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From: Jasper
Date: 9/19/00
Time: 2:42:51 AM
Kari,
My Spanish is horrible. I got a "C" in Spanish in college and I think I did that well only because the teacher liked me. I won't even pretend to know the difference in the El Salvadorian-Spanish dialect Rosa spoke and the Castellian-Spanish they taught at Wayne State in 1972. But I did pick up enough Spanish words to tell the time and to know when she was talking about footsteps and when she was talking about voices. If you talk to your friend I'm sure she will tell you that she was going nuts over other aspects of that testimony that the interpreter got wrong, subtle things that made big difference in how forthcoming she seemed to be.
Rosa could speak English. She could understand English. She spoke to Fuhrman and Roberts in English. But she spoke English so poorly that she did not feel comfortable trying to answer questions in English before the whole world in a murder case. Her interpreter didn't speak Rosa's dialect and Rosa knew when she was screwing up. What doesn't come through on the transcripts is the expressions on her face when the interpreter got important things really wrong and the times you could tell that she answered in English to make sure she wasn't misunderstood.
Rosa did say she heard voices and then footsteps - in that order. But the voices she was talking about then were O.J.'s and Kato's. She recognized O.J.'s voice but not Kato's. That was shortly after 9:00 (I understood that much of her Spanish). She saw them drive away and then she heard the footsteps that frightened her. She stayed scared all the while Kato and O.J. were at McDonalds. She felt safe when she heard O.J.'s voice again.
Later that night, around 11:00, she heard voices again out front. It's not entirely clear to me whether she heard footsteps again before that, if so they belonged to the person who made the thumps at 10:45. I don't think she could have heard Kato because he was wearing running shoes when he went to check on the thumps. I'll have to go back and see if I can clear that up. Maybe it was in her second trip to the stand. Anyhow, the only voice she recognized at 11:00 was O.J.'s. About an hour later, she heard voices again. This time she didn't recognize either of these voices.
I guess the question of what came first, the voices or the steps, depends on where you start and where you stop. I'll look again. --Jasper