Moore's murder trial delayed as defense team waits on evidence

HAGÅTÑA (The Guam Daily Post) — The murder trial in the death of Michael Castro will be delayed as defense attorneys await numerous pieces of evidence.

On Monday morning, Nicholas Moore appeared in the Superior Court of Guam for a hearing in his case in which he stands accused of shooting and killing Castro in October 2020.

Moore's trial was initially scheduled to begin in August this year, but at Monday's hearing his attorneys explained they were still in the process of obtaining evidence.

William Gavras said items they have yet to receive include evidence collected by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, surveillance videos from Unitek Environmental Guam, which is owned by Moore's father, and a DNA test to be conducted by an expert hired by Moore's defense team.

In response, prosecutor Basil O'Mallan said NCIS did not have any evidence in its possession. A bigger point of concern, however, was the surveillance footage from Unitek, which will show Moore in the building's parking lot.

O'Mallan added he has been working on obtaining footage from Unitek's 24/7 surveillance system, which uses four different eight terabyte hard drives.

"There was an attempt to erase certain days of it," said O'Mallan, who added that screenshots of some footage were salvaged and provided to Moore's defense team.

However, more work still needs to be done to extract all the footage and O'Mallan described it as a lengthy process.

"To make a copy of those hard drives, at minimum we need four 10 TB hard drives," O'Mallan said, before explaining 10 TB hard drives are not available on Guam.

The next step involves prepping the system for the extraction, which will take 27 hours for each hard drive.

O'Mallan further said he is "doing everything" he can to turn over the evidence.

"I want to see the videos myself," O'Mallan said.

With Judge Maria Cenzon saying the surveillance footage "seems to be the biggest issue" considering the amount of data that must be extracted and other processes including a DNA test on Castro's body by Moore's defense team not being done until September, she decided to move the trial date.

Cenzon, however, did not set a new trial date because of other discovery issues that need to be resolved to allow Moore's team to adequately prepare his defense.

"Once we resolve the discovery issues ... we'll probably then have a trial-setting conference just to see where we are in terms of updates, because if we're not going to be even addressing the motion to suppress until possibly September or shortly thereafter, we'll obviously be into 2024 for the trial," Cenzon said.