Photos of Car Could Damage Caro’s Defense

Blurry photos from a parking lot surveillance camera were introduced in the Socorro Caro trial Friday--images that could weaken the defense’s contention that her husband framed her in the slayings of their three young boys.

The photos were shot from a camera mounted in a Northridge hospital parking garage. Stamped with the time they were taken, they show what prosecutors contend is Xavier Caro’s Mercedes Benz entering the garage at 9:24 p.m. on Nov. 22, 1999, and exiting at 10:36 p.m.

The timing is crucial. Prosecutors say a 10:36 p.m. departure verifies Xavier Caro’s account of returning about 11:20 p.m. to his Santa Rosa Valley home, where he discovered his sons’ bodies in their beds and his wife nearly dead from a gunshot wound to the head.

Defense attorneys, however, say that phone logs and witnesses will prove that Xavier Caro left his office earlier, arriving at his home near Camarillo at least 30 minutes before his panic-stricken call to 911.

Socorro Caro, 44, faces a life prison term or the death penalty if convicted of killing her sons, ages 5 to 11, as they slept. Charged with three counts of first-degree murder, she has pleaded not guilty, later amending her plea to not guilty by reason of insanity.

In pretrial hearings, her attorneys tried unsuccessfully to have the parking lot film excluded as potential evidence.

In court documents, prosecutors offered a blunt opinion for the opposition expressed by Deputy Public Defender Jean Farley, Socorro Caro’s lead attorney. “The defense doesn’t want the photo admitted because it ruins her claim that Dr. Caro is the real killer,” they wrote.

Farley said before the trial that the black-and-white photos, which do not show license plates, were too blurry to make a positive identification of Xavier Caro’s maroon 1989 Mercedes. She also pointed to data indicating that about 70 of the 570 doctors with permits to park in the Northridge Hospital Medical Center garage own a Mercedes.

On Friday, a jury of nine women and three men heard witnesses called by the prosecution in an effort to prove the photos’ accuracy.

Kenneth Baloun, a video specialist with the National Law Enforcement and Corrections Technology Center in El Segundo, said he was asked by prosecutors in June to enhance the quality of the parking lot film.

He said he did so by modulating its brightness and contrast without altering the images.

Even enhanced, the photos do not show the entire car. The earlier photo shows only the front half on the driver’s side, while the exit photo shows only the rear half on the passenger side.

Even so, a 22-year Mercedes employee testified that the lines of the car and details like window molding and a distinctive bumper tell the tale.

The film shows a Mercedes made between 1986 and 1991, said Ernest Suman, service and parts director of Silver Star AG Ltd., a Mercedes dealership in Thousand Oaks.

Suman also said that the pictured car was of the top-of-the-line luxury S class and that it had a longer-than-standard body and a 126 chassis--features shared by Xavier Caro’s car.

Shown a color photo of that car, Suman said it could have been the one photographed the night of the children’s deaths.