March 28--Minutes before he was killed by a blow to the head on Feb. 18, Berkeley resident Peter Cukor asked police to get to his house right away because a man he described as acting strangely wanted to get inside, according to a draft transcript of his call to police.
"He says he lives here. He wants to come in, which is very strange. He is looking for someone named Zoey. He is pretty spacey," Cukor, 67, told a dispatcher on a call to a nonemergency police line at 8:45 p.m., the transcript shows.
"I'd like an officer up right here away," the draft says, apparently in error of the sequence of words, although it's unclear if the sentence was transcribed incorrectly.
The transcript, released under a Public Records
Act request, seems to contradict police statements that Cukor did not sound urgent in his initial call to report an intruder on his property. Berkeley police did not respond to the first call because officers were monitoring an Occupy protest heading into the city and had been instructed to respond only to emergencies in progress.
"We'll try and get somebody out as soon as we can," a dispatcher replied to Cukor, who responded, "Thank you."
Soon after the call, Cukor walked to a nearby firehouse for assistance, but the firefighters were out on a service call. Cukor returned to his home on Park Gate Road and encountered the stranger again, who police say picked up a ceramic pot from Cukor's porch and bludgeoned the older man to
death.
Daniel Jordan DeWitt, 23, of Oakland, has been charged with murder in connection with the incident; DeWitt's family has said he has been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. He is being held without bail and is next due in court April 13, according to jail records.
A man who answered the phone at the office of Cukor's son, Peter, on Tuesday said the family had no comment on the transcript's content.
The incident sparked outrage from Berkeley residents over the police response, which Police Chief Michael Meehan has defended.
In an email Tuesday, Meehan said he saw no indication in the transcript that the intruder was trying to enter Cukor's home by force.
Meehan again defended his department's response.
"It is not uncommon for people to ask for police to respond quickly. People generally like and appreciate a quick response to most calls. We base our response on the information received during the call," Meehan said. "The transcript the city has released states Mr. Cukor reported, '... there is a gentleman, a young man hanging around my property.' "
City officials said the transcript is only a draft and may not be completely accurate. Interim Berkeley City Manager Christine Daniel, citing the ongoing prosecution and internal city policies, has refused to release a recording of the call or recordings of subsequent 911 calls by Cukor's wife after he was attacked, or recordings of the radio transmissions of responding police officers.
Daniel cautioned that the draft transcript "is not and was not intended to be a complete and verbatim transcript of the dispatch tape."
She did not explain why the transcript was made.
Copyright 2012 - The Oakland Tribune, Calif.
