Crime scene shown to jurors in Marcher trial

EPHRATA — Prosecutors presented pictures and films of the scene of Earl Romig’s shooting, calling their last two witnesses to the stand.

Washington State Patrol Detective Dan Dale and Grant County Sheriff’s Detective Ryan Rectenwald took the stand in Robbie Joe Marcher’s trial.

Marcher, 40, Moses Lake, is accused of shooting Romig, an off-duty Grant County Sheriff’s deputy, in a field near Soap Lake on Jan. 10, 2008. He is charged with assault in the first degree, unlawful hunting of big game in the second degree and failing to summon assistance.

While other investigators tracked the white pickup allegedly seen leaving the scene to Carl Marcher’s house, Dale started cataloguing what he found at the scene. The jury was presented with a series of photographs showing tire tracks, pieces of the plastic call shattered when the bullet struck Romig’s back and the boot prints near the orchard.

“I knew our scene … was time sensitive,” Dale said. “We could have weather come in. I knew we needed to act as far as documenting an collecting the evidence, because it was going to disappear.”

When the first two deputies arrived on the scene, Dale explained they left foot prints from the road to where Romig lay. He told the jury the scene was secure when he arrived and he didn’t feel it had been tainted.

“There were deer tracks,” he said. “I know there were deer tracks around, I don’t remember if they went through there. I did not see coyote tracks in there.”

Marcher told police he tried shooting at a coyote, as he waited for his father to return from deer hunting and thought he missed.

Dale also discovered the tire tracks where Marcher scraped a tree with his father’s truck, noting shoe prints in the area. They followed the tracks to the orchard’s northwest corner, where they noted other boot prints. These were visually matched to Marcher and his father’s booths.

The state patrol detective said he wasn’t able to take casts of the shoe prints, because the material they usually use to take casts in mud won’t work in snow.

Dale also pointed out the pieces of what were thought to be bullet fragments by hospital staff were found out to be pieces of the green plastic calls hanging down Romig’s back.

Along with showing the jury a recorded walk through of the scene, prosecutors also presented a second showing of the reenactment recorded by Rectenwald. This one showed all three times the Grant County detectives and Ephrata police officer tested the rifle.

While defense attorney Brett Billingsley did not have a chance to question Rectenwald on Wednesday, he pressed Dale about contamination at the scene, how Romig was standing when he was shot and inconsistencies in Romig’s statement.

Billingsley questioned Dale about the multiple people who ran out to Romig before the scene was secured by the sheriff’s office. He pointed out the tracks in the snow left by the two deputies who responded first .

“So when they responded to this they walked straight from the tree line?” Billingsley asked, continuing with, “And straight across evidence?”

Dale admitted the deputies did walk across evidence both in the row of poplar trees on the edge of the orchard and in the field as well.

The deputies walked across the area the shot allegedly came from, Dale answered, possibly destroying footprints. In the area where the shot came from, only one boot print was allegedly Marcher’s.

Billingsley questioned whether anyone traced the trail Romig took while he was in the orchard, Dale answered no.

Billingsley also questioned whether Romig ever told the police he turned completely around before he was shot in the back. Dale answered the deputy did tell them he turned to the left.

Dale agreed there was a meeting trying to determine the off-duty deputy’s body position when he was shot, and worked with the incorrect assumption the lanyard with Romig’s coyote calls was hanging on his front rather than his back.

When Billingsley asked about “faulty assumptions” made because of possibly incorrect information prowvided by Romig’s initial statements, Dale said he simply followed the evidence.

The trial continues today.