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Crime Scene #2: The Roof Of The Park Plaza Hotel
According to police, the gunman on the roof was a 24-year-old African
American male named Alek Hidell, a political radical seeking to
incite a class war in which all the poor people of the world would
rise up against the wealthy and kill them one by one. According to
this version of the assassination, Hidell, positioned on a ledge,
fired two shots from a Mauser 7.65mm rifle, jumped down and, still
carrying the rifle, ran into Stairwell Number 1.
CITIZENS FOR TRUTH ANALYSIS: The police and the D.A. are utterly
certain that the person who fired from the roof of the Park Plaza
Hotel was Alek Hidell, the man who was later killed in the basement
of the hotel. Why are they certain of this? Partly because they have
eyewitnesses who stated they looked up while the shooting was
happening and saw a dark-skinned man on the roof with a rifle. But
did these witnesses see a black man up there because they could see
that much detail, or did they see a black man only in retrospect,
when they knew the man the police caught was black, something that
was known very soon after Hidell was killed? After all, only two
eyewitnesses are known to have provided descriptions of the gunman to
police before Powell discovered Hidell in the basement (the rest
provided their statements after the main suspect in the crime was
widely publicized to be an African American male, and hence their
"recollections" cannot be considered untainted by this knowledge).
Of these two critical witnesses, only one, machinist Enrique del
Valle, who was at the bus stop at the southeast corner of Park View
and 6th Street, described skin-color. He described the figure he saw
as "dark."
Two important facts must be considered when evaluating del Valle's
testimony. First, there was a language barrier between the
Guatemalan machinist and the New Jersey-born interviewing LAPD patrol
officer, Howard Evins. Evins spoke a "small amount" of Spanish,
while del Valle spoke almost no English. No verbatim transcript of
the quickly conducted field interview exists, but Evins's account is
that the description of the suspect he received from del Valle was
delivered in a "mix" of Spanish and English. Was del Valle's
description of a "dark" (Evins's word) gunman describing that the
gunman was dark-skinned or that the gunman was a silhouette?
"Citizens for Truth believes that there is no convincing evidence for
the conclusion that the gunman on the roof was a dark-skinned male."
Obviously, an interview of del Valle would be useful in clearing up
this question. However, del Valle has since returned to Guatemala,
and all indication are that he would prefer not to be involved with
the Los Angeles police or any other North American investigators (not
unusual considering the widespread distrust of authorities among
citizens of Guatemala, where the police have routinely been the
enforcement arm of murderous government regimes). The question of
del Valle's statement remains critical, however, and speculation is
warranted. If del Valle had stated to the officer "era obscuro," a
common phrase in Spanish, he could have meant either "he was dark"
(meaning the gunman had dark skin) or "it was dark" (meaning the
figure was in silhouette). This phrase, perhaps clumsily translated
by del Valle or Evins, could have resulted in an incorrect
identification of the gunman as a dark-skinned male.
The second important fact to consider about the early identification
of the gunman is that all available evidence indicates that under the
conditions prevailing at 12:31 p.m. on December 2, 1999, anyone
looking up at the Park Plaza Hotel roof from the area in front of the
hotel would have seen a silhouetted figure at best. Citizens for
Truth conducted its own tests, sending persons of three different
skin colors--white, Hispanic, African American--to the roof, while
observers below attempted to determine their skin color. It was
virtually impossible to make a determination--even the best guesses
of observers were no better than the law of averages (1 chance in 3)
would indicate.
Can YOU tell the skin color of the people in these pictures?
Citizens for Truth believes that there is no convincing evidence for
the conclusion that the gunman on the roof was a dark-skinned male.
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