LAKEPORT, Calif. – A forensic pathologist testified on Friday to the dozens of wounds a man suffered when his neighbor stabbed him to death in November 2007, believing wrongly that he was a child molester.
Michael Dodele, 67, would suffer more than 65 wounds, allegedly inflicted by Ivan Garcia Oliver, his neighbor of several weeks in the Western Hills Mobile Home Park outside of Lakeport.
Oliver, 34, is on trial for Dodele’s murder, with the prosecution alleging that the deadly confrontation arose after Oliver discovered that Dodele was on the Megan’s Law sexual offender registration Web site. Oliver misinterpreted Dodele’s listing as being for child molestation when in fact Dodele had done prison time for raping an adult female.
On the stand Friday were Dr. Thomas Gill, who conducted Dodele’s autopsy in 2007, as well as Cathleen Ferran, the mother of Oliver’s child, who described his erratic and bizarre behavior in the days leading up to Dodele’s death.
Dodele’s sister, Margaret Brooks, was the first to testify Friday. She was on the stand briefly to explain how her brother had been in Lakeport a short time after being released from prison.
She was emphatic that her brother had never been convicted of child molestation, and that he “owned up” to his rape convictions.
When he was released from prison at the send of September 2007, Brooks helped him find a place to live, working to get him settled into a trailer in Lakeport.
She said he applied for the trailer under the last name Salta, his last name at birth, as the Department of Motor Vehicles and Social Security told him he had to do when getting new identification. The siblings had used the surname Dodele beginning in childhood, adopting the last name of their mother’s new husband.
Chief Deputy District Attorney Richard Hinchcliff showed Brooks a picture of a pink and white throw blanket, which she identified as one she had given her brother. Oliver is alleged to have taken the blanket after Dodele’s killing.
Under cross-examination by defense attorney Stephen Carter, Brooks said her brother had raped several adult women, threatening them with a knife.
Gill’s testimony took most of the day. Now semi-retired and doing consulting, Gill was working at Forensic Medical Group in Fairfield in 2007 when he conducted Dodele’s autopsy.
In December 2010 his employment with the firm – which provided pathology services to a number of Northern California counties, including Lake – ended after he said the firm no longer had work to justify his position.
Several years earlier, after a mistrial in the murder trial of Petaluma resident Louis Pelfini, accused of killing his wife, Janet – who Gill had ruled was murdered – Sonoma County no longer wanted him working on their cases, he stated on the stand.
There were allegations that his testimony in the Pelfini case had been coached. Gill and a Sonoma County deputy district attorney were accused of wrongdoing and became the focus of a California Attorney General’s Office investigation, which he said ruled he hadn’t perjured himself. The deputy district attorney was briefly disbarred for failing to turn over the video of Gill working on his testimony.
Gill left the state to take another job and then returned to Forensic Medical Group in January 2007, he said Friday.
Independent news reports state that questions had been raised about Gill’s competence as a forensic pathologist and that several counties, in addition to Sonoma, had raised issues with having him work on their cases. He also was the focus of a National Public Radio, PBS Frontline and ProPublica news investigation in 2011.
Under cross examination Gill also acknowledged having been fired from a job he held in Indiana as the result of a drunk driving case in August 1994, when he was pulled over on his way to work. He said he was a recovering alcoholic, and called his behavior at the time “reprehensible.”
Numerous wounds described
Hinchcliff asked Gill to describe the numerous knife wounds on Dodele’s body. Gill had complete descriptions for 65 of them, with notations about two additional small wounds that he did not specifically number. The deepest among the main woulds was about three and a quarter inches.
The wounds primarily were found on Dodele’s left side, from his forehead, left cheek, left skull, on his jaw and neck, down his left shoulder and upper arm, near his armpit and on his chest.
His left clavicle also was fractured. Gill said that’s a large bone to have been broken by a knife blade.
Dodele also had four deep wounds that Gill said “stair stepped” down his left size, with the knife going between several ribs.
Those four stab wounds punctured the lower lobe of Dodele’s left lung, said Gill. When he examined the interior of Dodele’s chest cavity, he found little blood, which he said wasn’t normal for a wounded lung.
Dodele also had stab wounds in his abdomen, on both forearms and on the back of his neck, where the blade cut off one of the transverse processes on his C5 vertebra. “When this was cut it damaged the vertebral artery,” Gill said.
Gill said the wounds were consistent with a right-handed assailant. Hinchcliff established during testimony on Friday that Oliver is right-handed.
Dodele’s cause of death was multiple sharp force injuries, which Gill said caused Dodele to bleed to death.
He said the seven main wounds were the four that went between Dodele’s ribs, two deep wounds to his left side that pierced his spleen and the one that damaged his vertebral artery. Like his lungs, Dodele’s spleen didn’t show a lot of blood loss.
“This indicates that again there had been prior loss of blood that kept this down to a modest amount of bleeding in that location,” Gill said.
Under Carter’s questioning, Gill acknowledged that the wounds appeared consistent with having been received during grappling.
However, in response to Hinchcliff’s questions about the time frame of Dodele’s stabbing, Gill said he couldn’t tell.
He explained that if someone had been bleeding for some time, it would be expected that there would be less blood resulting from some of the internal wounds. The body also could experience hypotension, a shock-like state where the body starts to shut down.
“Do you think that Mr. Dodele could have been dead at the time any of those injuries were inflicted?” Hinchcliff asked.
While Gill said there was no way to be entirely sure, “It’s certainly possible,” he added. He said Dodele also could have been in a state of shock.
Strange, dangerous behavior
The day ended with Ferran’s testimony. She and Oliver shared a home at the time of the shooting, and had a young son, then 4. She was the one who called 911 that day after seeing her boyfriend with blood on his hand and acting strangely near Dodele’s trailer.
Oliver had told her that he thought Dodele was a child molester. But Ferran said she didn’t believe Dodele looked like the person on the Megan’s Law Web site printout Oliver showed her. She told Oliver not to assume anything, and to instead call law enforcement and notify the park owners.
She recalled telling Oliver that he needed to worry about her and their young son more than anything else.
On Nov. 19, 2007, the night before Dodele was killed, Ferran said she and Oliver argued throughout the evening. “He was just acting weird” and hyper, she said, and was speaking without making sense.
He wanted to go to Safeway to get cigarettes, and she had to wake her son to take him with them. “The whole ride up there was scary,” she said, with Oliver driving on the freeway late at night with the lights off, claiming they were being followed when no vehicles were behind them.
She said Oliver stayed up all night, going from room to room, looking for things. He kept telling her that he tried to do everything for her and their son.
Ferran said he had been seeing words in license plates, hearing things in music, mentioning things from the Bible in the week prior, with the behavior continuing that day.
She laid down for a few hours and got up to find a slender male running out of the home. She didn’t see Oliver hit the subject, Israel Bojorquez, who has since transitioned to a transgender woman and has changed her name to Monica. Bojorquez testified early in the trial that Oliver assaulted her that day.
Later, Ferran saw Oliver out crouching by Dodele’s trailer. She went to talk to him, he told her to get her stuff out of their. He was going in and out of their trailer, and Ferran said she tried to call his mother but couldn’t reach her, so she called 911.
He gave her a cell phone – which turned out to be Dodele’s – and she put it between the mattress and box spring of their bed.
Later, Ferran heard a knock at the door. Oliver told her not to answer it. About 10 minutes later, sheriff’s deputies broke down their door.
While Oliver had told investigators that Dodele had tried to touch his son, Ferran said Oliver never made that claim to her; neither did their son, who did mention his genitals being touched – in a way that Ferran decided was accidental – when a male neighbor picked the boy up.
During testimony, Ferran looked at a silver knife, one of two found outside of their home in a yard. She had previously told detectives that it was part of a set they had bought, but looking at it again Friday she didn’t remember if it was the same knife.
The trial will convene at 9 a.m. Wednesday, Aug. 8, in Lake County Superior Court Department 1.
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