An American college student in Prague tells police he was leaving a nightclub in mid-July when three assailants accosted him, attempting to steal his wallet before throwing him from a bridge - leaving him to die.
In late November, a 54-year-old American college professor believes he was waiting in the Main Train Station in Prague when an angry panhandler tossed him into an empty elevator shaft, sending him into a three-week coma. Months later, his memory of the incident remains unclear.
Prague police interviewed the men as they nursed broken bones in Czech hospitals. Later, the victims say police determined the injuries they suffered were a result of their own reckless behavior and drunkenness.
The victims contend, in both cases, police were determined to discount their recollections of the events that led to their injuries. Police, they say, focused unbending efforts to defer responsibility for what had taken place.
The student, Zachary Moravec-Gallagher, now home in East Lansing, and the professor, Edward Alwood, of New Haven, Conn., say the inefficiency of police in handling their cases have left them concerned about the conduct of officers investigating violent crimes committed against tourists.
Responding to claims of incompetence and corruption among police, a Washington spokesman for Czech Republic Embassy said "police follow their rules and their procedures" when investigating reports of violent crime.
These cases, spokesman Petr Janousek says, "are very surprising," because "they are very violent."
While there are violent incidents in Prague, officials and tourists say the crime rates typically don't surpass those of major American cities.
"The crime that is happening in Prague is the crime that happens in the big cities throughout the world," Janousek said. "There isn't any evidence that Americans are being targeted."
Moravec-Gallagher's story
When Moravec-Gallagher journeyed to the Czech Republic in June, he anticipated eight months studying in the beautiful city of Prague, while learning the native tongue of his ancestors.
One morning, six weeks later, he awoke on the coarse banks of the Vlatava River, he says - a victim of an ugly gang of thieves who robbed and hurled him from a bridge.
While the force of the fall has escaped his memory, the 21-year-old East Lansing resident recalls the bones in his legs grating as he crawled the steep river bank in the early hours of July 19.
"I tried to get people to help me, but they thought I was just some bloody drunk or a dirty bum," said Moravec-Gallagher, a student at Goucher College in Maryland and a 2000 graduate of East Lansing High School.
Nursing a broken pelvis, two cracked ribs and a concussion in a Czech hospital for 12 days, the nation's police questioned Moravec-Gallagher about what occurred that night near the bridge.
Back in East Lansing, the story he told police remains clear: He left a nightclub in Prague at about 1 a.m. and decided to walk to the tram, rather than riding in a taxi, which are known for being unsafe.
As he walked, three men speaking broken English accosted him from the front and side, demanding his belongings. As the men ripped his backpack from his tight grip, Moravec-Gallagher fought back when the men tried to pull away his wallet.
"One guy picked me up in his arms, and the others picked me up, and they just tossed me over," said Moravec-Gallagher, who has traveled to the Czech Republic and Europe before. He was enrolled in a summer language program through Charles University in Prague.
"I don't remember anything else."
The physical evidence of a heinous altercation was apparent - two metal plates and 12 screws in his pelvis and a scar from a dozen stitches on his hand. But Prague police believed only one man was to blame.
After Moravec-Gallagher returned to East Lansing in August, Prague police told The Prague Post that "the case did not happen the way the victim had described it," and that the fall was a result of Moravec-Gallagher's "heavy drunkenness."
While Moravec-Gallagher admits that he had been drinking, he emphatically refutes statements that he was drunk.
From the onset of the investigation, which was set back by weak translations from English to Czech, Moravec-Gallagher said police contorted the events of the night to deny responsibility for what occurred.
"They were like, 'Are you sure you didn't fall or jump?' It was just a ridiculous thing," said Moravec-Gallagher, who was cared for by family in the region before he returned home.
"I had been drinking, but I definitely wasn't drunk."
Alwood's story
When Edward Alwood arrived in Prague on the morning of Nov. 22, 2002, he visited the Main Train Station kiosk to purchase a two-week tram pass.
The tram pass would help him navigate the nation that he'd visited dozens of times to conduct research in recent years. The kiosk, though, appeared to be temporarily closed, so the professor looked to kill some time while he waited for it to reopen.
"My plan was to go upstairs and to have a coke or a cup of coffee and check with the kiosk again," said Alwood, a professor of journalism at Quinnipiac University in Connecticut. "What happened after I left the kiosk, I'm not sure.
"What is certain is, I woke up three weeks later in a hospital and learned that I had spinal surgery and was told I had fallen into a construction site in the middle of the train station."
He dropped 15 to 20 feet into an open elevator shaft, breaking his back and causing severe head trauma. The details of the incident remain difficult to fully grasp.
"I believe a man approached me for money, and I said, 'No,' and then I think I felt a lifting as though someone had their hand on the back of my belt," he said.
"Then I vaguely remember this flying sensation and going into this hole."
On Jan. 8, Alwood checked out of the Czech hospital to come back to New Haven, where he immediately returned to a hospital.
In the United States, the Prague police notified Alwood there was no "criminal intent nor negligence of another person involved in the incident."
The letter, dated Jan. 20, states that witnesses testified he "had been stumbling before the accident and fell over the staircase handrail; he was not pushed."
After nearly six months of recovering, Alwood returned to Prague in July and learned that police interviewed a woman who said he drank beer for two hours leading up to the incident.
Alwood says he wasn't even there for more than one hour and contends that because of a physical disability, he doesn't drink alcohol.
"It seemed to me to be a very convenient excuse for the police not to blame anyone and to close the case quickly without investing a lot of time," Alwood said.
Policing the police
For the past five summers, Laura Bedard has taken groups of Florida State University students to study police procedure in Prague.
She's noted several differences in policing between Prague and the United States, but, she says, "For the most part, their police force is good."
Bedard says, "they do have the wherewithal to investigate. Police have a vested interest in keeping tourists safe."
As in the United States, Bedard says there can be corruption within the police.
"I suspect that they are still in a corruption mode from communism," she said. "Under the communist regime, you got paid off. There is still probably a lot of that going on."
During the past dozen years, the Czech government has transformed from communism to democracy, spurring a number of adjustments. But the ability to police and investigate is intact, she said.
Alwood says he sees the remnants of the communist regime.
"All of these guys are left over from the communist days when the idea of investigating a crime was like a forbidden thing," he said. "They still have no concept whatsoever about what it means to investigate a crime."
Janousek, the embassy spokesman, said, "Some people think everything is happening because we are a post-communist country."
However, he said, today's crime "has nothing to do with the Communist past. We have become global, and there are all kinds of people in the country."
Steve Eder can be reached at ederstev@msu.edu.
