C-Seg; Trentadue Interview

This week, a federal judge approved a $1.1 million award to the family of a man who died in federal custody in Oklahoma City in 1995. Prison officials say Kenneth Michael Trentado committed suicide, but family members have long maintained that he was beaten to death. While Tuesday's ruling failed to hold corrections authorities responsible, it did say that the federal government handled the case improperly and was guilty of intentional inflection of emotional distress. Salt Lake City Attorney Jesse Trentado recounted the KGOU recently that his brother's death took key and his family by complete surprise. He lived in San Diego and years ago had been convicted of bank robbery in San Diego. He'd gotten an argument with his probation officer and refused to report and that was in 1987. And then the summer of 1995, he's arrested crossing the border from Mexico and sent to Oklahoma City to the federal transfer center and was dead two days later.

My brother supposedly committed suicide by hanging himself when he's beaten, head to toe, front to back, and his throat slashed. When you look at those photographs of my brother's body, that's not a suicide. The Trentadoos began searching for answers, but they encountered a series of roadblocks that Jesse Trentadoos believes were attempts to cover up the actual circumstances surrounding his brother's death. If he'd been killed by two or three prison guards, the FBI would have turned those men over in a heartbeat. There has to be a reason why all of the evidence disappeared. The logbooks that would have shown who had access to my brother disappeared. If they didn't disappear, the pages are missing. The crime scene photographs, negatives of crime scene photographs, disappeared. I'll have the FBI file alone, some 41 pieces of evidence disappeared without explanation. It's the greatest case of disappearing evidence I've ever heard of. And there has to be a reason for that. That reason, Jesse Trentadoos contends, was first revealed in an anonymous phone call he received about a year and a half after his brother's death. Now, keep in mind that Kenneth Michael Trentado

died on August 21, 1995, just four months after the Oklahoma City bombing. The caller told Jesse that his brother was killed in a botched FBI interrogation, and that authorities mistook his brother for a white supremacist bank robber, who may have been involved in anti-government attacks like the bombing of the Mura building. Jesse Trentadoos didn't make much of the call at the time, but then in 2001, he was contacted by an unlikely source. Shortly before he was executed, I received a message from Timothy McVeigh, who said that when I saw your brother's picture and read how he died, I knew that the FBI killed him because they thought he was Richard Lee Guthrie. Well, then I got a photograph of Guthrie, and Guthrie looks exactly like my brother, and Guthrie and my brother also matched the description of John Doe 2, which was being circulated by the FBI when my brother was picked up. That's to say, both were white males of similar age and height with dark complexions, powerful upper body builds, and dragon tattoos on their left forearms,

and they were both found driving mid-1980 Chevrolet pickups. Guthrie, by the way, committed suicide himself in his Kentucky jail cell in 1996. Since it's considering an appeal, the US Department of Justice declined comment for this story, but in the past, it's denied allegations that Kenneth Trentadoo was murdered, or that it conspired to cover up anything. Next month, a federal judge will review Jesse Trentadoo's request for FBI records that could provide significant clues in the death of his brother, and possibly new information about the Oklahoma City bombing. I'm KGOU News Director Scott Gurion.