Dancing on Her Grave (19 page)

“It is my determination to adjudicate you guilty at this time with a murder of second degree and sentence you to the maximum sentence of life in prison.”

The Flores family held hands, cried, and were visibly touched as they finally found some closure after so much pain. A wave of relief swept through the family as they heard the sentencing.

Jason Griffith turned to his mother, who had stood by her son throughout the case. Charlene Davis told her son, tearfully, “I will fight this every day until I get back to you. I adore you.”

The sentencing immediately made headlines across the state and the country, from Fox News to the
Las Vegas Sun
, from the Minneapolis
Star Tribune
to the
Huffington Post
.

Celeste created her own headlines in her Facebook page a few hours later:

I’m happy with the outcome of a life sentence because I know he will not get the chance at parole. Debbie can now rest in peace with justice served. This maximum was 25 but the judge gave him life, with eligibility for parole after that. I want to take the time to THANK EVERYONE OF YOU. Everyone from the LVPD, detectives, DA Office, courts, judge. The media who worked hard and kept her alive. But I especially want to thank, the volunteers, city and community of Las Vegas who embraced me and my family. Her friends, my friends and supporters who have stood by my side since day one. You gave me strength when I was weak. Positive
reinforcement when I was down and helped me back up. And so many prayers that they made a huge difference in today’s outcome. The power of prayers and God does exist. Thank you all so much. There are not enough words that I can give you for my gratitude. Love you guys. Xoxoxo.

Later that same day after Jason Griffith was sentenced, longtime Las Vegas news reporter Aaron Drawhorn from the local CBS station was able to get a short and peculiar interview with him from behind bars.

Aaron is a tall, blond, green-eyed, handsome young man from Port Neches, Texas, whom I first met when we both worked as journalists in Texas. Later, when I moved to Las Vegas for my Univision job, the first reporter I bumped into out in the field was Aaron.

Las Vegas is a crazy, fast-paced, and bustling city for tourists, but for locals, it is a small town. Locals hang out in the same spots, almost always trying to escape from the tourists and the madness at the Strip. Every time a new restaurant or bar opens, it gets packed with the same people. Again, with the locals; the tourists don’t know about such spots.

Aaron was friends with Chris, an Australian guy who lived at the Onyx Apartments, the same apartment complex as Debbie and her roommate, Sonya. He recalled that
Chris had always been mentioning his neighbor who talked finance but also danced in the
FANTASY
show at the Luxor.

The reporter clearly remembered the day the story broke, about “a missing girl from
FANTASY
who had many college degrees,” he said. “It didn’t take very long for me to piece everything together,” he said, since “what were the odds of a
FANTASY
dancer, who had a master’s degree in finance and who also lived at the Onyx Apartments?” he asked himself. It was certainly an odd combination, and a little more than a coincidence, he thought. By this time, his friend Chris, the one who lived in the same apartment building as Debbie and Sonya, had moved back to Australia. Aaron sent him a private message via Facebook.

A couple of days went by, and Aaron finally got a reply from Chris, apologizing for not responding sooner. Chris told him he was aware of the case because their building manager had already contacted him to tell him that Debora was missing. The two friends, although now far away, exchanged a couple of messages. Aaron kept the Australian posted on all the developments on the case.

“It was one of the most high profile murders that Las Vegas had seen in years,” Aaron remarked. “It isn’t every day that an entertainer on the Strip goes missing.” Many more reporters than usual covered it; sometimes there was not even a seat in the courtroom, he recalled. “Debbie’s
murder got as much attention as the O.J. Simpson robbery and kidnapping trial in Vegas,” he observed.

“One thing about this trial and Griffith that was different was that Jason talked on the stand.” Aaron assumed the defendant thought that if he was going to get a break or any sort of sympathy from this gruesome murder it was going to be with his testimony.

“At the end, it kind of did,” was Aaron’s theory about the outcome. “The jury came to second-degree rather than first-degree murder. It had to be his testimony that got him a lesser conviction.”

Still, Aaron remembered that Jason Griffith had been argumentative on the stand.

“At one point the prosecutor asked him a question and his reply was: ‘Seriously?’ That stuck with me,” he observed. Aaron also remembered that a lot of courtroom watchers agreed that if Griffith had called the police right away, he would’ve had a much stronger self-defense case. But he hadn’t done that. And to top it off, Griffith blamed it on the methods of the Las Vegas Police Department when he said Metro was “shoot first, ask questions later.” Not to mention that he’d face charges of concealment and disposing of the body.

Aaron was not surprised that Jason Griffith got a hard sentence from the bench.

The same afternoon, after the sentencing was handed down, Aaron and his photographer were made aware that
Griffith was available for a media interview. His assignment desk chief called him. Everyone—meaning every news media outlet—was there, his superior told him.

“I get down there, and we were first in line. Channel 3 is next, but I had a first shot at him.”

An officer at the Clark County Detention Center told him to set up in a booth where Jason Griffith would meet and talk with him via telephone through a glass.

“Our camera was set up right in front of his space. We were rolling as soon as I sat down and I said hello.”

But Griffith had wanted to do the interview face-to-face, “on his terms.” When the camera started rolling behind a wall made of glass in the Clark County Detention Center, Griffith did not seem very happy.

“This whole yellow journalism, this whole ‘you look guilty in this setting, you look like an animal, like a monster that people cannot come and touch you.’ That’s not who I am, and that is how I have been depicted since the beginning of this, so I am really not interested in doing it this way,” Jason Griffith said.

He was concerned about his “image” during the interview.

“It is a bit early for me with the things I want to share with you guys. I wanted a little bit of time to digest what just happened today,” he told the reporter.

Aaron said he spent the next few minutes basically arguing with the prisoner about the interview, and
although Jason Griffith was very polite, he was extremely upset about the forum of the interview.

According to Aaron, Griffith apparently did not want to do it through a glass and on the telephone, but “he had no choice. You have to get approval from the jail administration to do a face-to-face interview. The media outlet must request approval and it takes going up a chain of command to interview an inmate face-to-face.”

Griffith told Aaron he wanted what is known as a “contact visit,” or in person and face-to-face, because he felt that when the public saw him speaking through a telephone behind a glass, it would make him look like a criminal. He indicated to Aaron, he did not like the way he was being portrayed in the media.

“This went on back and forth between us for about seven minutes,” the reporter said. “At one point, Griffith acknowledged that we were having an interview about an interview.” However, Jason Griffith never asked their crew to stop recording.

After coming to a grinding halt and a dead end, Aaron asked Griffith to please answer a couple of questions, taking the opportunity that the media was already there waiting, but he declined.

Aaron asked if Griffith thought he’d had a fair trial, or felt he’d been wrongly portrayed in the media, but Griffith still would not elaborate.

“He said he needed more time to think about a couple
of things he wanted to talk about,” Aaron remembered, at which point the reporter, feeling a tad exasperated, retorted, “You had enough time.”

By this point, Aaron realized the interview was not going to happen. He knew he had enough to get two sound bites for this story, and he basically concluded the conversation.

No one else who was waiting was able to obtain an interview at all.

Aaron said he’d even told Griffith that there was another television station in line to speak with him, as a courtesy to his colleague, but apparently the prisoner hadn’t wanted to go another round and argue with another reporter.

Nor has he spoken to anyone since, presumably, as of this writing.

As of that day, July 23, 2014, Jason “Blu” Omar Griffith will pay, with every day that remains of his natural life, for what he did to Debora Flores-Narvaez on the night of December 12, 2010. He is eligible for possible parole after ten years, counting the three he already served. This means that in 2021, he can appear before a parole board and request to be set free on parole.

But then, there is that pesky matter of the family appearing at his parole hearings, especially Celeste, the
sister who had so adamantly pleaded for a harsh sentence. Celeste, as usual, posted her reaction to the sentence on Facebook, after a hiatus, to let family and friends that she was holding up okay.

“So ever since that bastard was sentenced to life in prison for Debbie. I feel like a different person. I know I will have to deal with this again in regards to an appeal, parole, etc. But I feel like a ton has been lifted off my chest. I feel more at peace & relaxed. I smile a lil more & less stressed, even happier. They say God will not give you what you cannot handle. And that’s sooo true. I’m a testament to that. Amen!

“But please let God decide what I can & cannot handle. I love my family & friends. I do. They’re all I got when I leave to pass on my existence.

“And I know that they love me and mean well and try to protect me from things. . . .”

Dreams and Messages

Let me preface what I’m going to tell you by first saying that I’m a very skeptical, yet open-minded woman.

Growing up in Colombia until the age of thirteen, I always heard stories about people who could somehow communicate with loved ones who have passed away. This belief is prevalent in our Latin countries. But it had never happened to me until this day, and I am not even sure if it did all.

As a journalist, I’m used to hearing the most harrowing stories and looking at disturbing graphic images, but I’ve always tried to leave them “at work,” before I got home to my husband and my pets.

Nevertheless, Debbie’s story has been different. There are times when I have been working day and night talking
about her, to her friends, family, or the authorities, so it has been almost impossible not to take the work home, since every time I write, it has to be at my house because I do not have the time to do it at work.

That being said, I’m not sure if it is that my brain is overworked and in overdrive, or if Debbie really has tried to connect with me. Talking to her sister, she has mentioned similar things happening to her; she says she feels Debbie’s presence.

The first couple of days after she was found dead, I would often feel as if someone was in the car with me.

Now, almost four years later, and now that I am also getting more details about Jason Griffith’s life, I felt it again.

It was a couple of days ago as of this writing that it happened, the day I interviewed Griffith’s attorney Abel Yáñez. I got home hoping to write as much as I could for the book. It is always better to write down information when it is “fresh,” especially because you don’t leave as many small details behind.

But there came a point when I felt like I had to stop writing. It was about to stop around 1
A.M.
, and it felt as if Debbie were there; it felt uncomfortable as I kept on reproducing the information I’d been given by Yáñez—that Debora was a stalker, the appeal and the possible grounds for it, and the fact that Griffith said her murder
was self-defense. The next night, I was able to finally play the video that Jason Griffith had recorded, of Debbie admitting to the acts of petty vandalism.

Judge Kathleen Delaney had suppressed the videos from being shown at Jason Griffith’s murder trial, although in them, Debbie does admit that she assaulted Griffith, broke into his house, looked on his laptop, poured egg whites on his car, and slashed three of his car tires. She says she knows what is wrong under the law.

Abel Yáñez, Jason’s attorney, had talked about this video for a while. The defense tried to enter the black-and-white recording as evidence during the
Nevada vs. Jason Omar Griffith
trial, but Judge Delaney refused once and again for it to be part of the evidence. She objected because the video had been recorded secretly in Griffith’s bedroom sometime in 2010, a couple of months before Griffith ended Debora’s life. The original video was longer, but Griffith had edited the recording down to 1 minute and 34 seconds. Delaney denied the attorney’s petition for it to be played to the jury, saying any statement should always be listened to or read in its entirely, so the jury could have a clear understanding of the exact scenario, not only the parts Jason Griffith wanted to be heard.

Yáñez, however, believed the video was a key element to show how Debbie supposedly assaulted his client, so
during my recent visit to Las Vegas where I met with the attorney for coffee, he provided me a copy after the trial was over and the sentence was read. It was saved in a weird format; one had to have a code to download it, which nobody in the newsroom could decipher. So I had to place it in different computers until it finally played. It was chilling to hear Debbie’s voice, to hear the desperation in her words, to analyze her body language as she walked back and forth, touched her face, placed her hands on her hips, trying to convince Jason she was right, and that she was, as prosecutor Michelle Fleck had stated, seeking the truth.

During the recording, Griffith seemed very calm. Of course, he, unlike Debbie, knew that they were being recorded. He kept on asking the same question in different ways to Debbie during a heated argument: “So, you admit to having assaulted me?” She was brutally honest and said yes to all his questions, admitting to slashing his car tires, looking on his computer, and pouring egg whites on his car.

To be honest, it was chilling to watch this video for the first time, to see Debbie so full of life, to hear her voice for the first time. I had done so much research and talked about her to so many people that just hearing her was shocking to me. I tell everyone, even her sister, that I feel like I really knew Debbie.

This is a transcript of the 1 minute and 34 second video that defense attorney Abel Yáñez gave me:

Debbie:
I’m admitting that I hit you, that I looked in your house, that I looked in your laptop, that I poured egg whites on your car, that I slashed three of your tires because I said, I will give him one left. . . . I am not going to lie about anything that I am doing.

(She starts raising her voice, sounding desperate. If the defense wanted to portray Debbie as an aggressor, the videos would have been proof to the contrary. Debbie does not seem evil, not even mean-spirited, in the videos. She only sounds sincere.)

Debbie:
But I did it because you—

Jason:
(interrupts) You are doing this because I can’t prove it.

Debbie:
No. Do you think I’m slashing tires and think you wouldn’t know . . . you knew it was me when you walked out. . . .

Jason:
But you made sure that there is no proof that you did it, so I can’t take any legal action.

Debbie:
Blu, fuck with me legally all you want and you will lose? No, I don’t fuck with that mentality.

Debbie:
I know legally, the law, and I know what it is legally wrong, and what it is legally right.

Jason:
Slashing tires is not legally wrong?

Debbie:
It is damage to property that no one witnessed.

Jason:
So, you are admitting to property damage?

Debbie:
Yeah . . . I am admitting it.

This recording is now part of the State of Nevada’s public record trial. After Jason was arrested in January 2011, the Las Vegas Police Department seized his home located in North Las Vegas and confiscated his personal computer. This video was found, as well as many other pieces of evidence, so the public defender’s office considered it to be useful for their defense. Once again, this was never played to the jury. They only heard of its existence.

As a woman, I’ve put myself many times in Debbie’s shoes. This video, to me, only shows a desperate woman in love, trying to do whatever it took to get her lover’s attention. By slashing tires, she screamed, in the wrong ways, I love you. She was begging for her lover’s respect and commitment.

The camera is hidden, so the viewer can only see Jason Griffith’s back wearing a hoodie. He is sitting down on the right-hand side of a bed with white sheets, and Debbie is standing, wearing sweatpants and a jacket, with her black hair loose, on the left side of the bed.

I asked Yáñez if it wasn’t against the law to record someone without their knowledge or consent, and he said it was perfectly fine because his client had done it at the privacy of his house. But then, what was Jason Griffith’s purpose in recording evidence? Covering his own back when he got rid of her?

I had to replay the videos many times to understand what was being said and to be able to write a transcript of it. That same night, I had a really vivid dream about Debora.

We are in my car and I believe it is in Las Vegas. I am driving and Debbie is in the front passenger’s seat. We talk and I remember seeing her so clear, her hair, her eyes, it didn’t seem like a dream. I remember telling her, “Debbie, I feel like I know you. If this hadn’t happened to you, I have a feeling we would have had a good friendship.”

When I woke up, I was scared, it was about 4
A.M.,
and my room was dark. I managed to go back to sleep, but when I awoke again, I could not remember much more of what we said. I know she told me “I had two purposes in life. One ended, and I am working on the second.” What could that possibly mean? I asked myself.

The next night, I had the opportunity to connect with psychic Gale St. John. It was late, since I am on the West Coast and Gale lives in Toledo, Ohio, but I was told she would be awake so I made the phone call right away.

Gale is a renowned psychic who traipses throughout
the country searching for the missing and presumed dead. She does not charge for her services, and she does it accompanied by her certified cadaver search dogs, which are border collies, the best search dogs there are. She loves them, and they are also pet dogs who live in her home.

Gale St. John had spoken with Celeste Flores-Narvaez on an Internet radio show about Debbie. She has been on such national programs as
Nancy Grace
,
Issues with Jane Velez-Mitchell
, and
Larry King Live
. Gale is a special woman. More than 70 percent of the bodies she has helped to be discovered were people murdered by someone they loved.

But Gale is not one of those psychics who try to grab the media spotlight, nor does she say about someone missing, as other psychics usually do, that the victim will be found “in the woods by a body of water.” In fact, she does not like to know anything about a victim beforehand, and does not like the media to interfere with her searches.

I told Gale: “I don’t believe in any of this stuff, and I could be just obsessed with so much work, but I am very curious to know if you feel Debbie has tried to send me a message. Does she think I should talk to someone else about her story? Is there anything I’m missing that she wants told?”

I had never spoken to Gale over the phone. She has a very soothing yet confident voice. I felt as though I knew
her, and she was happy to take my call even at that late hour. It was 9:30
P.M.
my time, and 12:30, after midnight, where she lives. But she knew about Debora’s case from previously speaking with Celeste, so she was familiar with all of the details.

We spoke for over forty minutes. I was driving home from work when we started talking. I couldn’t even get out of the car; I continued our chat inside my vehicle parked in front of my house. I was so intrigued. At times, I would feel goose bumps while the psychic gave me Debora’s message.

“No one knows what happened to Debora,” Gale said for openers. “No one knows how much she suffered. The most important thing she wants is to send a message to other women: this could have been you.”

She went on to emphasize, to me, I don’t know why: “This could have been you, Carolina.” These were reminiscent of the words that Marci Gee, one of Jason Griffith’s ex-girlfriends, had said to me.

My heart stopped, and I thought,
Is Debbie trying to tell me this?
But I continued listening to Gale.

She said Debbie wanted people to know she wasn’t a crazy person and that she was a pretty normal woman for her age.

Apparently, Debbie was very happy to know I was writing a book that does justice to her story.

“This isn’t any more about how she was killed. It is
about using the facts of what happened as a lesson, saying, ‘Look, is this going on in your life?’”

Gale went on to tell me that Debora feels very close to me, and that she’s very thankful she’s being portrayed in the right light in this book.

“Her obsession [Jason Griffith] turned out to be her worst nightmare,” Gale said. “She chose to overlook it and hide it.”

She certainly did hide it; even her sister, Celeste, has told me she never heard about Jason Griffith, or the fact that he was abusive to her.

“Debbie takes responsibility for her actions; she knows where she went wrong,” the psychic went on.

I told Gale I feel my cat, Pippa, acts weird at night, something she never did before. It seems to me like she’s playing with someone in the living room. I wake up and my kitty is playing with her toys. This happens almost every night I go to bed late working on Debbie’s case.

Gale told me cats have a very high sensibility to spirits; more than dogs, she said.

“Has Debbie forgiven Jason?” I asked her.

“No, but she knows she has to,” Gale said calmly. “Forgiveness is part of the other side. She understands him.”

Gale St. John also said that this time, Debbie “was very calm, unlike the way I heard her before, so playful and animated. Today it felt like jumping hurdles. The way
in which she was putting things to me, they weren’t real. When things are happening so fast and suddenly there is a resolution, it’s like wham! It’s the feeling she has. The sentencing was the final outcome of what happened.”

The psychic explained, “She was fighting, and trying to make things go in this direction, because she was a hell of a fighter in life. Now she realizes she can’t come back, and she has passed, she has crossed over. I heard her kind of whisper: ‘Even life cannot bring back life.’