USS Bonhomme Richard fire

Chris_Halkides

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Chris_Halkides
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ProPublica did a deep dive into the 2020 fire that destroyed the US Navy's Bonhomme Richard. Ryan Mays, a low-level sailor, is being charged with arson. Mr. Mays sounds like he was immature and given to bragging about his physical prowess. He had tried out for the SEALS one time and failed, but he hope to try again (three chances may be given). There are good reasons to believe that the fire was accidental, given the conditions aboard the ship. The evidence that it was even arson at all is pretty thin gruel, but even if it were, there is at least one other sailor that should have been a person of interest. A primary evidence against Mr. Mays is a very dubious eyewitness identification.

"Velasco told nobody about this person for days, according to testimony — not even during the fire, when that person could have been in danger of being killed. When Velasco sat down with agents, he told them that someone had walked behind him, “but I’ve never seen him before.” Agents went back to Velasco the day after the interview. This time Velasco said he was “fairly sure” the person was Mays, according to NCIS documents. Velasco told the agents that Mays was cocky and talked too much. The agents then brought Velasco back again: How certain was he that he saw Mays? “90%,” Velasco told them."
EDT
NBC has a story about the ongoing trial.
 
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cognitive bias

"“Cognitive bias led this entire investigation astray,” Lt. Tayler Haggerty, one of May’s three military attorneys. Mays, “is innocent,” she said." USNI I doubt that this is the sort of thing that would have been said forty years ago, but the role of cognitive bias in forensics has gotten much discussion since then, owing to the work of Dr. Dror and others.

"The prosecution has presented no physical evidence proving the 21-year-old sailor set the USS Bonhomme Richard on fire, something the defense has highlighted. Key witnesses also have changed their stories or their testimonies have contradicted each other, including on Monday." Navy Times. One problem is that the blaze burned for a long time before being put out. This and the firefighting effort itself made gathering evidence more difficult, according to this story.
 
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Chris_Halkides said:
ProPublica did a deep dive into the 2020 fire that destroyed the US Navy's Bonhomme Richard. Ryan Mays, a low-level sailor, is being charged with arson. Mr. Mays sounds like he was immature and given to bragging about his physical prowess. He had tried out for the SEALS one time and failed, but he hope to try again (three chances may be given). There are good reasons to believe that the fire was accidental, given the conditions aboard the ship. The evidence that it was even arson at all is pretty thin gruel, but even if it were, there is at least one other sailor that should have been a person of interest. A primary evidence against Mr. Mays is a very dubious eyewitness identification.

"Velasco told nobody about this person for days, according to testimony — not even during the fire, when that person could have been in danger of being killed. When Velasco sat down with agents, he told them that someone had walked behind him, “but I’ve never seen him before.” Agents went back to Velasco the day after the interview. This time Velasco said he was “fairly sure” the person was Mays, according to NCIS documents. Velasco told the agents that Mays was cocky and talked too much. The agents then brought Velasco back again: How certain was he that he saw Mays? “90%,” Velasco told them."
EDT
NBC has a story about the ongoing trial.
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Sounds a lot like the USS Iowa explosion investigation
 
process of elimination as a method of fire investigation

Megan Rose wrote, "The lead ATF agent, Matthew Beals, and his team of investigators had found no physical evidence anyone purposefully set the fire. Beals later testified that he’d ruled out accidental causes, such as electrical and mechanical, as well as natural ones. With those causes eliminated, along with his assessment of how the fire grew and witnesses' statements, he concluded it must have been arson."

However, Jenna O'Donnell wrote (not specifically about this case), "Up until recently, process of elimination – or negative corpus – passed as a reasonable way to prove an arson case. It was removed from the National Fire Protection Association’s fire investigation manual in 2011.

“'In the past it was an accepted practice,' said Bob Duval, a senior fire investigator at the NFPA, the Massachusetts based trade organization that publishes the nation’s most widely accepted guide for investigating fires."
 
The missing link

In my previous comment (#5), I meant to add a link to Jenna O'Donnell's article. Megan Rose is the author of the article in ProPublica that I cited in comment #1.

I am not yet ready to nail my colors to the mast, but I am underwhelmed by the quality of the investigation, so far. For one thing, the extreme length of time that the fire burned would seem to make collecting evidence more difficult. I would like to know more about how the investigator ruled out other causes, especially given this circumstance.
 
This has very nasty overtones of that poor man who was executed for arson, when the fire that killed his children showed no evidence of arson.
 
Rolfe said:
This has very nasty overtones of that poor man who was executed for arson, when the fire that killed his children showed no evidence of arson.
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Cameron Todd Willingham I believe.
 
Probable cause hearing

Rolfe said:
This has very nasty overtones of that poor man who was executed for arson, when the fire that killed his children showed no evidence of arson.
Click to expand...
The Cameron Todd Willingham case is a cautionary tale in more than one way. In the present instance, Seaman Ryan Mays faces up to life in prison, as opposed to the death penalty. He waived his right to a trial by military jury, and it will be up to the judge. An earlier adjudication went very differently, according to ProPublica. "After a dayslong probable cause hearing for Mays in December 2021, the judge said she wasn’t persuaded of Mays’ guilt. A nuclear-trained surface warfare officer who later became a Navy lawyer and then judge, Capt. Angela Tang is known for being thorough.

“'Given the state of the evidence presented to me, I do not believe there is a reasonable likelihood of conviction at trial. Therefore I do not recommend referral of these charges even though there is probable cause to support them,' Tang wrote in her findings."

I found a second article in ProPublica which stated, "Last week, the military judge in Mays’ case denied requests made separately by the defense and ProPublica to make the records public. Cmdr. Derek Butler sidestepped the defense’s claims — that the government was violating Mays’ Sixth Amendment right to a public trial — and ProPublica’s assertions of the First Amendment. Butler didn’t address the constitutional issues at hand and instead said he didn’t have the authority to release the records.
 
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The Negative Corpus methodology in fire investigations

Everett Lee Herndon, Jr. wrote, "Logically, if one is to infer (1) “ no proof of accident = arson,” then one must acknowledge (2) “no proof of arson = accident” as an equally valid argument. To accept the former argument and reject the latter argument is to presume (without proof) that the insured is guilty. Without proof one way or the other, the best an adjuster can do is call it “undetermined.”
 
https://www.navytimes.com/news/your...richard-failed-on-fire-safety-documents-show/

Same Pro Publica story from the opening post carried by the Navy Times. The Navy Times is not an offical publication of the navy but it, along with several other privately owned news sources about the US military is read by many members of the various branches. If they are carrying the story this will end up as another black eye for NCIS. And NCIS appears to have earned it along with the admiral that decided to ignore advice from JAG and go ahead with the case.
 
task-relevant information

I broadly agree about NCIS, but I would say that ATF shares the blame regarding the USS Bonhomme Richard. As I re-read the ProPublica article, I became aware of an additional problem with this process, namely that Matthew Beale was both the fire investigator and Seaman Mays' interrogator. Although the conflation of these two roles (fire expert and criminal investigator) is not uncommon in fire investigations, it is a very bad idea IMO.

Over at least the last thirty five years, many studies have been done showing that task-irrelevant (domain-irrelevant) information skews the interpretation of the expert. The National Commission on Forensic Science wrote, "When evaluating whether a latent print at a crime scene came from a particular suspect, for example, it would be inappropriate for the fingerprint examiner to be influenced by whether the suspect made incriminating statements or had a convincing alibi, or whether other forensic evidence implicated the suspect. Those are matters to be considered by police, prosecutors and jurors. But this kind of information is irrelevant to a scientific assessment of the latent print, and thus should not be allowed to influence the examiner’s assessment."

The concern that I have is that Mr. Beale's knowledge of Ryan Mays as a suspect (and his apparent belief that Seaman Mays is guilty) might color his assessment of the forensic evidence, unless Mr. Beale is capable of building a firewall in his brain. Just to clarify, I understand why Mays became a person of interest. But the only cursory investigation of at least one plausible alternative suspect points toward tunnel vision.
 
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Kenji Velasco's testimony

"Investigators interviewed Velasco several times after the fire. However, he did not give them Mays’ name at first and initially told agents from the Naval Criminal Investigative Service he could not identify the sailor he saw.

Lt. Cmdr. Jordi Torres, Mays’ lead defense attorney, pushed Velasco to explain why during cross-examination. “Did NCIS pressure you?” Torres asked. “Yes, sir,” he replied from the witness stand. “They told you a lot was riding on your testimony?” Torres asked. “Yes, sir,” Velasco answered.

Velasco told Torres some people on the ship started accusing him of setting the fire. Some began calling him “fire-starter.”" Stars and Stripes

Petty Officer (then Deck Seaman) Velasco is a key witness against Seaman Ryan Mays. In other threads I have mentioned the phenomenon of witness cajoling.
 
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It's unusual to find a witness who acknowledges being cajoled. There was one in the Lockerbie case, but the court failed to draw the rather obvious conclusion that if the investigators had been twisting one guy's arm to say what they wanted him to say, maybe those other witnesses who are (albeit with some degree of confusion) saying what the investigators want them to say have also had their arms twisted.
 
arcing or lithium batteries as alternate causes of the blaze

“An expert in electrical engineering told a Navy court that an electrical short in a forklift or some faulty batteries could have sparked the fire that ultimately led the service to scrap the former USS Bonhomme Richard (LHD-6), countering the Navy’s acceptance from a federal fire investigation that a disgruntled sailor deliberately set it.
SNIP
"We know definitively it was from electrical heat and not the heat of the fire” that caused the copper to melt, he [forensics engineer Andrew Thoreson] added in response to a question from Capt. Angela Tang, the hearing officer. USNI News.

From the same article, "He [Fouts] criticized the ATF agent’s methods and decision to classify the fire as arson by ruling out the three other possibilities. The method Beals used, known as negative corpus, “is an absence of proof. That is not proof,” he said. The ATF “made speculations about the heat source and the fuel ignited,” but no evidence of the flame or starter fluid was found."
EDT
In my opinion the existence copper wires that were melted from arcing holes this application of negative corpus methodology below the waterline.
 
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From recent experience electrically sourced fires happen.
We had a fire start in the roof simply because extra insulation had been placed over wiring to bring the home to "healthy" standard. One heater too many was switched on in winter. The copper was melted beyond recognition.
This explanation where it is clear that an electrical fault produces a result unattainable by ambient heat from a general fire resonates precisely with me.
 
More on Seaman Velasco's testimony

USNI News reported, "Velasco’s identification has been questionable. Velasco was more confident in identifying who he spotted that morning than in eight previous times he spoke with NCIS and ATF investigators, defense attorneys noted. In his initial interviews with agents, Velasco hadn’t identified the person he saw by name, but he eventually suspected Mays after discussing it with several other deck department sailors."
 
ATF's Michael Abraham

In a separate story USNI News reporter Gidget Fuentes wrote, "Defense attorneys raised the possibility that a malfunction in one of the forklifts led to arcing that started the fire. But ATF electrical engineer Michael Abraham, testifying for nearly three hours on Sept. 21, said what the defense’s expert claimed was arcing in the forklift was just a “globule” of melted copper. Copper melts at 1,985 degrees Fahrenheit." This now provides both prosecution and the defense interpretation (see upthread) of the copper wires.
 
blog post on the case

Parisa Dehghani-Tafti and Paul Bieber (West Virginia Law Review 2016 119 549-619) wrote, "Perhaps the only factor more concerning than its lack of scientific underpinning and entirely unknown error rates is the routine and consistent exposure to domain-irrelevant and potentially biasing information that has become a standard part of modern fire investigation. If the research in this area has taught us anything it is that the easiest way to corrupt a forensic science examination is to simply tell the examiner the answer before he or she is asked the question. Whether it is forensic anthropology, fingerprint comparison, or fire investigation, nothing hijacks the process more quickly than the examiner believing he knows the outcome before examining the evidence."

I put my thoughts down a few days ago here. The case is now in the hands of the judge.
 
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