The Other Way Around

Suppose it had been the other way around.

Suppose Maura Murray had been hit by a car on Triangle Street in Amherst and left hospitalized in critical condition, barely clinging to life for days or weeks.

Suppose Petrit Vasi’s car was found a few days later, abandoned in NH, with unexplained body damage that was very likely sustained before he mysteriously left Amherst in a hurry.

And suppose Petrit Vasi’s car had been discovered in NH before Amherst police had found even their first lead in their investigation of the hit-and-run of Maura Murray.

Would Amherst police then have dropped the investigation into the hit-and-run of an all-American white woman so fast?

Would Amherst police then not have immediately requested from NH authorities a more vigorous search for this non-resident suspect?

Would NH police then not have looked east on Rt. 112 for Vasi?

Would Amherst (and possibly UMass) detectives themselves then not have shown up in Haverhill NH – say, on Tuesday morning?

Would Amherst police then not have tried to get the FBI more involved?

Would Petrit Vasi have ever, after crashing his mother’s Corolla into a Hadley guardrail while drunk, been allowed to leave the scene un-arrested?

Would the New Hampshire League of Investigators ever have investigated the mysterious disappearance of a missing, non-resident, male UMass student?

Would the New Hampshire League of Investigators ever have given psychic/medium Maureen Hancock an award for her assistance in the disappearance of Petrit Vasi?

Would the disappearance of Petrit Vasi ever have ignited hundreds of thousands of posts and comments all across Social Media for thirteen years?

Would online curiosity about the possible connection between the hit-and-run of Maura Murray and the subsequent disappearance of Petrit Vasi have met such desperate resistance?

Would Social Media have ever paid even scant attention to the disappearance of Petrit Vasi?

Would the disappearance of Petrit Vasi have ever been granted even a tiny fraction of the same publicity, the same attention, that has been given to Maura Murray’s disappearance for thirteen years?


If it had been the other way around, if Maura Murray had been struck by an unknown driver and Petrit Vasi had disappeared a few days later, his car found abandoned in NH, then you can bet the case would have been investigated very, very differently right from the start, when it counted most.

If it had been the other way around, police would never have been able to cleverly turn the hit-and-run case of a male immigrant UMass student into an instance of Missing White Woman Syndrome.

Had police pursued Maura Murray right away, exactly as they would have pursued Petrit Vasi if their identities were reversed, then everything might now be quite different indeed.

Although it may be way too late to find out who hit Petrit Vasi and what really happened to Maura Murray, it is not too late to hold Massachusetts police accountable for their own failure in the hours immediately following the disappearance of Maura Murray.

If anyone wants to point a finger at the negligence of law enforcement, point it at the police departments of Amherst, UMass, and Hadley Massachusetts – for allowing rampant bigotry to throttle what could have been an impartial, and therefore successful, investigation.

And, not so incidentally, for their failure to inform New Hampshire State Police of the true reason Maura Murray was allowed to leave the Hadley Corolla crash un-arrested.

Chief Michael R. Kent, QAnon, and the Alt-right

Re-tweet by Chief Michael Kent, Burlington MA Police Department

Mike Kent left the Amherst Police Department as a captain in 2010 to become chief of the Burlington MA Police Department. He was, just prior to his departure from Amherst, a contender for the APD chief's job, which went to Scott Livingstone. 

I think at one point Kent more or less oversaw (in much the same way Jennifer Gundersen has) the 2004 Petrit Vasi hit-and-run investigation. Kent may not have actively investigated the case himself, but he was at least quite familiar with it.

Usually, I'm wary of reading too much into a re-tweet like the one above, which seems relatively innocuous at first glance, but I don't think it's out of bounds to question Kent's (and by extension, Amherst PD's) impartiality when it comes to handling cases in which the victim is a refugee or immigrant - like Petrit Vasi.

There are, after all, many other comparisons Kent could have used or re-tweeted in order to champion more funds for homeless vets.

Why, in this re-tweet, are refugees represented as a threat to homeless veterans? Why not say that the cost of subsidizing a farmer, for example, could go toward housing a homeless vet? Why not provide a whole range of government expenditures that could be cut in order to help homeless vets? 

Why the either/or, oppositional construction of the statement? Why refugess v. veterans?

Doesn’t the original tweet contend that by accepting refugees – specifically refugees - we are therefore turning away homeless vets?

Isn’t Kent maliciously spreading the fake notion that refugees are preventing the U.S. government from helping homeless vets? 

Isn’t Kent, even in a re-tweet, using homeless vets as a way to dump on (mostly Muslim) refugees?

Didn't Kent merely use homeless vets as a way of saying refugees are unwelcome - which is simply code for outright bigotry and ethnic prejudice?

It represents a racist false equivalency, similar to this recent instance at the Hadley Police Department.


What did Kent mean when he said, as reported by the Burlington Patch, that Burlington was a "very patriotic town?" As opposed to what? Other towns are not patriotic? Nearby Lowell, for example, with its Cambodian population? Sanctuary cities?

What kind of message does Kent's re-tweet convey? What kind of action do statements like Kent's inspire? What kind of illegal acts are given a wink and a nod when a police chief re-tweets #PodestaEmails, which led to the gunfire of PizzaGate? Or more things, like this vandalism at Burlington's Islamic Center? Or even worse?

Vandalism at Islamic Center, Burlington MA. Patriotic vandalism?

I have to think Kent is all too aware of exactly what he re-tweeted, that he deliberately spread the coded hatred and racial prejudice of the alt-right; that he's deliberately using his position as a police chief to bad-mouth refugees.

What about refugees from the Balkans, many of whom were Muslim? How did they fit into Kent's world-view back in early 2004 when he was at Amherst Police Department, when Petrit Vasi was struck by a hit-and-run driver? Less than one year after the U.S. invaded Iraq? When xenophobic war fever was running high indeed?

It should also be noted that the Podesta-emails hashtag in Kent's re-tweet was prominently related to the alt-right's utterly false, fake-news conspiracy theory about a (Hillary and Bill) Clinton orchestrated pedophile ring located at a pizza shop in Washington DC known as PizzaGate which, according to police, Edgar Maddison Welch "self-investigated" with a rifle - a rifle he discharged twice inside the restaurant. Over past couple of years, it has come be known as QAnon or Q. This is a totally false belief system that apparently Mike Kent - a police chief! - believes in.

UPDATE: Here's a short paragraph from a 02 August 2018 NBC News piece about what #PodestaEmails really means, including its connection to the more recent, and very disturbing, Qanon phenomenon: 

In December 2016, Edgar M. Welch entered a Washington, D.C., pizza parlor and demanded access to a basement that did not exist. He believed the restaurant was part of a child sex ring, a conspiracy known as Pizzagate. Conspiracy theorists on Reddit and 4chan posted that readers could uncover a child sex ring in the hacked emails of John Podesta — if only one were to replace words like “pizza” with “little girl.”

Is this what a police chief should be publicly connecting himself to?

So, why Kent's re-tweet? The two hashtags are clearly alt-right stuff, which absolutely no police chief should ever associate him/herself with. Not in these times. Not in any times.

If Kent thinks this kind of attitude, as exemplified in his re-tweet, is helpful in serving the immigrant or refugee community of Burlington - and especially the Muslim community - he is very, very wrong. It serves no community of any kind well at all.

And if Kent thinks his re-tweet of alt-right crap won’t be perceived as having interfered with the impartial investigation of crimes when he was at Amherst – cases in which the victim was not an all-American white person – then he is still very, very wrong.

But Kent is not the only one who seems to have aligned himself with the alt-right. A surprisingly high percentage of both licensed or sworn investigators and posters in the online conversation about Maura Murray’s disappearance also identify closely with the alt-right.

With investigators like these on the case, little wonder the Vasi hit-and-run was quickly transformed into an early version of Missing White Woman Syndrome - complete with malicious lies whispered by police to their naive Social Media mouthpieces.

Surprises me how many leading Maura Murray "investigators," of various kinds, sworn and not, share the same view as that expressed by Healy (a retired NH State Police lieutenant) in the above screen-shots.

Added 04 November 2018: And then there's this anti-Semitic meme tweeted by a gun-toting conspiracy theorist and so-called citizen detective in the Maura Murray case. (Who, like so many others, was once a police officer.)

Added 20 April 2019:

This is very saddening, but it's become abundantly clear to me that the comment below is the latest retaliation by the general law enforcement (LE) community and their affiliates, formal and informal, active and retired, for the above post and others like it that have appeared on both this blog and on its sister blog. LE would be hard pressed to explain it otherwise. They've been invited several times to try, but have always declined.

Lt John Scarinza: Out of the Loop?

From James Renner's blog, 08 January 2012

Almost eight years after Petrit Vasi was hit, Lt. John Scarinza - now retired, but the original New Hampshire State Police lead investigator on the Maura Murray case - still was not told why Maura wasn't arrested for drunk driving at the scene of the Hadley Corolla crash?

Isn't that what Scarinza is saying? That he, Scarinza, knew about the Corolla crash, that he had every reason to believe Maura could have been arrested for OUI but mysteriously wasn't, and, for some reason, NHSP was never told why?

Isn't that what Scarinza is really telling Renner here? That NHSP was kept in the dark by Hadley/UMass/Amherst police? That he knows someone intervened at the Corolla crash, but NHSP was never told why?

Scarinza is no rookie, and no dummy. He knows everything about talking to journalists. Has for years.

So, was withholding information like this from NHSP, the agency most responsible for finding Maura Murray, some kind of new technique used by Amherst police to investigate the Vasi hit-and-run? Just dump it in New Hampshire's lap and hope Maura magically returns?

How did a potential fugitive from Massachusetts - in one day! - turn into a missing person in New Hampshire?

How, exactly, did the Vasi investigation so quickly morph into yet another example of Missing White Woman Syndrome?

Amherst Police Department's Notes

Amherst PD's release of notes filed by detectives - notes pertaining to the Petrit Vasi hit-and-run - stops on the afternoon Maura Murray is believed to have disappeared.

Amherst PD was, of course, not required by state public records law to release any other notes about the Vasi case if their release might compromise further investigation. In other words, the records released by Amherst PD do not necessarily represent the entire case file, and therefore do not provide a full picture of the Vasi investigation.

With that in mind, however...

It seems safe to assume that on Monday night, 09 February 2004, Haverhill police contacted UMass police in order to discover in whose name the Saturn's UMass parking sticker was issued.

And safe to assume UMass police, in turn, contacted Amherst police about the Saturn. After all, UMass police knew about the Vasi hit. And about Maura's Corolla crash (because UMass, in addition to Hadley, had responded).

In fact, it seems likely Maura was not arrested for OUI at the scene of the Corolla crash because a UMass cop had intervened on her behalf; which must have been learned by Amherst PD when UMass police told Amherst police about the Saturn's NH location.

Did Amherst police just ignore the fact that a UMass student's car, a car with unexplained body damage, was found mysteriously abandoned in NH a few days after Vasi was hit? Presumably not. No surprise then that there's not a single note in the released portion of the Vasi case file about this.

There's also no note in the released file about police examination of the Corolla. If the Corolla crash was such an isolated, irrelevant event, why did police examine the Corolla so closely after learning that the Saturn was found in NH? The only connection is that both vehicles appeared to have been driven by the same person, Maura Murray, a fact initially known only to UMass police.

On a side note, one might wonder why Lt. John Scarinza (NHSP) was baffled by the fact that Maura was not arrested as a result of her having crashed the Corolla in Hadley. Wasn't he told why?

If Amherst police were investigating the Vasi case, which they were, then why look at the Corolla as part of that investigation? The leading explanation, one would think, is that the Saturn was customarily driven by the same person who had crashed the Corolla, Maura. (Both cars were registered to Maura's father.) If there had been no news about the Saturn from NH, would there still have been as strong a reason, or any reason at all, to examine the Corolla?

In other words, police, investigating the Vasi hit, would not have taken any interest in the Corolla if they had not first been interested in Maura as a possible suspect in the Vasi hit - interested because the Saturn, with a UMass parking sticker, was found in NH, found with body damage that had not been sustained nearby, driven there by a driver who had apparently fled.

Since the Corolla damage had already been accounted for by Hadley police as ordinary operator "inattention," the only reason it was so closely examined after the Saturn was found must have been due to police interest in Maura as the person who had struck Vasi - interest inspired by the Saturn's discovery.

So... The Vasi investigation notes - that is, the notes that were released - end at mid-afternoon on Monday. And then Maura disappears. And then the Saturn is found a few hours later in NH.

And that's it? Amherst detectives just stopped investigating the Vasi hit right around the time Maura apparently left UMass? They stopped investigating right after a UMass student's car, with unexplained body damage, was found mysteriously abandoned in NH? While Vasi lay in a coma, on the verge of death?

Seems there are a lot of things police didn't do after the Saturn was found. But one thing police did do was look closely at the Corolla. 

How odd that my backyard was lightly vandalized just hours after my having written on Topix in 2008 about this very same police interest in the Corolla. I mean, who would do such a thing? Not LE, right?

Although this narrative was filed on Tuesday, 10 FEB, the interview itself took place the day before.

Petrit Vasi: Non-resident

Is this why Amherst Police Department has dragged its feet for 13 years now? Because UMass student Petrit Vasi was a non-resident? An immigrant? A refugee? From the Balkans? Was he Muslim, too?

A witness statement claims 5-6 cops were with Vasi when he was in front of Bart's, minutes before he was struck down and left for dead on Triangle Street. That's a lot of cops for one drunk student on a Thursday night.

Seems like Vasi took off down Kellogg Street. If so, why go in that direction, away from campus? Pretty unlikely he knew anyone on Kellogg, Smith, or Triangle Streets; not exactly a student kind of place. Was he fleeing from someone? Did someone try to catch up to him or chase him into the road? Did this person see Vasi get hit? Could he identify the car? The plate number? 

UMPD's cadet program (remember the UMPD cadet mentioned in the podcast?) was modeled on the Amherst Police Department's cadet program (since ended). Were one or two of these "cops" actually cadets? 

Once again, Amherst Police Department is fully aware of the sensational nature of the Maura Murray disappearance.

Amherst PD could easily issue a statement saying that there is no connection between the Vasi hit and Maura Murray's disappearance. Why hasn't Capt. Ronald Young, Capt. Jennifer Gundersen, or Chief Scott Livingstone done so? Other departments issue statements like this all the time. Unless there's some reason not to.

Maura Murray's Missing Semester(s)

Maura Murray, according to many reports, graduated from high school in 2000, after which she entered the United States Military Academy - West Point - as a first-year student.

Which would have put her on track to graduate from USMA in the spring of 2004.

But at some point she apparently transferred from USMA to the University of Massachusetts.

However, she is consistently reported as having been a junior at the time of her disappearance in February 2004.

FROM UMASS DAILY COLLEGIAN 17 FEBRUARY 2004

Had she remained on track at West Point, February 2004 would have been her last semester there. Was she, when she vanished, a first-semester junior or a second-semester junior at UMass?

Did she take a year off? A semester off? Or did she have to repeat some time at UMass following her transfer? One semester or two? At UMass or another school? Was she ever a part-time, "night school" student somewhere?

Or did she take time off for some reason unrelated to her education?

Or was she in her final semester, soon to graduate, and various news reports kept getting it wrong?

Possibly related to this time-gap question is the You Tube video in which her father appears.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kM43tpDMrCg

At about the 00:50 mark, Maura's father says, "Things were... were really looking up for her."

I wonder what he meant. Was there a time when things were looking bleak? If so, is this related to the rarely or never-discussed missing semester(s)? And/or her ultimate fate?

This missing/repeated time during her years of higher education may not be a hugely important issue, but it seems to be one of several events oddly missing from the discussion of her disappearance. (Ditto the 12:07 to 12:14 phone call on Thursday night, for example; as mentioned here:

http://crypticcop.blogspot.com/2016/05/800-pm-to-1200-am-on-weekdays.html)


It might be helpful to know whether Maura's transfer from USMA was seamless or whether there was a break in time during which she was not a student at either USMA or UMass.

Or it might be totally irrelevant.

This omission is hard to understand. After all, it's a pretty simple, straightforward question. 

Why have no "citizen detectives" asked about this?

Did Maura Murray Leave Work at Midnight?

According to a very highly placed source within the UMass administration, there is no indication, despite an exhaustive records search, that Maura Murray worked past midnight on the night of Thursday, 05 February 2004. 

Perhaps Maura did in fact work beyond midnight, as some have claimed, but there seems to be, at least at present, no indication of this in UMass records.

So far as I can find, the only written statement about security desk hours is contained in Clery Act Security Reports, which indicate that dorm security ended at midnight on Thursdays. 

According to a blog post by James Renner, Maura was on her cell phone, talking with her boyfriend a few minutes after midnight, from approximately 12:07 am to 12:14 am. The time of this call is, it would seem, consistent with Maura’s having clocked out of work at midnight.

But if Maura had been allowed by a supervisor to leave work briefly, and if she had struck Vasi while on that break, then UMass would be financially liable. For a real lot of money. Not to mention how much trouble the supervisor would have been in.

So if Maura struck Vasi, a whole lot rides on whether or not she was on the clock.

Maura's actual shift Thursday night is just one example of the many little things that the so-called "hive mind," and every single so-called citizen detective, has overlooked. 

Comments by Melissa House

Three comments, seen below as two JPEG images, were submitted a little past midnight (EST) on or near 12 December 2013 to James Renner's now-archived or deleted blog.

Below is a screen-shot of a reader's comment that appeared on the "Not Without Peril" blog, apparently posted at nearly the same time as the above comments on Renner's blog; certainly within a day. Because the screen-shot is very difficult to read, a transcript appears below it.

TRANSCRIPT OF ABOVE SCREEN-SHOT:

heyjude32 says:

December 12, 2013 at 1:38 AM
I live next door to Alden , Hadley Housing Authority . State Trooper investigators came to my door , around August 18-22,2013 . Now I find out why , and you think that when I ask them if he is dangerous or violent , is my right to know ??? I told them about my wall , and the stench of ”death” for months that made me ill . Alden had a note on his front door , telling anyone if they need access to the basement to use someone else’s apt. to go through . I have reported him to DHCD , and called the police tonight , none of them have done anything . This man has a criminal history , then he never should have been approved for an apt. rent -free courtesy tax-payers are us . I knew someting was off with him . He tried to romance me , and God was looking out for me because I gave him a big REJECT . Neighbors joked that maybe the odor is his ex -wife through the walls . Maybe he killed her , while up there in Greenfield Wow , state-subsidized housing , filled with criminals & violent offenders !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! That’s Hadley for you . DHCD & Hadley Housing want these scum to run the show around here , takes the focus off of them lazy garbage . Police , what a waste of tax money . Safety is the farthest priority . Deranged lunatics residing here and they get the full package . Alden complained about not being able to find a job , he said it was age discrimination . Either they cori’d him and turned a blind eye , or didn’t bother at all . Either way , I want to sue for life endangerment . I live in between to maniacs , the other jerk beat my pumpkin in after beating another tennat’s skull down .

******************************

About two months after the above comments were submitted, a couple of guys parked squarely in front of my apartment, right at the end of my walkway, making no secret of their presence.

They had apparently come to talk with my next-door neighbor, Melissa House - on 09 February 2014, no less, from roughly 11:17 AM to 1:31 PM. 

Friends, detectives, or journalists of some kind? Hard to tell which for sure, but given the extreme infrequency of visitors to any of the four residents of the building, it seems only natural to wonder whether it was related to the posts about me by someone who, in all likelihood, was my neighbor. 

Stupid, stupid me, but I never photographed these two guys themselves, only the vehicle when it was unoccupied.

Later, after I became more familiar with who Tim Pilleri and Lance Reenstierna were, I thought maybe it was they, but according to Tim, apparently not.

I did manage to photograph their vehicle. So, there's that at least.

Sounds like if you say anything online, you'll be

investigated.

Lesson from Hadley Police

A while back, Hadley MA police officer Doug Costa taught me a valuable lesson about how the law actually works.

A half-dozen or so of the residents at Senior Housing regularly play their TVs, radios, or stereos much louder than allowed by law.

Late one night, one of my neighbors was playing his/her stereo fairly loud, as was his/her frequent habit. Since I enjoy music myself, I figured it would be okay for me, too, like s/he and the other residents, to play my own music a little on the loud side.

My neighbor turned his/her stereo off and then complained to the Hadley police about the music coming from my apartment.

Doug Costa showed up, said I was violating the town’s anti-noise by-law, and gave me a verbal warning, which is routine policy for first offenses. Second offense, you get arrested.

I asked Costa whether I could complain about my neighbor’s consistently loud music just as s/he had complained about mine. Costa said my complaint would be regarded as retaliation. In other words, in their eyes I would be using police to harass my neighbor and therefore I would be guilty of criminal harassment. 

The result of this is that my neighbor was then free to play his/her music or TV or radio as loud and as long at any hour of the day or night s/he pleased, comfortable in the knowledge that if I complained about it, I, not s/he, could get arrested. 

The logic used by law enforcement (LE) – and by victim-advocate groups with which LE often works closely - goes like this:

 - Person A creates, legally or illegally, one or more problems for Person B. 

 - Person B then is regarded by LE as potentially dangerous because it is assumed by LE that person B may retaliate against Person A. 

As this example, using only an anti-noise by-law, shows, an attempt by Person B to see the law applied equally and impartially to Person A can immediately become regarded by LE as a form of criminal harassment of Person A by Person B.

Nice trick. But that’s the upside down world in which we now live. Sure am glad I'm not Petrit Vasi.

Maura Murray's Work Hours

FROM UMPD 2007 SECURITY REPORT

As far as I know, this is the closest thing online to an independently verifiable statement from UMass itself about the hours security personnel might have worked in 2004.

Certainly, it's possible that the security hours were decreased two or three years after 2004 - possible, but seems doubtful.

Just so there's no confusion... It should be noted that "weekdays" always refers to five consecutive days, almost always Monday through Friday. Weekends, on the other hand, always refers, except in the case of holidays, to two consecutive days, almost always Saturday and Sunday.

If, for some odd reason, Thursday was, for the purpose of this security report, deemed a weekend night, then Saturday night would have been a week night, which seems pretty unlikely.

I think Friday and Saturday nights, in the ordinary sense, were the nights to which UMPD referred. These are obviously the nights of heaviest traffic and partying/drinking, hence the need for later security desk hours.

Here is the current (2016) schedule of security desk hours directly from UMPD's own website:

https://www.umass.edu/umpd/residence-hall-security

So... perhaps the hours of the security staff were different two or three years before the 2007 security report was written, but they are obviously the same today, in 2016, as they were in 2007.

If, however, the hours were the same in 2004 as they were in 2007, then it looks to me like Maura Murray left work around midnight, and then, according to the phone bill supplied by James Renner,

http://mauramurray.blogspot.com/2015/11/phone-records-provide-alibi-for-bill.html

she talked to her boyfriend between 12:07 AM and 12:14 AM.

Petrit Vasi, by the way, was found lying unconscious in Triangle Street at 12:20 AM. Although Triangle Street is not heavily traveled at that hour, it's not lightly traveled then either. 

Vasi would not have lain in the street very long unnoticed. Triangle Street is probably the most popular route between Main/College Streets/Belchertown Road and UMass. It's also the straightest shot between UMass and the ever-popular Bruno's Pizza, at the intersection of Triangle and Main Streets. 

Here's a video of what it's like to drive up Triangle Street from Main Street to the location of the Vasi hit.

All this raises some interesting questions.

Why, for example, has there been constant insistence for thirteen years that Maura could not possibly have left her desk at Melville, driven to Triangle and Mattoon, and returned to Melville without having been detected? What's to detect if she got out of work at midnight?

Why has there been - from various quarters, I might add - this years-long insistence that Maura could not possibly have hit Vasi despite the ready availability of these documents?

Why has no one ever referenced these documents, even if only to claim that the documents are incorrect? They're not exactly hard to find.

Why has there been, for thirteen years, no effort to substantiate the actual hours of Maura's shift, especially in light of easily found documents that indicate the strong possibility that she clocked out at midnight?

Where has the highly touted "hive-mind" been all this time? Where have all the so-called citizen detectives been hiding? Isn't this an issue they should have addressed long ago? Why aren't the "citizen detectives" on the case very interested in details like this?

Sure, it's entirely possible Maura did not hit Vasi. But why keep insisting it’s 99.99 percent impossible when it’s obviously very possible?

Another thing. While Maura’s father, Fred, has vigorously sought records from NH authorities, he has, to my knowledge, been completely uninterested in any records from MA.

Wouldn’t learning something, anything, about the Vasi hit be, potentially, a huge help in figuring out what happened to Maura?

The 12:07 phone call also raises another question. Regardless of whether or not Maura worked past midnight, her boyfriend has never said something like, "Maura could not have hit Vasi because I was on the phone with her..." Wouldn't this be something worth pointing out?

As far as I know, he’s never said a word about this phone call; this despite the fact that the phone bill has been around for more than a dozen years and seems to have been provided to Renner relatively recently. Somebody must have noticed this - a long time ago, I would think.

In fact, I don't think the boyfriend has ever said anything at all about Maura's schedule. But here we have a phone record, supplied by James Renner, that indicates Maura and her boyfriend were talking just after she likely left work, which would be a pretty normal time to talk with a significant other.

I gotta ask. If Maura hit Vasi, was she talking on the phone with her boyfriend when it happened? If so, what does that mean? Seems like it could mean a lot.

There has been a general assumption that Maura either was, or should ordinarily have been, on duty in Melville until at least 2:00 AM, despite fairly strong indications that her hours on Thursday night might have ended at midnight. 

Regardless of what her scheduled hours actually were, it seems that virtually no one was interested - for years - in nailing down Maura's actual work hours; which, by itself, seems to say a lot, too.

Was Maura Murray Pregnant

Not sure what the likelihood is of getting pregnant while using birth control pills. 

If Police...

1. If police failed to take a highly inebriated Petrit Vasi into protective custody right before he was struck, almost fatally, by a hit-and-run driver...

2. If a deliberately unidentified UMass/UMPD police cadet - a cadet who knew and worked with Maura Murray, and perhaps was a friend of hers - was at the Corolla crash while on duty...

3. If a UMass police officer, accompanied by the cadet, persuaded the responding Hadley officer at the Corolla crash to uncharacteristically allow a drunk Maura Murray to leave the scene un-arrested...

4. If Maura Murray's appearance following the Saturn crash - especially if she had sustained facial injuries from the Corolla crash - was described in terms so vague that no one would recognize her...

5. If police have not, after 12 years, released the ATM video...

6. If police never questioned anyone at the Hadley motel...

7. If police did not call the owner of the Bartlett NH condo...

8. If police never interviewed Maura’s residential security supervisor, with whom both the UMPD cadet and Sgt. Jeffrey Skinner were presumably well acquainted...

9. If police have never revealed that the Saturn was damaged before it left MA...

10. If police disregarded the obvious implication of the vandalism to my backyard...

11. If police – led by Skinner, a former co-worker of Maura’s who subsequently became a UMass police officer – aggressively tried to suppress questions about the Saturn’s possible parking location at UMass... 

12. If police vigorously resisted requests to release any information about the Vasi hit...

13. If police still will not unambiguously state whether there is any connection between the Vasi hit and Maura Murray's subsequent disappearance...

14. If police showed no interest in what BSG had to say...

15. And, oh yeah, if police never showed the slightest interest in the two videos...

Then just maybe LE had a pretty good idea early on who hit Petrit Vasi and why Maura Murray disappeared. But no effort by Amherst PD to find Maura? 

Watching the Maura Murray Detectives

Do I have this right? Lance Reenstierna and Tim Pilleri use "KF" to investigate people in the online community? Like who?

UMPD Serves No-trespass Order

Here's the link for a very boring video (no sound was recorded) of UMPD Officer Jeffrey Skinner serving me a no-trespass order in 2008. Skinner refused to tell me the reason behind the order. For more details about it, please see the previous post in this blog, "Another Message?"

The last minute or so supports my claim of the vandalism to which I referred in the post "A Message."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y00tYliCwD8&feature=youtu.be

Another Message?

During the summer of 2008, not long after the vandalism incident, I visited the Southwest (SW) residential area of UMass to get the overall lay of the land.

Kennedy Hall (dorm), where Maura lived, and nearby Melville Hall (dorm), where Maura worked a security assignment, are part of the SW residential area.

After looking around a little, I noticed a UMass cop on bicycle patrol.

I showed the officer, Jeffrey Skinner, a folded-over photo of the Saturn, revealing only the UMass parking sticker on the left rear passenger window. I said nothing to Skinner about Maura Murray or the car’s identity. I asked him to what lot the vehicle had been assigned. He said the permit was for Lot 12.

I also asked him whether students and/or the general public were usually allowed to park within most of the SW cluster itself after business hours – IOW, evenings, overnights, weekends, holidays, etc. – regardless of the parking lot to which they were assigned, if any.

At this point, Skinner appeared evasive and defensive. He seemed clearly disinclined to answer the question.

A couple of days later, Skinner, to my complete astonishment, appeared at my home with a no-trespass order for me.

Officer Skinner, his right foot on doorstep, about to serve the no-trespass order. 

I asked Skinner why he was serving it. There had been no problem when I politely talked to him only a couple of days earlier. Why not just tell me what was going on?

But Skinner refused to answer my question, saying only that the order reflected his professional judgment. Beyond that, he refused to specify. But the order was clearly Skinner’s idea.

It’s hard to believe Skinner, and whoever else may have approved the order, barred me from the UMass campus merely because I had asked a couple of questions about parking regulations and a long-expired parking permit.

Why, I wondered, had Skinner sought to ban specifically me from UMass? Were other campus visitors with an interest in the case treated to no-trespass orders, too? Or was I on some kind of watch list? And, just as important, why was the reason a secret? How often are people given no-trespass orders but not told why? I was totally baffled.
  
Between BSG and Skinner, the Saturn suddenly seemed a far more sensitive concern than I had previously realized.

If the no-trespass order followed hard on the heels of the vandalism, which it did, was it, too, related to what I had recently written on Topix?

Little did I know, when I asked him about the parking sticker, that Skinner, a UMass alum, had worked in residential security with Maura while they were both students.

In other words, Maura Murray, Jeffrey Skinner, and the unidentified cadet mentioned in the Missing Maura Murray podcast (Ep. 22, 24:55) must have known one another, maybe quite well. After all, they worked together.


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Yet one more message? Hard to believe otherwise when it was tacitly approved by Northwestern District Attorney's Office (Northampton MA).

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Added 22 October 2017: Just before Skinner showed up, a man and a woman, traveling in a red pickup truck, parked it down the street a couple of houses. They walked fast or nearly ran up my driveway. They went around the side of the house and into my backyard near where the vandalism had occurred, then they left as quickly as they had come. The woman wore a head scarf, the old fashioned handkerchief type. At the time, I thought they were simply looking for a missing dog.