The Haidl Case Gets Messier

The original allegations are sordid enough -- three young males accused of gang-raping a girl on a pool table at a Corona del Mar home and videotaping the incident. Since the July 2002 arrests, other unsavory events have muddied the case in which Gregory Haidl, the son of a politically connected Orange County assistant sheriff, is one of the accused.

The county grand jury is investigating the most recent troubling news, this one involving possible influence on the sheriff’s office. It’s a good example of why government needs separate branches to check on one another, because no probes have been forthcoming from Sheriff Michael S. Carona.

The investigation involves whether sheriff’s officials gave Gregory Haidl preferential treatment after he was stopped in late October. Haidl, 18, was with two friends when sheriff’s deputies found a small amount of marijuana in the friend’s car. In an audiotape obtained and aired by KCBS-TV Channel 2, a watch commander contacts Assistant Sheriff George Jaramillo for advice. Jaramillo is a friend of Haidl’s father, Don Haidl, and was criticized previously by Newport Beach police for interfering in the rape investigation by advising the elder Haidl not to let his son talk to detectives.

In the tape, the patrol deputy who made the stop called the watch commander after he learned Gregory Haidl’s identity to ask for the phone number of the teen’s father. After talking to the father, he called the watch commander back to say that Don Haidl was “not happy.”

In the ensuing conversations, Jaramillo and the watch commander agree the incident will be kept off the police log and away from the media. It will be “our secret,” they decide. The patrol deputy concurs.

Gregory Haidl was not cited and was driven home. Deputies cited one of the friends, who said the marijuana was his.

The only reaction to the tape from Carona’s office has been an expression of confidence that the grand jury will find “no criminal wrongdoing” by his department. Perhaps not criminal. But clearly something is not right when connected people get this much special treatment. It’s disappointing that Carona seems to be encouraging rather than trying to stop an apparent departmental culture of “taking care of our own.”

In the meantime, a civil suit is riling Haidl’s prosecutors. Shortly after the arrests, San Bernardino County sheriff’s officials investigated Haidl’s mother for possible witness intimidation, after fliers appeared around the girl’s neighborhood seeking information about her and her family and asking people to call a phone number traced to the mother. Though in a deposition the mother denied any connection with the fliers, she later sued the county, admitting that she had “published” them and claiming that deputies’ seizure of the fliers had kept her from being able to help her son’s criminal defense. Prosecutors say the lawsuit is an attempt by the Haidls to gain advance information for the criminal case.

That could be resolved by simply delaying the mother’s civil case until after the son’s criminal trial, scheduled for March. Perhaps the grand jury investigation will quell any other extraneous ugliness in a case that already is more than ugly enough.