Marketos, Rice square off
Jury selection was concluded Monday. A panel of five men and one woman will decide the outcome of the $2 million suit, in which Marketos seeks compensation for attorney's fees, pain, mental anguish, trauma, fear, sleeplessness, confusion, stress and loss of time from school.
These charges stem from a confrontation between Marketos and then-Campus Police Sgt. Kenneth Nipe during Will Rice College's Tower Party on Feb. 19, 1993. Exactly what happened during the encounter is at the heart of the trial, but both sides agree that there was a struggle of some sort between the two.
Rice claims that it was an attempt on Marketos' part to resist arrest, and therefore Nipe was justified in using increasing force to apprehend him. Marketos' attorney, Greg Gladden, implied in statements to the court that Marketos' resistance to Nipe's actions was an attempt to protect an injured shoulder.
Marketos claims that during the incident his shoulder was dislocated, and that he spent over two and half hours in a Campus Police detention cell in that condition. He was then charged with aggravated assault on a police officer, a felony.
At a subsequent examining trial, the felony complaint was dropped due to lack of probable cause. All other pending charges were dropped on Feb. 16, 1994, according to legal documents filed by Gladden.
Sid Richardson College senior J.R. Smiljanic was among the witnesses called to the stand by Gladden on Tuesday. Smiljanic tes- tified about what he saw of the incident involving Marketos and Nipe. Smiljanic also said that he could understand why students did not want their names associated with negative information about Nipe's behavior during his confrontation with Marketos.
Marketos took the stand on Wednesday before his lawyer rested the plaintiff's case.
Rice called Edward Kuo as its first witness Wednesday afternoon. Kuo, now at Southwestern Medical School in Dallas, was a '93 graduate of Rice and a WRC resident at the time of the incident. Kuo and three of his friends were standing in the stairwell near where the altercation took place. He said that immediately preceeding the incident, "Sgt. Nipe was escorting three guys down the stairs."
"They looked pretty drunk," Kuo said.
Kuo described what happened when Marketos came on the scene: "Pete Marketos came from behind and said basically, `Let them go.'" Kuo described Marketos' voice as angry.
He said that Marketos grabbed Nipe by the shoulder; subsequently, Nipe tried to grab Marketos to escort him out also. "He grabbed his arm from behind, but then Pete turned around and struggled with him," Kuo said.
"It was confrontational ... I thought [Marketos] was on the offensive," he said.
Marketos and Nipe continued to struggle as they left the building.
When Kuo and his friends went outside shortly after the struggle in the stairwell, Kuo saw Nipe outside with what appeared to be blood around his mouth. "[Nipe] was pretty upset, might have been swearing -- he was saying how Pete chipped his tooth, and he was bleeding," he said.
The defense's last witness Wednesday was John Wesley, a '94 graduate who witnessed the struggle outside. Wesley testified that Nipe was trying to use as little force as possible to subdue Marketos.
This item appeared in the News section of the November 3, 1995 issue.
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