Sergeant Rosario Hubbell

He works for the El Paso County Sheriff’s Office. He is currently sergeant for the patrol midnight shift. He has worked there 16 years.

• In January 2020 he was the major crimes sergeant for the investigations division.
• Major crimes are assaults, armed robberies, homicides, major child abuse cases with felony charges, cold case work, missing and runaway persons.
• He received a request from the Fountain Police Department offering assistance with Gannon.
• This is how Hubbell became aware of the report that patrol took.
• He was the supervisor during the investigation.
• The case began as a missing person runaway case. Detectives then ran standard procedure for missing persons and asked for a comparative sample of Gannon’s DNA.
• They started to prepare for the worst case scenario.
• Letecia stopped cooperating which made them even more concerned with finding Gannon.
• The case was updated to a potential abduction but they did not have the ability to put out an AMBER Alert so they began to expand with search & rescue.
• Community groups put together teams of people who went searching.
• The entire investigations division was working full time on the case.
• They had to rely on the information Letecia gave as the last person to see him.
• The first cursory search happened on January 27th 2020, there were more searches throughout January and February and each one helped develop the investigation and push it further.
• On February 3rd, 2020 Hubbell responded to the Stauch home and did another search.
• In Gannon’s room, there was blood evidence on the walls, on an electrical socket. It was very hard to see; not easily visible to the human eye.
• They wanted to use BlueStar in Gannon’s room; when Hubbell arrived it appeared the blood had been cleaned up.
• The carpet was pulled back because sometimes when you clean a carpet you push things into the back of the carpet.
• Hubbell felt it was stiff and accidentally touched it without gloves. There was saturation through the carpet, the carpet pad, and onto the cement from a blood stain.
• This was directly underneath Gannon’s bed.
• A blood stain analyst, Tom Griffin, was consulted to examine Gannon’s room.
• Hubbell is certified in level 1 crime scene construction. His crime scene class was taught by Griffin.
• They used a lot of BlueStar at the Stauch home.
• On February 25th, 2020 Hubbell documented the entire residence via video camera due to the complexity of the scene.
• The house faces north, Gannon’s room was in the southeast corner of the house.
• Exhibit 373 is a disc containing the video he took, 22 minutes.
• Now he says it is from March 25th 2020.
• The video is played.
• There is a padlock on the fence next to the garage (Gannon would definitely not have been able to unlock it from the back yard).
• The floor planks in the garage are in a different spot they were in during the initial searches.
• There was a presumptive positive of blood on the boards.
• There was a BlueStar reaction on the stairs showing a potential shoe impression.
• In the laundry area, the tile floor reacted to the BlueStar; droplet size.
• There is a small spot of blood on the door and door handle of the door between the garage and laundry blue.
• The floor where the tile meets the carpet also reacted to BlueStar. The carpet in the living room reacted to BlueStar; there was no saturation under the carpet.
• The stairs to the basement reacted to BlueStar; more droplets.
• Cleaning provides a slow reaction unlike blood.
• It showed heavy cleaning on the stairs.
• There was a Luminol reaction on the landing but no saturation on the other side of the carpet.
• The baseboards around the landing reacted to BlueStar.
• The carpet at the bottom of the stairs reacted to BlueStar showing a lot of cleaning in that area.
• There was a reaction to BlueStar at the base of a table, about quarter size.
• In the basement, in the cut out portion of carpet the padding tested positive for BlueStar.
• BlueStar showed a lot of cleaning near the furniture.
• The hallway outside of Gannon’s bedroom reacted to BlueStar and showed a trail to the back corner of the storage area near the sump pump.
• Multiple areas of the storage room showed BlueStar reactions.
• There are dozens of stickers denoting blood spatter on the walls of Gannon’s room in the corner where his bed was.
• There is a large red stain in the corner directly underneath where his bed had been.
• The state clarifies it was February 25th, 2020.
• He does not recall when Al moved out.

Cross Examination

• This was February 25th 2020.
• The searches with BlueStar were several days prior to that.
• The BlueStar trail ended at the sump pump.
• The storage room was empty when they used BlueStar.
• BlueStar is testing for iron; it is the building blocks of blood - protein and iron.
• Presumably, further testing was done on the swabs; CSI techs collected the actual swabs.

Juror questions

• Does BlueStar in any way compromise the subsequent analysis of the collected blood sample?: That would be a great question for the crime lab. A scientist would be able to explain it better. When they say something is positive for blood they mean 100% it is blood. I don’t know if it does not impact the sample of if they test out the BlueStar.
• Was the trash bin outside searched for evidence?: The night that Sergeant Smith was there, the trash can was looked at.