Kevan Baker wanted to forget Wanda Lopez's final moments. He ...

746 COLUMBIA HUMAN RIGHTS LAW REVIEW [43.3:711
Domino’s, the suspect seemed to be doubling back towards the
nursing home and possibly trying to cross McArdle to the Circle K.
Police thought they were closing in.
Three minutes after Mejia’s last BOLO, and twenty-two
minutes after Wanda screamed, the dispatcher called every available
unit to the area around Kostoryz and McArdle between the “nursing
home” (Point 5) and “Domino’s” Pizza (Point 6). Seconds later, an
urgent call for emergency assistance came in from the area, followed
by a signal requiring the channel to be kept clear of all traffic
unrelated to the emergency.
Frantic calls went out from the dispatcher to the cops
swarming dark alleys looking for an armed suspect to “be advised we
do have several vice units in the area, plain-clothes.” For two
minutes, the dispatcher desperately tried to regain contact with
officers in Car 155, who had been among the first responders at each
step of the chase and had suddenly gone silent.
Call piled on top of call, one every few seconds at the peak.
Where they overlap on the tape, some are hard to hear. One sounds
like, “Too far. He got away.” In the confusion, one event took steam
out of the McArdle-Kostoryz search, then another event brought it to
a halt.
The first event was Julie Arsuaga’s insistent description of
the man she saw jogging past the Phase III nightclub, which
prompted Mejia to broadcast Julie’s stream of grooming details about
the man she saw. After Escochea got Fowler’s report of a 5 foot 9
Hispanic male loitering at the Circle K earlier that evening with a
light sweatshirt, beard and moustache who said he was looking for a
ride, and after realizing it “sounds like the description the chick was
trying to give me on the phone,” the dispatcher pressed Mejia for a
better description of the Sigmor suspect’s face.
On the tape, Mejia can be heard talking to the witnesses, with
a female voice prominent in the background. Then, instead of Baker’s
description of the mustachioed man with a couple weeks of whiskers
who sprinted away to the north, Mejia gave Julie’s description of the
“clean shaven” man she saw jogging east of the station past the Phase
III. Soon thereafter came Mejia’s final BOLO, complete with the
facial-hair details from Julie Arsuaga.
The urgency drained from dispatcher Escochea’s voice.
Clearly, the clean-shaven man at the gas station that Mejia was
describing was not the mustachioed and unshaven man Officer
Fowler had questioned earlier that evening at the Circle K. Reverting