Middlebury police chief plays down rumors
Garza search photos prove inconclusive
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By Gordon Dritschilo Herald Staff - Published: May 8, 2008
MIDDLEBURY — Police Chief Thomas Hanley played down two recently hyped developments in the search for Nicholas Garza Wednesday.
"There's been a lot of misinformation in the media and a lot of conjecture," he said. "People are saying things they shouldn't be saying."
Hanley was specifically referring to an aerial surveillance photo taken last month purported to show what could be Garza's blue jeans and white sneakers in the Otter Creek. An "object of interest" was spotted in the creek behind Middlebury High School. He said police checked the area that night and again the next morning.
"Reports that this object of interest was Nick Garza's body are very premature," he said. "All it was was an object with a blue tint. When you consider that the Otter Creek drains 685 square miles of Vermont land … this could be anything. It could be a person, it could be a piece of lawn furniture."
Hanley said the object was noticeable because it did not look like the normal sort of debris typically found in the creek, such as tree branches and animal carcasses.
A searcher with the Maine-based Down East Emergency Medicine took the picture. Richard Bowie, the group's director, said that of 720 photos taken, the one of the blue-and-white object was the only one of interest.
"You can't see the image well enough to identify that those are jeans and those are sneakers, but there's a high probability they are," he said. "I can't go so far as to say it's a body. I can say it's something we're really, really interested in."
Hanley also rejected media reports linking the Garza case to a group of killings attributing one or more people using a smiley-face graffiti tag as their calling card.
"From what I've seen of the media portrayals of the smiley face stuff, this didn't look anything like it," he said.
A theory recently promoted by a pair of former New York City police officers ties together the drowning deaths of numerous young college men across the country, pointing to the graffiti tag as a common element. After the theory's recent publicity, volunteer searchers recalled seeing a smiley-face tag in Middlebury.
Hanley said he did make an attempt to contact the retired detectives, but an investigation into the graffiti determined it had been there well before Garza disappeared.
"I have checked with the wastewater supervisor," he said. "This is nothing new. … A couple years ago we had some problems with tagging and graffiti in town. What they saw was a couple images in amongst some gang graffiti. This graffiti predates Nick Garza. We're not making a connection here."
Hanley said he is consulting with an investigator from the New York State Police who analyzes gang graffiti to identify what organization might have left the tag, but that investigation is wholly separate from the search for Garza.
Meanwhile, Hanley said searches of the creek continue. With the water level and flow rate dropping, Hanley said he is arranging the logistics for a more intensive effort. Three officers remain assigned to the missing persons investigation.
Hanley said people are also conducting shoreline searches every day.
"That means somebody walking toe-to-toe, hand-picking through everything on shore," he said.
Bowie said his organization was also working to help bring in search dogs specially trained to pick out latent scents in the hope of picking up Garza's trail.
Garza, 19, of Albuquerque, N.M., was a freshman at Middlebury College when he disappeared in early February.
Contact Gordon Dritschilo at gordon.dritschilo@rutlandherald.com.
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