Who made tire marks? Defense asks if Columbus can prove Jones video shoot caused damage
Columbus Civic Center surveillance videos match other recordings that in combination prove motorists damaged the center’s parking lot while District Attorney Mark Jones filmed a campaign ad there in 2020, a police officer testified Tuesday in Jones’ trial.
But defense attorneys for Jones and co-defendant Erik Whittington questioned whether the prosecution can prove their clients left all the tire marks police used to justify charging their clients with two felonies, because so many custom car enthusiasts spin their tires there.
The attorneys also raised doubts about the city’s cost estimates for repairing the parking lot, noting those estimates jumped from less than $500 to over $300,000, and then dropped back to around $2,500.
Jones and Whittington were among five suspects charged after Jones posted a campaign rap video to social media showing Whittington’s gray BMW “drifting,” or spinning its tires while circling Jones and two others standing in the parking lot.
The investigation
Officer Ronnie Oakes testified that he used the campaign video, Civic Center surveillance video and recordings he got from the Instagram accounts of those involved to match their actions on May 17, 2020, to the tire marks police found afterward in the parking lot.
Under questioning by prosecutor Brian Patterson, Oakes said the marks made during the video shoot are consistently depicted in the other recordings, confirming they’re the same marks that city engineers used to estimate the cost of the damage, and that investigators used as evidence against Jones and Whittington.
Oakes said he used the recordings and other social media images to identify those involved, getting their tag numbers and driver’s license photos. Besides the campaign ad and security footage, Patterson showed jurors five different videos Oakes got from Instagram and Facebook, which also depicted drivers spinning their tires that day.
Defense attorneys noted that Oakes did not ask for the Civic Center surveillance footage until May 19, two days after the video shoot, and other drivers could have left tire marks there within that time span. Another officer, Sgt. Joshua Bailey, was assigned to photograph the damage, but he testified that he could not recall which day he did that.
Brian Giffin, the Civic Center’s operations manager, said workers inspecting the parking lot the week after the Sunday video shoot noted the damage and reported it. After Oakes contacted him about the damage May 19, Giffin reviewed footage from some of the center’s 95 security cameras to see where the campaign video was shot, and provided the recordings to Oakes, he said.
History of skid marks
Under defense cross examination, Giffin acknowledged that motorists frequently leave tire marks in the center’s parking lots, and authorities do not investigate every case. But they do investigate when they can identify a particular vehicle that has distinctive markings, he said.
Giffin did not know the outcome of any previous investigation for which police sought Civic Center surveillance video, he said: “I’ve been contacted on several occasions. I don’t know if they were felonies or misdemeanors.”
In Jones’ case, workers saw the tire marks and the campaign video, and reported both, he said: “As far as what happened, several employees came to me and said they saw it on YouTube.”
No one in city leadership pressured him to report the damage to police, who contacted him first, Giffin said.
Jones’ attorney, Chris Breault, has alleged authorities targeted Jones to derail his political campaign, pushing officers to pursue a felony case. Oakes said he started this investigation on his own, after viewing the campaign ad.
Oakes said police had problems with motorists misusing the parking lot before, and set up a sting operation there in July 2019, using an unmarked car to mingle among the drivers. But no one at that time was charged with a felony traffic offense, he said.
How did the city come up with damage estimate?
The felony charges against Jones and Whittington are based partly on parking lot damage estimates. Breault and defense attorney William Kendrick, who represents Whittington, repeatedly have raised doubts about the validity of those estimates, noting city emails at first placed the cost of repairs at $478, to restripe some of the parking spaces.
That shot up to $309,000 when city engineers were asked to estimate the price of repaving the entire lot.
That’s the amount on which Whittington’s bond was based after his arrest on May 22, 2020. Whittington initially could not afford to bond out of jail, because of that, and faced spending Memorial Day weekend behind bars until attorneys negotiated a lower bond of $30,000, for which he put down 10%, or $3,000.
The city later re-evaluated the repair cost, dropping it to $2,521.20, testified Tori Peacock McNeese, a Georgia Bureau of Investigation agent assigned to the case in November 2020, around the same time Jones and Whittington were indicted on felony charges of interfering with government property and first-degree criminal damage to property.
McNeese said the GBI was called in as an independent agency to review the Columbus police case, because local police and district attorneys work so closely together that a conflict of interest was possible.
She said the damage estimate she saw was based on two city workers paid $12.50 an hour to work two days restriping the lot, with $1,866.75 in paint, plus the cost of operating the machine they use.
Breault noted that estimate indicates each of the five initial suspects could have just paid $500 in restitution to fix the lot. Noting $500 is the threshold between a misdemeanor criminal damage case and a felony, he claimed city officials tailored their later damage estimates to meet that felony threshold.
Both Kendrick and Breault have claimed the damage never warranted the felony charges police filed. Other codefendants in the case have pleaded guilty to misdemeanors, agreeing to pay around $500 in restitution.
This story was originally published September 14, 2021 at 6:19 PM.