www.msnbc.com/news/965870.asp?cp1=1Phillips: “This was an unlikely career for you?”
Moose:
“In my mind. I didn’t start out wanting to be a police officer. I despised police officers. I thought they put dogs on black people. ” .......
Phillips: “Some people question why you didn’t pursue more aggressively the lead that came early on from an eye-witness that a Chevrolet Caprice had been seen speeding away the scene of one of the shootings?”
Moose: “We were also later told by Metropolitan Police Department that that car had been located and that it was burned out, that there’d been a car fire, and it was no longer a vehicle of interest.”
Phillips: “But that wasn’t the only Chevy Caprice that came across the radar screen. I mean, the one that John Muhammad was driving had been stopped by police on numerous occasions.”
Moose: “Yes, that plate is entered. And in the end, when we put that plate in and say how many times has it been entered into various computers, that’s the report that we saw.”
Phillips: “And what was that, it was more than 10 times?”
Moose: “I think it was eight to 10 times.”
They were all routine license checks, the kind patrol officers run through their computers every day. In some instances, police actually spoke to Muhammad and Malvo, and ran a check of Muhammad’s driver’s license. That, too, turned up nothing unusual.
Phillips: “One of the big criticisms is how wrong the FBI profile was. And how long you seemed to cling onto that. White male, working alone, in his 30s.”
Moose: “Let me be very direct. The FBI behavioral scientist profile team never put race on the profile that they gave to us.”
Phillips: “The FBI profile did not specifically mention that this was most likely a white man?”
Moose: “No, they did not.”
But Moose’s own book seems to contradict that. In it, he quotes the profile: “Historically cases similar to this series have been perpetrated by white males.” Still he insists, that was merely a guideline and claims race was not used to rule out suspects.
Moose:
“We stressed it over and over and over again. ‘Keep an open mind.’”
Phillips: “Perhaps the most serious criticism is that after communicating to the snipers that you wanted to talk, the people manning the phones failed to recognize them, when they called.”
Moose: “Yeah, I wish we could have only hired perfect people.” Phillips: “One of your police officers had a three minute conversation, it turns out, with one of the sniper suspects. A man claiming to be the sniper, using some key phrases. And at one point he yelled at the officer, ‘Do you know who your dealing with? More people are going to die if you don’t talk to me.’ How does a phone call like that not get flagged for immediate investigation?”
Moose: “I would just encourage you to understand how many of those calls that we got. Whether or not there should have been some way to take each call and move it to the front, if we do it that way, then it’s just a fiasco.”
Moose says a thousand calls an hour were coming in to the sniper task force, generating a thousand leads a day. In the end, it was information generated by a phone call that linked the snipers to another murder in Alabama. A fingerprint left at that scene, pointed to Lee Boyd Malvo and his traveling companion, John Muhammad.
Phillips: “Do you think these suspects, if convicted, deserve the death penalty?”
Moose: “If the jury sees it that way, then certainly I would be in agreement with that. It’s a very difficult position for me, because so many people that look like me, African-American males are on death row, some justifiably, some in error. So it pains me, but I’ve been involved in this case, these people are not inappropriately charged, there’s not been any making-up of evidence. If they get the death penalty, there was no doubt that they deserve the death penalty.”