MURDERED BY OKLAHOMA
Ken and Carmen Trentadue
3/1/07 - Alex Jones interviews:
Salt Lake City attorney Jesse Trentadue
AUDIO:
http://www.apfn.
New Links 9/21/07:
http://www.apfn.org/pdf/HAMMER_DECLARATION.pdf
http://www.apfn.org/pdf/LANGAN.pdf
http://www.apfn.org/pdf/MUELLER_LETTER.pdf
http://www.apfn.org/pdf/NICHOLS_DEC_WO.pdf
http://www.apfn.org/pdf/ORDER.pdf
21 Aug 1995 Oklahoma City,
OK
Kenneth Michael Trentadue is beaten to death in his cell at the Oklahoma City
Federal Transfer Center, where he is incarcerated for a minor parole violation.
The U.S. Bureau of Prisons tells his family that he hanged himself, but upon
inspection at the funeral, they discover injuries over his entire body.
Since August 21, 1995, Salt Lake City trial lawyer Jesse Trentadue has led a
small, relentless crusade against Janet Reno, the FBI and the United States
Department of Justice.
The quest is a family affair, and includes Trentadue's aging mother who has
handed out T-shirts on the steps of "Main Justice" in Washington, D.C. For four
years now, the family has doggedly searched for the truth about how family
member Kenneth Trentadue died while in federal custody. And now smoke blowing in
from the direction of Waco, Texas, where dozens of people met their death in a
standoff with Reno and the FBI, may spell more trouble for embattled Attorney
General Reno and her FBI director, Louis Freeh.
For the Trentadue family, their personal nightmare began in the early morning
hours of August 21, 1995, shortly after prison guards claimed to have found the
body of Kenneth Michael Trentadue hanging in a suicide proof cell in the new
"Federal Transportation Center" in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.
Kenneth Trentadue had been returned to federal custody there for a "parole
violation" hearing. According to family members who had contact with him hours
before he died, he was positive and upbeat about his chances for an early return
home.
Originally locked up for a bungled bank robbery, Trentadue was a model prisoner
while in custody. A slip-up had resulted in his return to jail, but family
members say he had made important changes in his life and had prospects for a
good future.
"He left a wife and new baby behind," says older brother Jesse. The family
describes Kenneth as a peaceful person, unless you pushed him into a corner. "He
was not the kind of man to back down from a fight," says older brother Jesse.
A recent twist in the Trentadue case coupled with newly discovered evidence in
the Branch Davidian cases, may well set the stage for explosive confrontations
in both the halls of Congress and federal courtrooms in October of this year.
While Congress prepares to peel back layers of FBI secrets, families of the dead
victims will be in federal court seeking once and for all to learn what the
Justice Department and the FBI are doing in secret behind their closed doors.
In the Trentadue case, older brother Jesse Trentadue says that from the very
beginning, Justice Department lawyers have lied about the existence of critical
evidence, including death scene pictures. Federal officials finally admitted
that photos existed only after a number of them were leaked to a writer for GQ
Magazine, Mary Fischer.
Though they admitted photos existed, Justice then they claimed they couldn't
find the negatives of the 35-millimeter snapshots taken of Cell 709A where
several prison guards have testified Trentadue's body was found hanging at 3 AM
on August 21, 1995.
Early-on, a literal "swearing contest" erupted between the prison guard who took
the pictures, and the FBI Special Agent he swore under oath he gave them to. The
agent testified that he never received them. After several years, the negatives
mysteriously reappeared in the Oklahoma City's FBI field office where another
Special Agent, Tommy Linn, says he found them in a stack of pictures of the
Oklahoma City's paramilitary FBI "SWAT" team.
The prison guard, Kenneth Freeman, has testified he used two different cameras
to film the cell at different times that morning.
In a deposition, Freeman said he took one set early in the morning of August 21,
1995, before sunrise. Later that morning he went back with his assistant Serena
Israel and took more pictures. In his testimony Freeman admitted "rearranging"
several items of evidence: a plastic knife and two plastic toothpaste tubes.
Freeman said he posed the evidence to better photograph the items.
The government now claims Trentadue used the plastic items to inflict deep
gashes in the right side of his neck before he supposedly fabricated a noose
from bed sheets and hanged himself in a cell which the architect who designed it
says is "suicide proof."
Earlier this year, Trentadue lawyers filed papers with the federal court in
Oklahoma City refuting the conclusions of experts hired by the Justice
Department to help defend it in the civil suit. Former Oklahoma City police
captain, and self-styled "blood spatter expert" Tom Bevel maintains that
Trentadue viciously beat himself to a bloody pulp and then hung himself. Other
experts, including Rudy Riet, and a Chicago homicide investigator disagree.
The House Judiciary Committee had previously assigned a veteran homicide
investigator, on loan from the Chicago Police Department, to investigate the
Trentadue case. The detective, in a telephone interview, said that Trentadue
"was clearly murdered." The investigation was derailed by the Clinton-Lewinsky
matter and never taken back up by the House committee.
It is a complex case to investigate. The alleged death scene, Cell 709A, was
completely "sanitized" shortly after 7 AM on August 21, 1995, after Oklahoma
State Medical Examiner staff were denied access to it. A "crime scene"
investigation was never accomplished on the cell and all sides to the
controversy agree that critical evidence was lost because of that. Since the
scene was never properly documented and vital evidence lost or destroyed, the
government and the Trentadue family have been at war over what the remaining
evidence actually proves.
And since the government is in control of virtually all the physical evidence in
the case, the Trentadue family has had to fight lengthy battles to gain even
limited access to the evidence. And when they do get access, inevitably it
causes problems for the U.S. government.
A person close to the Trentadue case said that one such problem the government
will soon face is in the nature of explaining how the strips of sheet that
supposedly formed a noose were "cut" into strips with either scissors or a
knife. Bureau of Prisons records indicate that Trentadue was held in the most
secure part of the facility. He was supposedly alone in a cell where there were
no sharp objects, certainly no scissors or knives.
A motion filed by the family revealed that forensic analysis of the sheet
strips, a number of which are still missing, precludes their having been ripped
by hand and confirms that they were cut.
If sheets are a problem, the photos are a nightmare for the government. In May,
1999, the government finally produced a set of twenty-nine glossy enlargements
of what they claim is the only roll of film ever shot at the scene. The Justice
Department stands on that claim despite the fact that government lawyers had
previously produced two separate "photo logs," and even the photographer,
Freeman, says otherwise.
"When we began to analyze the photos," said Trentadue, "we thought they had been
faked." Beside the 35-millimeter photos, the government also produced a series
of eight Polaroid pictures.
An experienced trial lawyer, Trentadue says he was immediately suspicious when
he was told the negatives could not be examined by Trentadue family lawyers and
their experts. Agents and lawyers from the Justice Department's Office of
Inspector showed Trentadue and his attorneys strips of negatives they claimed
constituted "a roll." When they handed over the prints, they also produced
several volumes of CD ROM's which supposedly contain digitized copies of the
negatives. The attorneys for Trentadue werre never allowed to touch the
negatives or closely examine them.
Despite that, a photographic expert presently employed by the U.S. Navy as an
image analyst, says the attempt by the FBI to fake the pictures is "an
amateurish result produced by professionals."
The pictures are a gory collection that begins with a sheet of paper with a
handwritten date on it. What follows are pictures of Kenneth Trentadue's body,
covered with blood. His knuckles are bruised. Huge patches of scalp are
bloodied. Government officials claim it's the result of him beating himself. His
neck bears a long gash on the right side. After the gruesome pictures shot in
the prison hospital, the scene switches to the cell where it is claimed he first
beat then hung himself. The cell has puddles of blood on the floor. A bloody
noose is tied at an impossible height off the floor to a grate that has not a
single drop of blood on it.
The analyst, speaking on condition of anonymity, examined the original prints at
the request of Arkansas Chronicle on his off-hours. After nearly two months of
comparing the prints, the digitized CD-ROMs, the testimony of the witnesses and
the actual photo logs, the expert eventually unraveled and explained the faked
photos.
He said his first resource was the Navy's own Naval Observatory. The observatory
keeps incredibly accurate records of sunrise times for every place on earth.
That includes Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, on the morning of August 21, 1995.
According to the National Weather Service, the weather was clear with a thin
haze in the air at sunrise, August 21, 1995. But, if the government's negatives
are to be believed, the sun rose and set at least twice that morning at the
Oklahoma City airport. If it did, nobody seemed to notice it.
"The sequence of exposure of the pictures is tracked by 'frame numbers' that
appear on the edge of the film. Even after the negatives are cut into strips and
placed in plastic sleeves, you can always tell which order they were shot in by
looking at the frame number just beneath the actual image," said the Navy
analyst. "Those frame numbers are put on the film by the manufacturer, not the
camera."
It is this "image sequence" that creates the most problems for the Justice
Department. When you take the pictures, in the sequence that the government
claims they are on the roll and compare it to the testimony, and, to other
pictures on the same roll, the Alice-in-Wonderland world of the government
defense to a murder case becomes shockingly apparent.
According to the negatives, the sun had risen an hour early, just in time for
prison guard Freeman to take his first picture of the cell. His camera, a
Minolta with a built-in flash, failed to flash on the first shot in the cell.
And through the vertical slit window at the back of the cell, you can see
daylight, trees and grass. "Another picture after that one shows a clearly
illuminated outdoor scene," said the expert. "Somehow, the sun set again.
Additional pictures, but with higher frame numbers, show total darkness outside
the very same window. There's just no way the sun was going up and down. It's
the pictures that are all wrong."
Pressed for an explanation as to how such images could be faked, the image
expert explained. He described the process whereby a computer with two
"peripherals," a negative scanner and a film output printer were used to
fabricate a roll of film that appears to be "original," but really isn't.
"What someone obviously has done is this: they had the two rolls of film all
along. And I would guess that there is surely something on one or both of those
rolls they don't want anyone to see. So, they simply used a common computer
tool, a 'negative scanner,' to import the negative images into a graphics
program.
"Once they have scanned in the images they can electronically reassemble them
into any sequence they want to. The original sequence of pictures can be
shuffled just like a deck of cards. Picture number one can become number eight,
and so on. The images can also be electronically altered, special effects
filters used, and information added or subtracted.
"Once the original negative is scanned in, the sky's the limit with a skilled
operator, and there are a bunch out there. But whoever did this job got into
trouble when the 'reassembled' the faked roll and forgot to take into
consideration the incredible documentation that exists on paper about who took
which pictures and when they took them. That's why they have some of the
pictures out of sequence with daylight where darkness should be, and vice-versa.
"After they had the fake roll assembled they merely issued a command to 'print'
the images to a new roll of film. There are printers that you can hook to your
computer, even at home, and create a whole new roll of film. The printer created
a 'perfect' roll of film that was conventionally processed using what is known
as a 'C-41' process. The negatives were then cut into strips and placed into the
plastic sleeves just like the originals," explained the imagery expert. "You
could take the bogus roll to the local Moto-Foto and have them developed and
printed, and nobody would be the wiser," he added.
Government lawyers also produced the faked negatives for copying onto CD-ROM's.
The analyst said that there are tell-tale "artifacts" on the digital imagery
that further confirms the negatives are "second generation," but would not offer
specific details on the methodology used to identify the fake photos. Arkansas
Chronicle was able to obtain a set of the CD-ROMs and have them analyzed at the
same time as the prints were analyzed.
The analyst said that the most damning piece of evidence is that one of the
pictures released earlier by government lawyers somehow does not appear on the
"roll" that the FBI produced. "It's sort of an obscure shot. But the point is,
the picture is not on the roll of their negatives, and without question, it was
indeed shot between two frames that I can absolutely identify on the roll they
released." Other evidence suggests, he said, that the roll they produced was in
fact shot from two different cameras with "two different lens systems."
"There is strong evidence to support a claim that several of the pictures were
altered, and, in once case, some photos were electronically cropped to make it
appear that one photo was in fact two different photos. The cycle time of a
Minolta camera, such as the one they used is too slow to create to images that
are otherwise so completely similar in intricate detail," said the analyst. "My
opinion is that they had a quota to fill . . . somebody said, 'here, fill up
this roll with pictures and don't use any of these shots to do it.' So they left
some pictures out, got many of the real pictures out of sequence, and then
doubled up on some of the pictures which were safe to use in order to try to
make up a full roll. The big problem is that the sequences are all wrong and
they don't coincide with the photo logs and they don't have any relation to the
light conditions outside the window of the prison cell."
One polaroid picture, supposedly shot at 4:30 a.m., has a picture of part of a
watch band on the hand of a man who has testified under oath that he didn't come
to work until at least 6:30 a.m. that date.
"I suppose that's why they have refused to let us have them tested by an
independent lab," said Trentadue.
"Since the case record would indicate that the FBI had custody of these
negatives for several years," said the imagery expert, "that's where I would be
looking in terms of identifying who manipulated this imagery. It took really
expensive equipment to produce these fakes and not a lot of people have it."
Contacted again shortly before press time, the expert would neither confirm nor
deny that he is one of two imagery experts now examining video tape of aerial
FBI infrared photography from Waco for a U.S. Congressional committee headed by
Rep. Dan Burton.
According to court records in the Trentadue case, the Department of Justice's
Office of Inspector General has indeed been investigating Bureau of Prisons and
Federal Bureau of Investigation agents for complicity in criminal misconduct in
the Trentadue case.
It was in the process of having the pictures and CD-ROM's examined that a
chilling allegation surfaced about the capabilities of the FBI's lab, especially
its ability to alter physical evidence such as photographs, video and audio
tape.
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May 2, 2001
$1.1 MILLION SETTLEMENT ORDERED IN TRENTADUE CASE
U.S. District Judge Tim Leonard ruled today that the family of Kenneth Michael Trentadue suffered severe emotional distress because of the insensitive action of federal prison officials and ordered $1.1 million paid in settlement of the law suit brought by them against the Federal Bureau of Prisons in 1997.
Federal and state investigators called the Aug. 21, 1995, death of Trentadue, 44, a suicide, but his family alleged prison guards or another inmate had killed him.
Although state Medical Examiner Fred Jordan initially ruled Ken Trentadue's cause of death as unknown, the injuries covering Ken’s body caused his family and others to suspect he had been beaten to death. Federal and state investigations subsequently determined the injuries were caused by a botched attempt to hang himself before succeeding on the second try. The cause of death was then amended to suicide.
In December, a federal jury found that Lt. Stuart A. Lee, a former officer at the Federal Transfer Center, was deliberately indifferent to Ken’s medical needs because when Ken was found hanging in his cell, Lee did not order guards to cut him down and attempt to revive him. Lee had said it was obvious Trentadue was already dead.
The jury awarded $20,000 in compensatory damages to the family in compensation for Lee’s deliberate indifference to Ken’s medical needs. Jurors decided only the case against Lee, the officer in charge the night Ken was found hanging.
The broader allegations against the federal government were be decided by the judge. Judge Leonard ruled Monday that the federal government was liable for the intentional infliction of emotional distress caused to Ken's wife and family.
Judge Leonard scolded prison officials for not informing the family of Ken's injuries or the fact that an autopsy had been performed. Ken’s family was shocked and outraged when they discovered the injuries after his body was shipped to them in California.
"Prison officials did not initially answer the Trentadue family's valid and understandable questions about the unexpected death of their loved one," the judge said. "Their silence and the mishandling of potential evidence from Trentadue's cell helped fuel conspiracy theories that the inmate was murdered."
Leonard did find however that Ken committed suicide, stating that allegations of a conspiracy by prison officials to cover up a murder was just speculation and that actions of prison officials were more consistent with ignorant or incompetent, rather than conspiratorial behavior.
Come on Judge Leonard – do these photos look like suicide to you? Do they look like suicide to ANYONE?
Oklahoma City attorney Scott Adams, who represented the Trentadue family, said he was very pleased the judge punished the prison officials for their actions.
"They stonewalled us from day one," Adams said. "They treated the family very horribly. You cannot treat people the way the government treated the Trentadue family." Adams said the judge was sending a message with his award of $1.1 million. http://www.geocities.com/prisonmurder/ken_trentadue.html
Judge ordered disclosure of info on informants that could shed light on Oklahoma City tragedy
http://www.apfn.org/apfn/OKC_UPDATE2.htm
Officials had prior knowledge of bombing
http://www.apfn.org/apfn/OKC_update.htm
WHO KILLED TERRY YEAKEY?
http://www.apfn.org/apfn/yeakey.htm
[APFN] The Terrance (Terry) Yeakey Incident
Terrance (Terry) Yeakey was a courageous young black
Oklahoma City police officer who was on duty near the
Murrah Building the morning of that building's bombing.
Officer Yeakey entered the bombed out Murrah building
and saw things that apparently caused him to be murdered.
The hideous details are within these audio tapes, an interview
with Terrance Yeakey's wife:
(Real Player)
Part 1
http://www.apfn.org/audio/tyeakey1.rm
Part 2
http://www.apfn.org/audio/tyeakey2.rm
Oklahoma City Bombing Cover-Up
http://www.apfn.org/apfn/okc_coverup.htm
"John Doe #2 Identified: But Can We Get
The FBI To Arrest Him?"
http://www.xld.com/public/jdt/jdindx1.htm
Just click "search" for more information on OKC Bombing:
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