In the aftermath, a series of troubling questions have been raised about how the Braintree case was handled, with several key figures in the investigation - including former Braintree police chief John Polio - saying they were unaware of crucial facts surrounding the death of 18-year-old Seth Bishop.
Keating said yesterday that he was confounded by Polio’s admission that he did not know Bishop had pointed her firearm at a mechanic and demanded a getaway car. These details were included in Braintree police reports made public on Tuesday after they had previously been declared missing.
“The report reflects what his own police officers saw,’’ Keating said. “And if he’s saying that he wasn’t aware that Amy Bishop took a loaded shotgun and pointed it at an innocent bystander, I find that astounding. He’s saying he didn’t read his own [officers’] reports.’’
Polio acknowledged yesterday that he read the reports of his own officers for the first time when they were released by Keating’s office this week. Polio said he did not read the reports in 1986 because his officers told him the case would be handled by State Police and the district attorney’s office.
“I’m not fingerpointing at anybody,’’ Polio said. “I know what part I played and what I did, but the lines of communication broke somewhere. I have no regrets whatsoever.’’
US Representative William D. Delahunt, who was Norfolk district attorney at the time of the 1986 shooting, has been in Israel since the Alabama shootings, but was questioned about the case yesterday at a press availability called after the congressional delegation was blocked from entering Gaza.
“I haven’t had a real opportunity to get into the details of the case, but I suspect when I return I’ll have an opportunity to become debriefed,’’ the congressman told the Associated Press.
Braintree Police Chief Paul Frazier first raised concerns about the handling of the investigation during a Saturday press conference. Yesterday, an assistant in his office referred calls to Braintree’s mayor, Joseph Sullivan, who declined to comment on Keating’s remarks.
Sullivan said town officials worked through the weekend to find the Braintree police reports, which Frazier said had been missing for more than 20 years. They were ultimately found in a box at the police station among the papers of an investigator on the case, who has since died.
“I wanted to get the facts out as quick as we could,’’ Sullivan said.
On Sunday, the Globe, citing an anonymous law enforcement official, reported that Bishop and her husband were questioned in the attempted bombing of a Harvard Medical School professor in 1993. Investigators searched the home Bishop shared with her husband, but no one was ever charged in the crime.
Bishop’s husband, James Anderson, acknowledged that he and his wife had been questioned, but he told the New York Times that he had been given a letter from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms that said: “You are hereby cleared in this incident. You are no longer a subject of the investigation.’’
However, Michael J. Sullivan, who served as US attorney for Massachusetts from 2001 to 2009 and had been acting director of the ATF, said it is extremely unusual for federal officials to write such a letter unless the suspects or those questioned were publicly linked to the case. The names of Bishop and her husband were never publicly linked to the case until after Friday’s shootings.
“There probably were one or two times during my career as a federal and state prosecutor where I felt an obligation to give that type of letter because a person’s reputation was harmed through no fault of their own and there was an exoneration of the individual,’’ said Sullivan, who emphasized that he had no personal knowledge of the Bishop case.
On Tuesday, Keating said Bishop should have been charged with assault with a dangerous weapon, unlawful possession of a firearm, and unlawful possession of ammunition for pointing her shotgun at innocent bystanders. Braintree police had to order her to put down her weapon, which she did not do, forcing one officer to grab her from behind, according to the newly released reports.
Keating said the errors made in the 1986 case are the kind that shake public confidence in law enforcement.
“It’s important to go forward so that the same mistakes can’t be repeated,’’ he said.
Among those mistakes, said Keating, were letting Bishop go without questioning her the day of the shooting because police concluded she was too distraught to be interviewed and the decision by local and State Police to wait 11 days before interviewing her and her mother, the sole witnesses to the shooting.
“If you eliminated everyone from an interview that was emotionally upset after a shooting death, you’d have no one to talk to,’’ Keating said. “If someone takes a loaded shotgun, levels it at someone, and makes demands, and the person goes to the police station and gets released and there are no charges, I don’t think anyone could say that wasn’t a mistake.’’
Braintree police also should have waited for the State Police crime scene response unit to arrive at the house and allowed their troopers to take pictures and document evidence, Keating said.
According to the local police report, in the moments following the shooting, Braintree officers photographed the scene and removed evidence, like spent shells, after Howe reportedly told Captain Theodore Buker of the Braintree police that “State Police would not respond.’’ But in Howe’s six-page report, which he wrote in March 1987, he said he was directed on the day of the shooting to conduct an investigation.
It is unclear from the state and town reports when or whether State Police went to the scene that day.
Keating said it is standard procedure for smaller towns, like Braintree, to immediately hand over death investigations to the State Police and the district attorney’s office, which have more resources.
“The statutes are clear that the district attorney and the State Police attached to the district attorney have primary responsibility over the investigations of death,’’ Keating said. “There should be a clear chain of command on investigations, and as I reviewed the documents . . . based on those reports, that chain of command, that sharing of information was not there.’’
Prosecutor Says Amy Bishop Could Have Been Charged In 1986 Shooting
Norfolk County prosecutors have just announced that they have located the missing files in the 1986 shooting death of Seth Bishop by his sister, Amy Bishop. The Norfolk County district attorney now says that, after reviewing the files, he has concluded that probable cause existed in 1986 to arrest Amy Bishop and charge her with assault and weapons crimes. But, at the time, the death was declared accidental.
Here is the statement from the Norfolk District Attorney's Office:
"As a result of an internal audit of municipal records ordered by Braintree Mayor Joseph Sullivan over the weekend, today Mayor Sullivan and Braintree Police Officials hand-delivered to the Norfolk District Attorney's Office a substantial body of police reports, previously believed to be missing, relative to the 1986 shooting of Seth Bishop.
These reports have been reviewed by senior staff at the District Attorney's Office, including the Chief of Homicide, the Chief Appellate Attorney and a lieutenant detective of the State Police assigned to the Norfolk District Attorney's Detective Unit.
The District Attorney's Office is also in receipt of the State Police ballistics report relating to the shotgun that was used in the Dec. 6, 1986 shooting.
All of these documents are attached for your review, along with previously released documents.
The analysis of the newly received documents, as well as the previously released March 30, 1987 State Police report indicate that probable cause existed at that time to place Amy Bishop under arrest charged with:
Assault with a Dangerous Weapon, Chap. 265 Sec. 15B
Carrying a Dangerous Weapon, Chap. 269 Sec. 10, 12D
Unlawful possession of ammunition, Chap. 269 Ch. 10 (h)
The statute of limitations has run on all of those charges.
The reports supply significant additional details into the incident and the circumstances of the apprehension of Amy Bishop. The reports do not contradict the previously released information regarding the sole eye witness, the victim's mother, who told police at the time that she directly observed the shotgun in her daughter's hands discharge accidentally, striking and killing Seth Bishop.
Even if a Grand Jury were to hear allegations that this incident involved wanton and reckless conduct on the part of Amy Bishop -- the lowest standard for Manslaughter in Massachusetts -- the statute of limitations has barred indictment on that charge since 1992.
Mayor Sullivan stated: "On Monday, February 15, 2010 after a search of archived records, Chief Frazier located the Braintree Police reports written by officers involved with the incident. The reports were found among other investigative files maintained by a retired Braintree Police Captain." Mayor Sullivan further stated: "A review of Braintree municipal records also revealed that Amy Bishop's mother was one of 240 elected Town Meeting members. She represented Precinct 3 from 1980 to 1993. She served one year (1985) on the Braintree Arts Lottery Council, with her husband. There is no indication in town records that she served on the Personnel Board or any other elected or appointed office."
"I appreciate the work we were able to accomplish with District Attorney Keating throughout this matter and I believe our combined efforts are in the best interest of the town of Braintree," Mayor Sullivan said.
"Although the reports and my statements contain minor discrepancies, I am relieved that we now have the incident reports from the responding officers available to us," Chief Paul Frazier stated.
Amy Bishop Case: A Flawed Calculus
When it comes to Amy Bishop, the Harvard-trained biologist accused of opening fire on a roomful of colleagues at the University of Alabama at Huntsville, nothing adds up.
She was 21 years old when she shot her 18-year-old brother, Seth, to death at their family’s home in Braintree in 1986. The death was ruled an accident.
Given that Amy Bishop fired the shotgun that killed her brother into her upstairs bedroom wall before she went downstairs and shot her brother in the kitchen, that was some accident. There were inconsistencies in what she and her mother, the only other witness to the shooting, told police, but she was never charged.
In 1993, Amy Bishop and her husband, James Anderson, were questioned about a bomb in a package left at the Newton home of Dr. Paul Rosenberg. Amy Bishop and Rosenberg clashed when they both worked at Children’s Hospital in Boston. Neither Amy Bishop nor James Anderson was charged in connection with the bomb, which didn’t go off only because Rosenberg was cautious enough, in the middle of the Unabomber’s reign of terror, not to fully open the package.
And then on Sunday, three days after Amy Bishop was charged with murder - facing the death penalty in her husband’s home state, where they have considerably fewer qualms about executing people than in her home state - Anderson told Eric Moskowitz, the Globe reporter who knocked on his door, that he hadn’t bothered to learn the identities of the people his wife is accused of shooting, even though he assumes he knows them.
“I haven’t even looked to see who was killed,’’ he said. “Because I worked with those people.’’
Does that add up? If it was your spouse accused, wouldn’t you want to know who he or she supposedly shot?
Agents from the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives say Dr. Rosenberg and his wife would have been killed if he had fully opened the package containing two pipe bombs. Instead, Rosenberg used a knife to cut around the top of the box and peer inside. He and his wife, an attorney, ran out of the house and called the police. The bomb didn’t detonate because the cardboard flaps that would have triggered the device were never raised.
Needless to say, with the Unabomber still running around at the time, terrorizing and targeting people who fit Rosenberg’s profile, not to mention the usual anti-Semitic loons out there, the investigation into who sent a bomb to the Rosenbergs was a serious one indeed.
But Anderson downplayed it, suggesting federal agents were on a fishing expedition. He told the Globe he considered it “being bothered, harassed,’’ when agents from the ATF questioned him and his wife about it. Given that it was common knowledge at the lab at Children’s that Amy Bishop had clashed with Rosenberg, the questioning was to be expected.
Police in Alabama say Amy Bishop shot her peers in a dispute over having been denied tenure. James Anderson said his wife should have received tenure, in part because she was generating millions for the university. Why would the university reject such a money-maker?
This is shaping up as a real blame game. Everybody is going to be second-guessed on why they didn’t hold Amy Bishop accountable for something, anything, before last Friday.
As he weighs whether he’ll run for reelection to Congress, Bill Delahunt will have to worry about more than people saying he’s too chummy with Hugo Chávez. How long before a political opponent suggests Delahunt dropped the ball when, as Norfolk County district attorney at the time, his office decided not to charge Amy Bishop with anything, even involuntary manslaughter, after she shot her brother?
Nothing we know about Amy Bishop adds up, except the number six, because that’s how many people the cops say she shot last week, and three, because that’s how many of them died.
New Doubts About 1986 Shooting
A former Braintree police chief backed away yesterday from his earlier defense of a 1986 decision not to press charges against Amy Bishop, who shot her brother to death that year and then, on Friday, allegedly killed three of her colleagues at the University of Alabama.
John Polio, now 87, said in an interview yesterday that after reading a State Police report compiled in 1986 and released to the public last weekend, he has questions about the quality of the investigation into the death of Seth Bishop, which was declared an accident.
The report, which Polio said was not given to him at the time, reveals that State Police did not interview Amy Bishop and her mother, who witnessed the shooting, until 11 days later, and there were some discrepancies in their accounts of what happened.
“When I hear everything and I see this report for the first time, if this information was at my hands then, yes, I would have to do a lot of thinking before I made a decision then,’’ Polio said.
Polio’s comments came as Bishop, 45, stood before a judge in Alabama for the first time since the shooting. At a closed-door hearing, the charges against her were explained.
Meanwhile, in Massachusetts, neighbors and colleagues shared revealing recollections about Bishop during her days living in Braintree, Newton, and Ipswich and studying at Northeastern and Harvard universities. They described her as someone who was obviously bright, but also difficult or odd.
In Newton, neighbor Johnny Henk said he remembered Bishop as a “wacky’’ woman who was often seen yelling at her husband and children, but who also would play the violin in her home and invite neighborhood children to sit and listen.
“One minute she’s fine, the other minutes hollering and screaming,’’ Henk said.
In Ipswich, police said that Bishop called 911 so many times to complain about the noise of children riding dirt bikes or playing basketball that police referred to her and her husband as “regular customers.’’
“There was never enough we could do for them,’’ Officer Michael Thomas said. “When someone calls the police a lot about their neighbors, it says either they are not able to cooperate enough with them or that they are just unable to adapt to a neighborhood.’’
And in Hamilton, where Bishop joined a writing group, other aspiring authors recalled that the biologist-writer was talented but awkward. Bishop had penned three dramatic novels - a suspense thriller about an IRA operative; a tale about a virus that made all women barren and ended mankind; and a book she titled “Martians in Belfast,’’ which recounted the life of a girl growing up during the Troubles of Ireland, according to Rob Dinsmoor, a member of the Hamilton Writers Group, which Bishop attended in the late 1990s.
“She really had a knack for writing character, dread, and suspense,’’ Dinsmoor said. But, he said, she sometimes felt ill at ease in the academic world. “She didn’t know how to interact with them. She would just say what’s on her mind, and that would get her in trouble.’’
The shootings in Alabama dredged up some powerful memories for a former mechanic in Braintree, who was at work on the day in 1986 that Bishop shot her brother and then ran from the family home.
Tom Pettigrew said a wild-eyed Bishop burst into the dealership where he was working, pointed a shotgun at employees, and said that she had had a fight with her husband and he was going to come after her, so she needed a getaway car.
“I yelled, ‘What are you doing?’ and she screamed at me to put my hands up. So I put my hands up,’’ recalled Pettigrew, 45, in an interview at his home in Quincy yesterday.
Pettigrew said Braintree police briefly questioned him and several other employees, but authorities never contacted him again. Now, after the deaths in Alabama, Pettigrew wonders why authorities didn’t follow up more aggressively.
“It was almost like they wanted to put it on the shelf and forget about it,’’ said Pettigrew, whose encounter with Bishop was first reported by the Boston Herald yesterday. “I think if that happened to me I’d be wrapping up a long prison sentence. But with this, it seems like they just wanted it to go away.’’
Polio, the Braintree police chief at the time, said yesterday that he knew Bishop had to be apprehended at gunpoint, but he said he did not know she had pointed the shotgun at Pettigrew. Polio said he allowed officers to release Bishop on the day of the shooting because the lead investigator, Captain Theodore Buker, told him she was too emotional to interview.
Buker recommended that the case be handed to the district attorney’s office because “there were too many questions,’’ Polio said. Buker remained on the case, but State Police were the lead investigators, Polio said.
Polio said Buker, who has since died, told him the district attorney’s office had decided not to pursue the charges. Polio had no reason to question it at the time, he said yesterday.
“I took the word of my captain, I took the word of the State Police,’’ he said. “All I know is that they investigated, they found it to be accidental and that was it. But when I got all this other material . . . I found it to be deficient in answers.’’
In particular, Polio said, the report has too little information about ballistics.
Polio’s handling of the case has been questioned by the current Braintree police chief, Paul H. Frazier, and the mayor of Braintree, Joseph Sullivan, has pledged to look for missing police records about the case.
The district attorney who decided not to pursue charges against Bishop in 1986 was William Delahunt, now a member of Congress from Massachusetts.
Delahunt, who is in the Middle East, has not returned calls for comment over the last three days. Yesterday his spokesman, Mark Forest, said the congressman has “very little recollection’’ of the case but said his decision was based on a State Police investigation that declared the shooting an accident.
John Kivlan, Delahunt’s first assistant district attorney who reviewed the police reports into the shooting of Seth Bishop and accepted the police finding of an accident, yesterday acknowledged there were inconsistencies in the statements that Amy Bishop and her mother, Judy Bishop, provided. But he said those discrepancies did not challenge the overall finding by police that it was an accidental discharge.
Kivlan, however, said his assessment would probably have been different if he had been aware that Amy Bishop had fled the residence and pointed a shotgun at a man at a nearby car dealership, demanding keys to a car. He said that information was not contained in the report.
“At the end of the day, we don’t have to accept the [police] report given to us,’’ Kivlan said. “But there was nothing we knew of to contradict the finding of an accidental discharge.’’
State Police spokesman Dave Procopio said the trooper who conducted the investigation has retired, but that the agency will check its archives this week to see if there are additional records. A spokesman for the current Norfolk district attorney, William Keating, said that at this point, prosecutors have no reason to reopen the case.
Bishop is now facing one count of capital murder and three counts of attempted murder after allegedly shooting her colleagues during a faculty meeting Friday afternoon. Three people were killed and three others were injured.
Huntsville police spokesman Mark Roberts said yesterday that Bishop did not have a permit to carry the 9mm handgun she allegedly used Friday and investigators are still trying to determine who owned the gun and how Bishop acquired it.
Bishop’s husband, James Anderson, told the Chronicle of Higher Education yesterday that his wife had recently borrowed a handgun and had practiced with it at an indoor gun range. He said she would not tell him who loaned her the gun and was “very cagey.’’
He said she had been worried about “crazy students’’ since someone had followed her across campus last summer. But he said he warned his wife not to bring the gun to work.
Huntsville police also remain interested in Bishop’s connection to a 1993 attempted mail-bombing of a Harvard professor with whom she worked in a hospital laboratory. Federal authorities did not press charges and have never apprehended anyone in the case. Anderson has said that he and his wife were not suspects in the case, but rather “subjects’’ who were cleared by investigators.
Amy Bishop Was Charged With Assault In 2002 IHOP Dispute
In March, 2002, Bishop walked into an International House of Pancakes in Peabody with her family, asked for a booster seat for one of her children, and learned the last seat had gone to another mother.
Bishop, according to a police report, strode over to the other woman, demanded the seat and launched into a profanity-laced rant.
When the woman would not give the seat up, Bishop punched her in the head, all the while yelling "I am Dr. Amy Bishop."
Bishop received probation and prosecutors recommended that she be sent to anger management classes, though it is unclear from court documents whether a judge ever sent her there.
The woman, identified in court documents as Michelle Gjika, declined to comment, saying only "It's not something I want to relive."
Alabama Shooting Survivor: "There Was No Way To Ever Anticipate This"
There was nothing about last Friday's biology department faculty meeting at the University of Alabama in Huntsville that portended the carnage that was to come, Professor Debra Moriarity told a reporter Wednesday.
"It was actually a really laid-back, mundane kind of faculty meeting," the biochemist told CNN affiliate WAAY about the 13 people seated around an oval table in Room 369 of the Shelby Center for Science and Technology. "Events coming up, scheduling classes, budgets. It was really actually one of the easiest faculty meetings we've had."
Among the participants was Amy Bishop, a Harvard-trained geneticist with whom Moriarity had developed a professional relationship nurtured by the fact that the two women worked with cell cultures. "Sometimes you borrow things back and forth from each other," she said. "We had talked about writing grant proposals together."
After about an hour, just before 4 p.m., Bishop -- who had recently been denied tenure -- ended the calm. "All of a sudden, she just stood up and shot," Moriarity said.
Moriarity reacted quickly, dropping onto her hands and knees on the gray carpet. "Just dropped to the floor and crawled under the table and crawled towards Amy," said Moriarity, who was focused on one thing.
"I mean, you're crawling under a table, you see the legs of a person who's shooting above the table. I grabbed her leg and, I don't know what I was thinking. I wasn't thinking anything. I was just thinking: 'Grab her!'
"And she sidestepped me. I mean, she pulled her leg free and I was in the doorway then with my back kind of to her. And I think she tried to shoot at me then, but that's when I started yelling at her, 'Amy, Amy, think about my grandson, think about my daughter! This is me! I've helped you before; I'll help you again! Don't do this Amy! Don't do this!'"
Bishop then stepped out into the hall, pointed the gun at Moriarity and pulled the trigger, the biologist said. "It clicked, and it clicked again, and I crawled right back in the room and shut the door and she was left out in the hall."
The survivors burst into action. One person locked the wooden door, another shoved a table against it, others moved a refrigerator into place to further block the door, another called 911, others moved to help the six people who had been shot, Moriarity said.
Three people died; three others were wounded. Two of them remained hospitalized Wednesday in critical condition, according to a spokeswoman for Huntsville Hospital. The third has been released.
Moriarity, who joined the school's faculty in 1984, said the casualties have not affected her plans to remain at the school. And she rejected any suggestion that her role in getting Bishop out of the room was heroic.
"She followed me out in the hall and then the gun jammed and I could get back in the room," Moriarity said. "That's not being a hero. That's just God looks out for you."
She said she had had little time to think. "From the beginning until we finally got things barricaded, it couldn't have been more than 20 seconds," she said.
Moriarity further rejected suggestions that anything could have been done to protect the victims. "There was no way to ever anticipate this," she said. "And there was nothing that could ever have been done to stop her. It all happened too fast."
And she worried that any attempt to tighten security could have negative consequences. "There is evil in the world; it is unfortunate that good people are hurt by that. But a university is a place of free thought and freedom to explore ideas and to search out new knowledge and you don't want to put anything in place that dampens that."
Moriarity returned to her office on Wednesday and said she plans to resume teaching next week. She predicted that, with the help of anti-anxiety medication, she would be able to sleep Wednesday night.
"I've been talking to family and friends and just getting their support helps you deal with it," she said. "I think right now most of us want to get back there and get things going, make plans for who is going to cover classes."
A memorial service to honor the lives of the dead -- faculty members Maria Davis, Adriel Johnson and Gopi Podila -- is to be held Friday.
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Sources: AP, Boston Globe, MSNBC, CNN, Youtube, Google Maps
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