MLM Counties News. Notices. Need-to-know Information.
Suspected Clayton garage bomber Milton “Skip” Ohlsen III is claiming St. Charles attorney Jeffrey Witt acted as an informant for the government when Witt was supposedly representing him.
Ohlsen said Witt tipped off St. Louis County police to Ohlsen’s whereabouts after helping Ohlsen get released from St. Louis County jail in December 2008, Ohlsen’s attorney Gilbert Sison said in a motion to suppress evidence filed Friday in U.S. District Court in St. Louis.
Witt, of the Law Offices of Jeffrey M. Witt, relayed a request for comment to Michael Downey, a legal ethics attorney with Armstrong Teasdale. Downey emailed a statement and said in the email that no other comment would be made.
“Mr. Witt consulted with me as his legal ethics counsel before any disclosure was made,” Downey said in the statement. “We believe that Mr. Witt’s conduct complied with all his obligations under the Missouri Rules of Professional Conduct.”
The information led to a search of Ohlsen’s Ford Expedition and a later search of his apartment, according to the filing from Sison, of Rosenblum, Schwartz, Rogers & Glass.
After Ohlsen posted bond in the county case, he was transferred to the St. Louis City Justice Center for questioning in a separate domestic case. Witt then gave Ohlsen a ride to his downtown apartment, and later to his workplace, where he’d left his SUV, the filing said. Ohlsen later was arrested there on an outstanding federal warrant and the Expedition was searched.
Ohlsen also believes that Witt “provided other information that the Government will eventually use in its prosecution against the Defendant,” Sison said in the filing. The motion asks that evidence derived from information Witt provided be withheld from his federal criminal trial in the October 2008 bombing that injured Clayton attorney John Gillis.
Sison did not return a phone call by press time.
Prosecutors said in a response that Witt was not the source of information that Ohlsen was going to pick up his car at a South St. Louis County business’s parking lot, where he’d left it when he was arrested on theft charges. Investigators were keeping tabs on Ohlsen and knew where he’d left his SUV and notified the police, the filing said.
Even if Witt had been the source of the information about Ohlsen’s whereabouts, it was not protected confidential information, said the filing, which was signed by Assistant U.S. Attorney Carrie Constantin.
“Jeff Witt did not obtain the information about defendant’s location from a communication from defendant; he knew the location because he left defendant there,” the filing says.
The case is U.S. v. Ohlsen, 4:11-cr-00284. An evidentiary hearing is scheduled for June 1. Trial is set for Sept. 5.
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