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CHRIS TISCHA Clearwater pharmacist confesses, but a judge agrees to dismiss the charges because evidence in his home was found during an illegal search.
CLEARWATER - Lynn Harbach came to court Wednesday morning lugging a cloth bag stuffed with framed photos of her daughter, Christina Hurst.
Harbach wanted to show those photos to Judge Linda Allan at a hearing scheduled for 8:30 a.m. She hoped it would sway the judge's decision regarding the prosecution of the man once accused of killing her daughter.
But Harbach arrived about 10 minutes late and missed the hearing, which didn't take much more than a few minutes. If she had been there, Harbach would have seen Allan dismiss the murder charge.
"It's a legal system, not a justice system," Harbach said outside the courthouse after her late arrival. "There was no justice. He got away with murder."
And so ended the long legal journey of Vasilios Katogiritis, a one-time pharmacist who was accused of providing Hurst with a lethal dose of morphine.
Hurst, 23, died on Oct. 15, 2000, after overdosing at Katogiritis' apartment. A grand jury indicted him on a first-degree murder charge four months later. U.S. Customs agents arrested him after he got off a plane at JFK Airport in New York City in March 2001.
Katogiritis was brought to the Pinellas County Jail, where he was held for more than two years awaiting trial.
His attorney, George Tragos, filed motions with the court alleging Clearwater police had illegally searched Katogiritis' Savannah Trace apartment the day of Hurst's death.
Allan agreed and tossed out the evidence, including a syringe and more than 500 pills that were seized from the home. Police said Katogiritis also had confessed to the crime, but Allan threw out that, too, saying the admission was tainted by the bad search.
Prosecutors disagreed with Allan's decision and appealed. Katogiritis' bail was lowered and he was released from jail. In April, an appellate court sided with Allan's decision.
At the status conference Wednesday, Tragos asked Allan to dismiss the murder charge, along with a dozen counts of drug possession based on narcotics police said they seized from Katogiritis' apartment.
Prosecutor Bill Loughery, with almost all his evidence gone, could do virtually nothing. Allan agreed to dismiss the charge.
Katogiritis, 39, whose pharmacy license was suspended after his arrest, was not at the hearing.
"He is going to attempt to get his pharmacy license back," Tragos said. "If they can't prosecute him for it, then he shouldn't suffer for it."
Detective Steve Bohling, the case agent in the investigation, declined to comment Wednesday. Bohling was not involved in the search of the apartment.
Katogiritis had called 911 after finding Hurst unresponsive the morning of Oct. 15, 2000. He allowed police inside the apartment. Officers soon learned that Hurst had died at the hospital. Then an officer found a syringe in the kitchen.
"It was obvious that there was more to the case than originally thought," an officer wrote in a report.
At this point, Tragos argued, officers should have asked Katogiritis again if they could look around, or gotten a search warrant. Instead, officers went into a closet and found several bottles of prescription drugs hidden in a light fixture.
Tragos said he thinks the illegal search is a rare occurrence for Clearwater police.
"I think it was a group of competent officers that were trying to do a good job, but they just messed up," he said. "Everybody makes mistakes."
Police said Katogiritis told detectives that he provided the equivalent of 15 morphine pills to Hurst the night before. He then showed her how to crush, dissolve and inject the pills, police said.
Under Florida law, a person who provides drugs to someone who dies from an overdose can be charged with murder.
But Tragos said Hurst was an experienced drug user who didn't need Katogiritis' help to take the drugs. Even if the police search had been lawful, Tragos thinks a jury would have acquitted his client.
"The whole case always was two people basically partying and one of them dies and the other one gets charged with murder," he said.
Hurst had a history of drug use and had been in trouble with the law several times. Her troubled young life included apparent suicide attempts, nude dancing and two pregnancies.
Hurst was born in Ohio but moved to Florida with her mother 14 months later. Her father died in Ohio when Hurst was 10.
Hurst dropped out of high school and was pregnant by 17 or 18. She got an abortion, but was pregnant again a year later. She gave birth to that child, a boy who is about 8 years old now. Photos show he has golden hair, like his mother.
Drug use was a problem in the family. In fact, Harbach, her mother, was in a treatment facility when Hurst died. She acknowledged that both she and her daughter had used drugs at the same time.
"I knew she did some cocaine," Harbach said in a deposition. "Because I did crack and smoked cocaine, she thought that she was a lot better than me because she snorted it."
Hurst racked up arrests for burglary, battery, drugs and DUI. She also danced at a gentleman's club, where she was arrested once for illegal nudity.
Harbach said her daughter wanted to turn things around. A few months before her death, she wrote a letter from jail to a friend that included a poem about drugs called Poison.
She wrote: There are many poisons for rats, mice and men, but drugs to me have got to be the strongest poison . . . .
Hurst met Katogiritis while she was dancing. He allowed her to move in with him and they had a physical relationship, he told police. Detectives said the decision to shoot morphine was a mutual one.
Despite her daughter's struggles, Harbach remembers her as a little girl who liked to dance and write poems. She was friendly and shy and funny.
"She was always so kind," Harbach said. "She was quiet and really, really thoughtful. She was a really beautiful person. She was very graceful and classy."
Harbach, 49, who lives in Holiday, blamed her tardiness Wednesday on a traffic accident on U.S. 19. She also missed the last two hearings because, she says, no one told her about them.
She never got to show the framed photos in her cloth bag to the judge or to Katogiritis. They show her daughter as a toddler, a gap-toothed adolescent and a striking young woman.
"I would have asked him to look at these pictures and would have told him this is all of her that I have left to live with," she said.