State v. Langlois
| Citation | 2 N.E.3d 936 |
| Decision Date | 22 November 2013 |
| Docket Number | No. L–11–1313.,L–11–1313. |
| Parties | STATE of Ohio, Appellee v. Mark LANGLOIS, Appellant. |
| Court | United States Court of Appeals (Ohio) |
OPINION TEXT STARTS HERE
Julia R. Bates, Lucas County Prosecuting Attorney, and David F. Cooper, Assistant Prosecuting Attorney, for appellee.
Jeffrey M. Gamso, Cleveland, for appellant.
{¶ 1} Defendant-appellant, Mark Langlois, appeals from his conviction and sentence by the Lucas County Court of Common Pleas following a jury trial in which he was found guilty of one count of murder and one count of aggravated murder, both with attendant firearms specifications.
{¶ 2} On the morning of January 27, 2011, a homicide occurred at Forklifts of Toledo (FOT) where Langlois was employed. Sometime between 7:50 a.m. and 8:30 a.m., the victim, Jim Schueler Jr., died of a gunshot wound to the head. Schueler, who was the manager at FOT, was in his office enjoying a cup of yogurt and a banana when he was killed. For about two years he had been on a “health kick,” and each morning it was his habit to eat this same breakfast. Janice Albright, the fleet manager, last saw Schueler alive when she passed his office at 7:52 a.m. His back was to the doorway and he was seated at his desk eating. Albright then left the front office area to get coffee and was away until after 8:00 a.m. She testified that if someone entered the office who Schueler knew, he would continue to eat without stopping. But if he saw a customer or stranger, he “would stop eating, set his food on his desk, get up and introduce himself.” At approximately 8:30 a.m., another FOT employee, Chris Fordham, discovered Schueler sprawled on the floor next to the desk. His chair was overturned and pieces of the banana and yogurt covered his face. Thinking Schueler had suffered a heart attack, Fordham and another employee attempted to revive him through CPR while Albright called 9–1–1. They stopped when they saw blood coming from the back of his head. Paramedics and Toledo police officers arrived soon afterward.
{¶ 3} It was quickly apparent to the crime scene investigators that Schueler was murdered with some type of 9mm semiautomatic pistol because a spent shell casing in that caliber was found next to his body. An autopsy later determined that he was shot once at point-blank range. The bullet entered just behind the right ear, traversed sharply downward and exited the left side of his neck. Investigators eventually recovered the bullet in the room near the desk. Since no gunshot was heard, police surmised that a sound suppressor must have been attached to the barrel of the pistol. The ambient noise from shop machines operating adjacent to Schueler's office would also have contributed to muffling a gunshot.
{¶ 4} Almost immediately police suspected that an FOT employee had killed Schueler even though no motive was apparent. There were no signs of a struggle, forced entry, or theft. Nor was there any indication that someone had entered FOT through the front door before the murder. Whenever that door was opened, it would trigger a chime to alert those working in the front offices that someone was entering. No one there had heard the chime sounding within the time frame of Schueler's murder. That left only the possibility of accessing the front office from the shop area. Consequently, all FOT employees were ordered to remain on the premises while police secured Schueler's office and gathered evidence.
{¶ 5} When Langlois arrived at FOT that morning it was extremely cold and snowing with a bitter wind driving the snow. A five-year employee and one of three shop mechanics, he had expected to work, as he usually did, inside the FOT facility that day. However, because a road technician called in sick and service was needed on a vehicle at a customer's business, Art Martin, FOT's service manager, assigned that task to Langlois. This prompted an angry response during which Langlois expressed frustration at being made to work outside in the cold. Despite the outburst, Martin ordered him to pack up and get started. At 7:20 a.m., Langlois, still visibly agitated about the assignment, began loading tools into an FOT truck to drive to the worksite. He did not leave the facility, however, until just before 8:00 a.m. This time was confirmed by both a GPS tracking device attached to the FOT truck that Langlois used and a videotape from a surveillance camera atop a car wash next to the FOT property. A fellow employee also saw Langlois leaving the front office before departing, “look[ing] like he was mad at the world.” Another employee would later testify that the mechanics rarely visited this part of the building.
{¶ 6} Langlois returned to the FOT facility about 10:30 a.m., telling someone he came back for more tools and parts. He was already aware, from another employee's call earlier, that Schueler was dead; yet, despite that fact and the heavy police presence and the attendant commotion from fire department EMTs, Langlois appeared emotionless and disinterested. He asked no questions and seemed concerned only with getting back to his offsite assignment. At first he refused to be interviewed by the investigating detectives who, by then, had gathered all the FOT employees into one room. Langlois told one detective that he “was not here” when Schueler was killed. Witnesses who saw Langlois at this point described him as looking “shaky” and “nervous.”
{¶ 7} Later that day all the employees, including Langlois, went to the Toledo Police Safety Building to be interviewed and give statements. During questioning, Langlois was asked whether he stopped anywhere after leaving FOT for the assigned work site. Langlois said he drove directly to the location of the job assignment. However, the tracking data from the GPS device on the FOT truck revealed that he had stopped at his home for about five minutes before going on to the work site. Langlois acknowledged that he owned “a lot” of guns and had a concealed-carry permit. He agreed to give police two of his 9mm semiautomatic pistols for examination, one of them a Beretta and the other a Glock model 26. Subsequently, police executed a search warrant on his home and recovered more handguns, ammunition, sound suppressors, and numerous types of firearms paraphernalia.
{¶ 8} Langlois was eventually indicted on one count of aggravated murder in violation of R.C. 2903.01(A) and (F), and one count of murder in violation of R.C. 2903.02(B), along with firearms specifications as to each count. At trial, the state's evidence included the spent 9mm shell case recovered from the murder scene and the bullet that killed Schueler. One of the state's experts, David Cogan, testified about his comparative ballistics testing using Langlois' 9mm Glock 26. Specifically, Cogan compared both the bullet and the shell case from the crime scene with a spent bullet and shell case produced through a test-fire procedure with the Glock 26. The comparison confirmed that the crime-scene shell case matched the one test-fired in the Glock, but the bullets did not match. The state theorized that the inconsistent results with the bullets were due to the fact that Langlois had used a different barrel in the Glock for the murder and then disposed of it afterward. Police were never able to find that barrel. A second ballistic expert testified that he reviewed Cogan's examination and testing of the shell cases, verified that his procedure was correct, and agreed that the crime-scene shell case came from Langlois' Glock 26.
{¶ 9} An assistant coroner testified that she found small abrasions and slight deposits of soot around the entrance wound on the back of Schueler's head. This indicated that the pistol had been placed close to the skin, resulting in an imprint or “contact wound.” She noted, however, that in a “true contact wound,” where the muzzle of the weapon is directly on the skin when fired, there is much more soot found in and around the entrance wound. The very slight amount of soot in Schueler's wound could indicate that a suppressor was used on the barrel. On cross-examination, however, she conceded there might be “other possible explanations too.”
{¶ 10} In an effort to substantiate its theory that Langlois had killed Schueler with the Glock 26 using a different barrel and a suppressor, the state introduced, over objection, a large number of exhibits which tended to show his familiarity with firearms, their component parts and method of assembly, and the use of sound suppressors on pistols. This evidence included other handguns, the suppressors and their adaptors, magazines, spare barrels, scopes, holsters, quantities of ammunition of different calibers, spent shell casings, tools for repairing firearms, reloading components and tools for making ammunition, as well as books, periodicals and DVDs all relating to firearms and shooting.
{¶ 11} Additionally, through the testimony of Detective James Dec, the state introduced Langlois' internet browsing history recovered from his home computer. Defense counsel did not object to this evidence. The browsing history showed that Langlois had visited websites pertaining to firearms, gun parts, and replacement barrels “hundreds of times,” and had used on-line search engines for those subjects repeatedly. Dec could not identify the dates of these visits and searches, however, in relation to the date of Schueler's murder, because of the “particular way the internet history was logged.” Dec's analysis also uncovered the browsing of websites devoted to the topic of pistol suppressors. This history indicated “hundreds if not thousands of searches for silencers or suppressors.” Within that history, Dec found that Langlois had searched websites pertaining to suppressors that would fit the specific models of Glocks he owned. There were also searches for “drop-in” replacement barrels, some of them made for use with a...
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