Opinion ID: 2625875
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 7

Heading: The Bubble Shield and Helmet Liner

Text: While driving from another part of Pasadena to the crime scene around 12:40 p.m., Pasadena Police Officer John Krayniak noticed a bubble shield from a motorcycle helmet and a cloth hood or liner lying in the street near the intersection of Mountain Street and Mar Vista Avenue. When he arrived at the pharmacy, a sergeant told him to go back and retrieve the items. Krayniak and his partners located the shield and liner about 50 feet from where they had previously seen them. Krayniak put them each in a brown paper bag and returned to the pharmacy, where he gave the bags to investigator David Harris. He did not take the shield to the courthouse at any time that day. On cross-examination, Officer Krayniak testified that later on the day of the killing, he helped prepare an affidavit for a search warrant and reviewed it before it was presented to the judge. The affidavit, signed by investigator Harris, stated that Krayniak had brought the bubble shield to the police department, where Harris examined it. Krayniak testified, however, that that statement was erroneous; he gave Harris the shield at the pharmacy, not at the police department. Investigator Harris testified he received the bubble shield and liner from Officer Krayniak at the pharmacy about 2:30 p.m. He took the shield back to police headquarters shortly after 3:45 p.m. and gave it to Joseph Downs, a police fingerprint technician. Downs confirmed that Harris had given him the shield, in a brown paper bag, at 3:30 or 3:45 p.m. Downs found that a latent fingerprint lifted from the inside of the shield matched an exemplar of defendant's left middle finger. The identification was verified by fingerprint experts for the Los Angeles County Sheriffs Department and the Los Angeles Police Department. The bubble shield, which was designed to snap onto a helmet, had small amounts of blue paint on its snaps. Pasadena Police Officer John Knebel, who had arrested defendant on unrelated charges in May 1980, testified that at that time defendant was wearing a motorcycle helmet whose blue color matched that on the shield snaps. Pat Booker, who had been living with defendant for several years in the period before the crime, testified that defendant had owned a motorcycle and a helmet with a bubble shield attached, and that he had at some point spray painted the helmet, as well as the motorcycle gas tank, blue. The painting was done outside the rear stairwell of their apartment building, near a metal post set in concrete. The top of the post was covered in blue paint, which Officer Knebel testified was similar to the color of the helmet defendant was wearing when arrested in May 1980. Stephan Schliebe, a criminalist, compared the blue paint specks found on the bubble shield snaps with the blue paint on the metal post from defendant's apartment building. From microscopic examination and spectroscopic testing, Schliebe concluded the two paints had similar physical and chemical properties and could have come from the same source.