Mead Stone
Appearances
48 Hours
Post Mortem | Could Angela Prichard Have Been Saved?
And it turned out that Angela's family had found receipts for the two officers showing that they had indeed boarded their dogs in the kennels. Now, that by itself is not particularly important. What's important is that they apparently lied about this in an attempt, says O'Brien, to conceal their relationship with Pritchard.
48 Hours
Post Mortem | Could Angela Prichard Have Been Saved?
The defense attorneys say that this information was not turned over in discovery because of a mistake that the defense attorneys had made, not their clients. And this was considered, and it did not change his decision. The judge, in his ruling, he said there's no evidence to indicate that they're friends.
48 Hours
Post Mortem | Could Angela Prichard Have Been Saved?
Angela's family said they are appealing the case to the Eighth Circuit in St. Louis. It's a process that will lengthen their legal journey for about another year.
48 Hours
Post Mortem | Could Angela Prichard Have Been Saved?
Thank you for having us. Yes, thank you. Thank you.
48 Hours
Post Mortem | Could Angela Prichard Have Been Saved?
And that final week of Angela's life, the police apparently didn't do anything to try to find Chris Pritchard. According to their own police records, they were doing other things in the town, like chaperoning... A prom and, you know, providing an escort for a funeral procession. There was a loud barking dog, apparently, in the neighborhood.
48 Hours
Post Mortem | Could Angela Prichard Have Been Saved?
The Bellevue police made notes about these incidents, but nowhere in their records is there any mention of trying to find and arrest Chris Pritchard.
48 Hours
Post Mortem | Could Angela Prichard Have Been Saved?
I think that's one of the tragedies. In Iowa, for the first offense, it's one night in jail. A second offense, it goes to seven days in jail. And it goes up from there. And, you know, had Pritchard been arrested... Each time he violated the no contact order, you know, he would have eventually been spending a good amount of time behind bars. And, you know, one would think that would be a deterrent.
48 Hours
Post Mortem | Could Angela Prichard Have Been Saved?
He rented equipment that belonged to the company he worked for to customers, and he was requesting that they pay him for the rentals. So they apparently wrote Pritchard checks, and he kept the money. It was a first-degree theft charge.
48 Hours
Post Mortem | Could Angela Prichard Have Been Saved?
Thanks for having us. Good to be here. Thank you.
48 Hours
Post Mortem | Could Angela Prichard Have Been Saved?
You know, you can put yourself in her shoes at that moment. You know, it's just... You can't even imagine that sort of terror. And she had the presence of mind to call 911 in that moment. And, you know, she shouted his name in the last split second of her life.
48 Hours
Post Mortem | Could Angela Prichard Have Been Saved?
The profanity that he uttered helped convict him because, as Angela's son Josh points out, that's not a word you say after you accidentally shoot someone. And, of course, Pritchard claimed that the shooting was accidental. And that proved to the prosecutors that it was premeditated and intentional.
48 Hours
Post Mortem | Could Angela Prichard Have Been Saved?
Our special agents in our hour interviewed Pritchard three times, and each time they did, his story of the accidental shooting changed a little bit. The first one was Angela pushed him, shoved him, and he fell back, and the shotgun hit a cabinet or something and went off. And he had another story where he had kicked a backpack and the gun fell over and went off and shot her.
48 Hours
Post Mortem | Could Angela Prichard Have Been Saved?
The medical examiner testified that the shotgun blast had a downward trajectory. And in Pritchard's examples, most of them would have had an upward trajectory. The police tested the gun, and it was in perfectly fine working conditions. And the condition that Pritchard explained, that the gun just went off, would have been impossible.
48 Hours
Post Mortem | Could Angela Prichard Have Been Saved?
From that residence to the kennels, it's about a mile and a half, a couple of miles. And he left in the middle of the night. But this would have been a treacherous hike. It would have been pitch black through very, very thick woods. I mean, this shows an incredible amount of determination. And then, yes, he was just waiting for her for about four hours to show up.
48 Hours
Post Mortem | Could Angela Prichard Have Been Saved?
Yes. And that was quite a scene. There was, you know, a lot of officers and from different agencies. It was a SWAT team that came in and arrested him. And when they get to the jail, there's more body cam footage of Pritchard being processed. And you just you sense the gravity of what he's done has has hit him.
48 Hours
Post Mortem | Could Angela Prichard Have Been Saved?
You know, the judge didn't buy the argument of the state-created danger. Okay, we got to slow down.
48 Hours
Post Mortem | Could Angela Prichard Have Been Saved?
Right. That's what Dave O'Brien was arguing, that there was a state-created danger. And that's a legal term, which means that a police force, in this case the Bellevue police, actually made Angela's situation more dangerous because they didn't enforce the no-contact order. So their inaction actually put Angela in greater peril. And that's what a state-created danger is. The judge didn't agree.
48 Hours
Post Mortem | Could Angela Prichard Have Been Saved?
The judge also didn't agree that there was sufficient evidence to prove that the officers and Pritchard had relationships. Dave O'Brien requested his hearing a couple of months later because the officers in pretrial filings said they, two of them, said they had never boarded their dogs at the kennels.