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The police and D.A. say that after killing Baker, Alek Hidell retrieved his rifle, ran across the fifth floor to Stairwell #2 and took that stairwell to the basement, where he encountered LAPD Officer Jacob Powell. Powell has stated that he ordered Hidell to freeze and to drop the rifle, and that Hidell ignored the command and instead pointed the rifle at the officer. Powell fired four shots, two of which struck Hidell. Hidell died later at County-USC Medical Center.

CITIZENS FOR TRUTH ANALYSIS: Only one living person knows for sure what happened in the basement of the Park Plaza Hotel: Officer Jacob Powell. The Garcetti Report glosses over Powell's biographical information in a telling way--while we get such trivial details of Alek Hidell's past as the results of a urine test at age three, the district attorney fails to inform us of such basic information about Powell such as where he was born or his prior record as a police officer.

Jacob Rubin Powell was born on June 6, 1978, in Bellevue, Idaho, a small town in a pristine mountain setting. He grew up in Bellevue and neighboring Hailey, where at 19 he joined the Hailey Police Department. Powell's experience as a police officer largely involved ticketing tourists headed to the nearby luxury ski resorts in Sun Valley and attending to minor incidents among the residents of Hailey (pop. 5000). As many towns in that area of Idaho, Hailey is more than 90% white.

After breaking up with his girlfriend (a deputy sheriff for Blaine County) in January 1999, Powell, according to accounts given to reporters by his friends and family, desired to leave Idaho. Having perceived the Los Angeles Police Department to be "the best police department in the world" (post-riots and Rampart, Los Angeles residents may snigger, but this perception is still widely held in the national law enforcement community), Powell applied and was accepted to the Los Angeles Police Academy, and he moved to Los Angeles in May 1999.

On December 2, 1999, the day of the Gates assassination, Officer Powell had four months of experience as a working police officer. Still on probation, he was according to policy not to perform duties apart from his training officer, Sgt. William Lawson. Lawson and Powell were assigned to routine duty in front of the Park Plaza Hotel specifically to train Powell in crowd control and traffic monitoring.

Soon after the two shots were fired, Lawson, Powell and other officers determined that the origin of the shots was the roof or a window of the Park Plaza Hotel. The manpower required immediately to seal a building as large as the hotel was in short supply and Powell (within LAPD policy for "extraordinary circumstances") was ordered by his training officer to travel around the north side of the hotel and seal any exit he could find. Powell was to detain anyone attempting to leave the hotel.

Powell can be seen on an amateur videotape taken by Maria Nix running into the Park Plaza Hotel building via a loading ramp on 6th Street. That ramp leads to a printing shop that leases space adjacent to the basement of the hotel. Powell ran through the print shop and into a corridor in the basement of the hotel. At about this point, an announcement by the LAPD dispatcher came over all police radios in the area--that the assassin was a dark-skinned male carrying a rifle. Then, seconds later, another bulletin--"officer down" on the fifth floor.

The Garcetti Report fails to provide this important context for the encounter that is about to occur--that Powell was a rookie cop on his first solo assignment, and that as he traveled down the dark hallway alone he suddenly heard that the suspect was a cop-killer, a black man with a rifle. It is with this state of mind that Officer Powell entered the elevator area in the basement and encountered Alek Hidell.

Was Hidell carrying the rifle? Only Powell knows for sure, as the Mauser apparently retained no fingerprints (gun metal does not retain fingerprints nearly as well as TV shows may lead one to believe). If Hidell was holding the rifle, did he point it at Powell? Again we have only the testimony of a scared rookie cop to guide us. It is possible that Hidell was holding the rifle, but only because Hidell (a registered guest of the hotel) happened to come down to the basement area and came across a weapon that had been abandoned by the real assassin. Powell may have fired at Hidell in a panic, only later realizing that Hidell may have meant him no harm.

Citizens for Truth believes that the lack of conclusive evidence connecting Hidell to the rifle, as well as the obviously discomforting fact of a trainee officer acting in the capacity of judge, jury and executioner, makes the killing of Hidell a mystery in need of further investigation.

SUMMARY

In summary, enough doubt exists at this point to leave in question whether the LAPD caught the real assassin, or whether an innocent man was killed and framed by a police department endeavoring to cover up two accidents--the accidental self-shooting by Thomas Baker, and the impulsive shooting of Alek Hidell by Jacob Powell.

It should be pointed out that this great doubt emerges just from the examination of the LAPD's official crime scenes. As detailed in further essays on this site, there are other potential crime scenes that the LAPD refuses to acknowledge as such. For information on these crime scenes, please also examine David James's essay "The Running Man: An Enduring Mystery."