Trustees’ Testimony Conflicts as Trial on Phone Tapes Opens

The opening day of testimony in the trial of an Oxnard Elementary School District administrator accused of secretly tape-recording a trustee’s telephone calls produced conflicting statements by two school board members who are central to the case.

Pedro R. Placencia, the former head of the district’s migrant education program, is suspected of illegally recording the calls of trustee Jim Suter and faces six felony counts that could bring a prison term of more than three years.

In launching their case Thursday, prosecutors called a long line of witnesses, including school board members Arthur Joe Lopez and Mary Barreto, who differed on some of the key events leading to Placencia’s arrest.

Lopez brought the issue to light by alerting school district administrators of the existence of the recordings.

He testified that Barreto invited him to her home and told him that the taped phone calls had been anonymously left on her doorstep. He said she played one of the tapes for him and that he recognized several of the voices.

But he said he especially remembered a voice he identified as Placencia’s logging the time and date of at least one of the conversations.

“I heard his voice clearly and that’s what struck me the most,” Lopez said. “That was Pete Placencia’s voice.”

However, Barreto later testified that she never played either of the tapes for Lopez. And contrary to her testimony before the Ventura County Grand Jury, she said Thursday she was unsure if she recognized Placencia’s voice on the tapes.

Barreto testified that she confronted Placencia days after finding the first of the two tapes to see if he could shed light on the recordings.

She said she also confronted Supt. Bernard Korenstein about one of the taped conversations in which he and Suter were discussing confidential personnel matters.

“I told him I knew of the conversations he had had with Jim Suter about the evaluation process,” said Barreto. “I was concerned about the information leaking out into the community.”

Initially Barreto was a target of the investigation, but the grand jury found insufficient evidence for charges against her. The jury indicted Placencia in October based on testimony that he used a radio scanner to record 18 calls over five days last June. Placencia allegedly left the recordings on two 90-minute cassette tapes at Barreto’s home.

In his opening statement, Deputy Dist. Atty. Mark Aveis told jurors they would learn that some of the tape-recorded conversations concerned Suter’s efforts to gain support for a controversial decision to name the district’s newest campus after a former superintendent.

And he said they would learn that investigators had served a search warrant on Placencia’s home and confiscated a tape recorder and radio scanner, like the one used to record Suter’s conversations.

“You will hear excerpts of these tapes,” Aveis said. “You will hear several times during the tapes the defendant’s own voice.”

But defense attorney Victor Salas countered that prosecutors have no direct evidence that Placencia recorded the telephone calls or that he had the kind of technology needed to make such recordings.

“The evidence will show that this is purely a circumstantial-evidence case against Mr. Placencia,” Salas said. “Most importantly, the evidence will show that other persons had the same ability to make these tapes.”