8B
Friday. April 21. 1995
UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Criminalist says she handled evidence carefully
The Associated Press
LOS ANGELES—A rookie criminalist accused by O.J. Simpson's defense of bungling evidence collection told jurors yesterday she immediately logged every item she handled but one — a viol containing Simpson's blood.
Criminalist Andrea Mazzola, testifying after her supervisor's nine-day ordeal on the witness stand, told jurors she carried a plastic trash bag out of Simpson's estate the evening after the murders of Simpson's ex-wife and her friend.
Veteran criminalist Dennis Fung testified that the bag contained a gray evidence envelope that held a vial of blood drawn voluntarily from Simpson earlier that day.
Prosecutor Hank Goldberg, antipating another defense attack on that testimony, asked if Mazzola had noted the blood vial on her crime scene checklist, where all evidence was recorded.
"No," she said. "It was done on the 14th."
Asked why she waited until the next day, Mazzola said. "Our checklist was locked in the back of the truck, and we had to get back to prepare evidence."
Defense attorneys have seized upon the handling of Simpson's blood sample as the touchstone of their frame-up defense. They allege that the detective who carried the
blood some 20 miles across town from police headquarters to Simpson's home did not give it to Fung that evening, as the prosecution maintains. That could have given police the opportunity to scatter Simpson's blood at his estate and at the murder scene to implicate him, the defense says.
Fung denied any such conspiracy and testified he and Mazolla received an envelope containing the blood vial from Detective Philip Vannatter at 5:20 p.m. on June 13, 1994, in the foyer of Simpson's mansion.
The defense and prosecution have produced dueling videotapes of events around that time. A tape at 5:11 p.m. shows Fung and Mazzola stashing evidence in their crime scene truck, locking the door and returning to Simpson's home empty-handed.
seen holding what appears to be the envelope.
At 15:17 p.m., Vannatter arrives with a gray envelope in his hand. In a shadowy view of the foyer, Fung is
Yet another tape shows Fung and Mazzola emerging at 5:42 p.m. with Mazzola toting a dark plastic trash baa.
"Did you collect anything after 5:11 that was consistent with the size of what was in that bag?" Goldberg asked her.
"No." Mazzola said.
Mazzola, 34, said she wasn't present when Fung received the gray envelope, having gone into the living room to sit down, exhausted after more than 12 hours' work. She said she closed her eyes briefly but didn't fall asleep.
Asked if the receipt of such an evidence envelope was significant, Mazzola indicated it was so routine she didn't give it great attention.
Superior Court Judge Lance Ito took the bench yesterday without mentioning his inquiry into reported problems among jurors and guards. The judge spent several hours Tuesday and all day Wednesday interviewing the 12 jurors and six alternates individually in his chambers, with attorneys from both sides present.
Mazzola showed jurors the leather glove and knit hat found under a bush at the crime scene and demonstrated how she handled the items as she placed them in evidence collection bags. She said she was careful to touch as small an area of each
item as possible.
She also disputed the defense assertion that one videotape shows her handing Fung a bloody envelope containing eyeglasses, with neither of them wearing protective latex gloves. The eyeglass envelope was found near the bodies of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman.
"Is that item the bloody eyeglass envelope?" Goldberg asked.
"No," she said, later adding, "I would not hand anyone anything bloody without gloves."
Asked why, she said, "For personal protection. ... Today we have various forms of hepatitis, HIV; we have AIDS."
She said criminalists were very mindful of exposure to blood evidence.
Goldberg began his direct examination by seeking to bolster Mazzola's credentials, showing that although she had handled only two crime scenes before the Simpson case, she received a police commendation for her work on the first one. He cited courses she had taken, and she testified that collecting evidence was not a complicated task.
She acknowledged that she and Fung did not write their initials on evidence packages to show who collected what.
"We were working as a team," she said. "So it didn't matter if our initials were on the envelope."
Scientist's ashes enshrined; Curie first female honored
The Associated Press
PARIS — Trying to make amends for centuries of Gallic sexism, male leaders watched yesterday as the ashes of brilliant scientist Marie Curie were enshrined in the Pantheon, the first woman honored at the memorial to the nation's great men.
The ceremony at the majestic domed monument, draped with a huge French flag, was a symbolic triumph for French women's rights activists and a dramatic farewell gesture by President Francois Mitterrand.
Ailing with cancer as he completes the final weeks of his 14-year presidency, Mitterrand fulfilled a 1993 request from feminists that a woman be enshrined in the Pantheon.
On Mitterrand's order, the ashes of Marie Curie and her husband, Pierre Curie, were transferred from a small-town cemetery and carried in wood coffins into the Pantheon. The couple shared the Nobel Prize for physics in 1903, and she won the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1911.
They are the 70th and 71st people whose remains are enshrined at the Pantheon. One woman,
Sophie Bertholet, is there alongside her husband, renown chemist Marcellin Bertholet. But Mitterrand stressed at the ceremony that Marie Curie is "the first lady in our history honored for her own merits."
Ironically, Marie Curie was a native of Poland, not France, and Polish President Lech Walesa joined Mitterrand at yesterday's ceremonies. Also present were Premier Edouard Balladur and Paris Mayor Jacques Chirac, conservatives lying to succeed Mitterrand in a two-round election that begins Sunday.
The woman they honored was born Marie Sklodowska in Warsaw in 1867.
She came to Paris to study at the Sorbonne, where she met her husband. With their discoveries of polonium and radium, "they changed the face of the world," 1993 Nobel Physics laureate Pierre-Gilles de Gennes said at the ceremony.
During World War I, Marie Curie was involved in the first use of radiology to treat wounded and trained the army's radiologist nurses at what is now known as the Curie Institute. The name curie is used today, for the unit of measurement of radioactivity.
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