Judge rejects challenge to guard’s ID in Harris murder case 

Posted: 8:30 pm Tue, August 31, 2010
By Brendan Kearney
Daily Record Legal Affairs Writer

When Germyn Murray learned former City Councilman Ken Harris had been shot and killed at the Northwood Shopping Center, he was especially interested. Not only did Murray live just up Perring Parkway from the strip mall, he had been patrolling there as a special police officer for almost three years at the time of the Sept. 20, 2008, homicide.

So Murray took a close look at two surveillance videos police had released, which were posted online. And as he watched the grainy footage of three men walking along the sidewalk in the dark, Murray thought he saw something familiar.

Specifically, he testified Tuesday in Baltimore City Circuit Court, he recognized two “thugs” who were regulars at the mall and whom he had previously arrested together for loitering.

He knew Gary Collins from his “distinctive walk” — “slough-footed,” or “the opposite of pigeon-toed,” he described it — in one surveillance tape and Charles McGaney from a partial profile of his face in another video.

He waited a month and a half, but Murray eventually picked up the phone and called the homicide detective on the case — this in spite of his fear for his own safety and that of his family. (A man pleaded guilty this year to witness intimidation in the case, and Murray is now in the state’s attorney’s office’s witness protection program.)

“It was the right thing to do,” he said in court Tuesday.

Murray’s ability to pick out two shadowy figures from the tapes, which were recorded shortly before Harris’ killing during the robbery of the New Haven Lounge, was the focus of a second day of a pretrial motions hearing yesterday.

Murray’s identification of Collins, 21, and McGaney, 22, is a linchpin of the prosecution’s case, and whether Murray should be able to explain to a jury how he was able to recognize them from the snippets of footage was hotly contested by their defense attorneys.

A third defendant, Jerome Williams, 17, was not identified in the video. His DNA was found on a skeleton mask used in the robbery.

On Monday, retired Judge David Ross found that DNA evidence from all three defendants can be used against them at trial.

Continuing Monday’s momentum for the prosecution, Ross denied the defense motion to exclude the video identification. Murray’s fingering of Collins and McGaney is informed by experience and will be “helpful to the jury.”

“You build up a store of knowledge and recognition,” the judge said of Murray’s ability to pick out the defendants when most could not. “You can’t necessarily specify what it is,” he said.

Collins’ defense attorney, Janice Bledsoe, had pelted Murray with questions about how he could identify her client from a few seconds of video of three men walking away from the Sav A Lot grocery store camera.

“Just that distinctive walk,” Murray said. “That’s it.”

Bledsoe became exasperated when Murray testified that he could spot Collins’ open-toed style of walking “without a shadow of a doubt” but couldn’t recall other specifics about Collins or his serial interactions with him.

Murray explained that his daughter is pigeon-toed and he has spent time talking to her doctor about it, so he is sensitive to the way people walk. When pressed, however, he was unable to identify the doctor.

McGaney’s defense attorney, Jason Silverstein, asked how Murray could identify McGaney from a momentary side-angle image, taken from a bank ATM camera. Murray stood fast, saying he could “absolutely” pick out McGaney from the image.

He said he felt “equally strong” about each identification.

Meanwhile, Donald Giblin, chief of the homicide division in the state’s attorney’s office, led Murray through questioning about how he was “very familiar” with both Collins’ gait and McGaney’s profile through hundreds of interactions with them over the course of recent years.

In his argument to Judge Ross, Giblin said the questions about Murray’s identification should go to its weight, not its admissibility.

“If the jury doesn’t want it, they can disregard it,” Giblin said.

Ross will hear two more DNA-related motions Wednesday, setting the stage for what is scheduled to be a days-long jury selection process starting Thursday.