Lawsuit seeks to hold detective accountable for criminalist's suicide.
Detectives pressed Kevin Brown to confess to 1984 sexual assault and killing.
God is a big deal to Brown, a devout Catholic. After her husband died, in keeping with ancient traditions, she had a Mass celebrated for him for 30 straight days, believing it would free his soul from purgatory. She went to the tree where he died, said a prayer, picked up leaves from the ground and put them in his Bible.
Rebecca Brown also learned that investigators obtained a search warrant for a cabin in Julian that her family owns, not far from where Kevin Brown killed himself. He’d gone there shortly beforehand. On Dec. 17, 2014, a claim was filed against the city of San Diego, a required precursor to a lawsuit. Lodged on behalf of Rebecca Brown and her husband’s estate, it accused detectives of illegal search and seizure, investigative misconduct and wrongful death.
Her proudest moment as an attorney, she once told San Diego Lawyer magazine, came when she was in private practice. She filed suit and won a six-figure verdict for a female pedestrian hit by a car. “It was extremely rewarding to have been able to provide a measure of justice to my client and to show her that the system does work,” Richardson said.
Sabraw is an 18-year veteran of the federal bench. His American father and Japanese mother gave him the middle name Makato, which translates to “truth.” He made national headlines in 2018 when he ordered the U.S. government to stop separating families caught trying to cross the border. So that was another hurdle for Iredale. He had to show how it might have happened, which meant talking about criminalists bringing into the lab their own semen.James Stam, who retired in 2008 after 30 years in the SDPD lab, testified that analysts need to make sure chemicals are working properly before they examine evidence for the presence of sperm. They cut out a piece of cloth with semen on it, put it in a vial, and add the chemicals to see if the solution turns the right color.
After Kevin Brown’s DNA was found on the vaginal swabs in 2012, Simms was “mortified” to learn that he had been the original analyst and that he might accidentally have done something to contaminate the evidence. He initially told his bosses he didn’t think he would have made such a mistake.Responding to questions from Iredale, Simms said the crime lab in 1984 didn’t know yet about DNA testing and didn’t have the safeguards in place today to prevent contamination.
His 1984 notes from the Hough case don’t say whose standard he used. Nobody thought to write down that kind of information back then. It was a different world, pre-DNA. They suggested he had done it because Kevin Brown was a friend. They also knew Simms had been talking to other criminalists who were in the lab back in the 1980s, some of whom were upset that their DNA profiles — supposedly in the database to be used only in case of contamination — were being looked at in murder investigations.
Lambert did talk to some of the analysts, but he was mostly focused on stories about Kevin Brown’s interest in nude photography and porn movies. He never interviewed Simms. Iredale pointed to numerous interviews Lambert did and never wrote reports about, suggesting the detective had blinders on regarding contamination because he had made up his mind that Brown was guilty and was intent on getting a confession.
When it was her turn, Richardson took Lambert through his role in the search of the Browns’ home. Although he wrote the warrant that convinced a judge to approve the search, he wasn’t there when the items were seized. He said he didn’t know what was in the boxes until he examined them later. Julia Yoo, Iredale’s partner, did the questioning. She displayed a series of photos of the couple throughout their marriage.
Things went downhill from there, she said, detailing the escalating tension in the house as the items police took were not returned. That upset her 80-year-old mother, who lived in the home with the couple and cried about not being able to look at photographs and other mementos.Rebecca Brown is the widow of former San Diego Police Department criminalist Kevin Brown, who committed suicide five years ago after being accused of murder in a decades-old homicide.
She also went through problems Kevin Brown had with anxiety and other mental-health issues that predated the detectives knocking on his door. “Are you claiming that you were damaged because for 10 months you couldn’t go into the garage and look at your baby outfit?” Richardson asked. The attorney criticized what he called Lambert’s “course of conduct that was deliberately designed, over time, to bully, to intimidate, and ultimately to drive Kevin to what he thought he wanted, which was a confession. But when a man is innocent, but so frightened, you don’t get a confession — you get a suicide.”
She said Lambert “had no preconceived notions” during his investigation, which led him to lab workers who talked about “Kinky Kevin,” and to the suspect himself, who made incriminating statements in interviews with detectives. Iredale asked for a mistrial. “If it was done deliberately, it is outrageous,” he told Sabraw. “Inadmissible evidence of a highly prejudicial kind was placed before the jury.”
Rebecca Brown put her head in her hands and sobbed briefly. Lambert wiped at his eyes with a paper napkin. Iredale asked him whether he thought he had done anything wrong during the investigation. “I believed what I was doing was correct,” Lambert said.“I wanted to be prepared to come here today with a spirit of generosity and to say that in order to ask for justice, as I did, I must be prepared to render justice, and that in considering the appropriate punitive damage, you may consider not only the bad but the good,” Iredale told the jury.
They wanted to know whether the $6 million verdict they’d delivered earlier would be paid by the city. They wanted to know whether Lambert would be on the hook personally for any punitive damages. And they wanted to know whether they could recommend community service instead of a monetary award.
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