Blown away 

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Skorska and her husband had been elated by medical test results Ehrenburg had received at a doctor's appointment the day before the shooting that showed Ehrenburg was in good health and that his condition was stable.

Phone records show Skorska spent half an hour talking to Ehrenburg around 1 p.m. the day he was killed. Her husband sounded fine at the time, Skorska says.

Skorska had been out of town for about two weeks at that point, and says she would never have left the country to visit relatives in Poland had her husband's health been in question.

He was excited about her relatives, who would be returning from Poland with her, coming to visit, she says. In the days before the shooting, he'd gotten his hair cut and hired a maid to clean the house. In her last conversation with her husband, he told her he planned to call Dr. DiLoreto, whom he had never met, to ask for free advice about his kidney because Ehrenburg's HMO wouldn't cover a doctor's visit, Skorska says.

Doctors had told Ehrenburg his kidney was fine, Skorska says, but Ehrenburg wanted a second opinion. He had his other kidney removed years ago after it was discovered he had kidney cancer and feared his one remaining kidney would fail.

Up until that point, Ehrenburg and Skorska had only spoken with Dr. DiLorto's wife, Faythe, about adopting a child. Ehrenburg had never met David DiLoreto, who mispronounced and misspelled Ehrenburg's name during his call to 911.

DiLoreto says that Sasha Ehrenburg sounded fine in the voice mail message Ehrenburg left on the DiLoreto's answering machine at 7:25 p.m. that evening asking David DiLoreto to return his call.

Phone records show that Ehrenburg had spent a considerable amount of time on the phone that afternoon and evening, making and receiving nine calls to and from friends, family and Catholic Social Services after 4 p.m.

But after 7:48 p.m., the phone calls stopped.

When DiLoreto returned Ehrenburg's phone call at 9:12 p.m., Ehrenburg sounded dramatically different than he had on DiLoreto's voice mail earlier that evening.

"He kept repeating, 'I'm so sick,'" says DiLoreto. DiLoreto says he tried to ask Ehrenburg questions, but Ehrenburg wouldn't or couldn't answer them, and instead kept repeating that he was sick. After eight minutes, the phone disconnected, but DiLoreto called back and Ehrenburg picked up again and the two were connected for another eight minutes. DiLoreto says at times he could hear Ehrenburg moving around in the background, as if Ehrenburg had put the phone down. At one point it sounded like Ehrenburg was throwing up.

DiLoreto says he was never sure Ehrenburg knew who he was during either conversation, because Ehrenburg never acknowledged him. DiLoreto told 911 operators that Ehrenburg appeared to be confused, and suggested that he might be in renal failure, but emphasized that he wasn't Ehrenburg's physician and didn't know what if anything was wrong with him. He says Ehrenburg's English wasn't good during their conversation, and he appeared to be slipping back to a Russian language in some places.

DiLoreto says an officer at the scene later called him back that evening, told him Ehrenburg had a gun and wanted to know if Ehrenburg had a psychological disorder.

"I told them he appeared to be confused," says DiLoreto. "I told them he appeared to be a Russian immigrant and that he might be afraid of them because of past experiences with police in Russia. I said he might be more ready to respond to someone speaking his native language."

Policing the Police

Unfortunately, readers of this article now know far more about Ehrenburg's case than the members of Charlotte's citizen review board, which declined to hold a hearing to investigate the case further. The board, which is in charge of investigating complaints about police behavior, is assumed by many to be policing the police.

But as Ehrenburg's case demonstrates, from the beginning, the deck is stacked in favor of the police department.

The board doesn't see actual evidence from cases like Ehrenburg's, but is merely given a summary by the police chief of what happened in the case and other supporting materials if he chooses to provide them. There are no specific rules governing what information must be included in the summary and what can be left out.

Those involved with the citizen review process in this case say review board members never heard the radio communication tapes and largely based their decision off the summary that police wrote up for them.

The Mecklenburg District Attorney's office reviewed the criminal investigations done by the police department in both cases and declined to charge the officers involved with a crime. But aside from county district attorneys, the only eyes that have seen the information that might answer Barnhart's questions belong to those who work for CMPD.