12.18.25 Statement by Karen Friedman Agnifilo Outside 100 Centre Street
Good morning, everyone. First of all, we want to thank everyone for coming and for sitting through a three-week mini-trial that should have been a half a day. Mapp hearings and Huntley hearings to suppress statements and evidence usually take a half a day, maybe a day. We were told this was going to be several days, but this went on for three weeks unnecessarily, and lots of witnesses were called. And in fact, today we were fully expecting the case detective, Detective Diaz, to testify. And it was only after Lieutenant Leonardi testified about the illegal wiretap of Mr. Mangione in Altoona, Pennsylvania, that they withdrew statement notice and now suddenly we’re not going to have the lead case detective in this case. It’s significant. There was – a lot of open questions that we wanted to question him about, especially the very prejudicial statement made by the Chief of Detectives at the time. There was a press conference a year ago where they were talking about all the probable cause and the reasons they had to believe that Mr. Mangione committed this crime. And one of those things was that they relied on a statement made by his mother that she could see him doing something like this. That’s an absolutely false statement that was never said. And in fact, we asked for discovery regarding that. The prosecution told us they gave us all the discovery, we even subpoenaed materials from San Francisco Police Department. There is no such statement. It was never made. In fact, it was the opposite. What Mrs. Mangione said was that she could never see her son being a risk to himself or others. And we put that on the record again today, and that still has not been corrected by either the NYPD or the Manhattan DA’s Office. That’s a prejudicial statement that has been repeated many, many times. And yes, I’m repeating it here. But because you all have published this over and over and over again, because this was an essential piece of information that Detective Kenny said was relied upon by the NYPD in this case. So we just, we want the NYPD or the San Francisco PD or the Manhattan DA to correct this very prejudicial statement that was never said. So thank you very much for coming.