Witness attests Tigers have a ‘rock star’

The defense in the case against the man charged with vandalizing and stealing a chunk of Howard’s Rock cast suspicion Tuesday on other individuals seen on security cameras around the time his client was at the scene.

As the trial of 20-year-old Micah Rogers of Pisgah Forest, N.C., got underway in Pickens County, the prosecution first tried to establish the value of the brick-sized piece of the famous rock at Clemson’s football stadium that went missing between June 2-3, 2013.

An expert witness who has done appraisals for the NFL Hall of Fame, Baseball Hall of Fame and the New York Yankees Museum, testified that based on the size of the fan base and the importance of Clemson football nationally that the university could have broken the chunk into 1,344 pieces to sell for $100 each, generating $134,000.

She compared the rock fragment’s value to other pieces of sports venues, such as the sections of the basketball court at Boston Gardens or the University of North Carolina and Duke.

“Really, it’s a rock star,” Leila Dunbar, a former vice president at Sotheby’s, said of Howard’s Rock.

Defense attorney Frank Eppes questioned how such an object could be given a market value since Clemson has said it intends to never sell it.

Dunbar said she used the same method she uses to appraise objects for the IRS and other legal purposes, whether they’re intended for sale or not. She said that this is the first of hundreds of objects that she has appraised that is the subject of a criminal case.

Rogers is charged with grand larceny of more than $10,000 value and malicious damage to personal property. In opening arguments, both attorneys said Rogers doesn’t deny that he was there that night, but he has pleaded not guilty to the charges.

Several members of the athletics department staff told the jury how they discovered that the rock had been damaged and found its case shattered some 30 feet away.

Clemson police found three latent fingerprints – one on the case and two on the rock’s pedestal – but they didn’t match those of the accused in the case, according to an expert from the Anderson County Sheriff’s Office.

No match has been found, he said.

Assistant Solicitor Baker Cleveland showed the jury an 11-minute video segment, shot from 300 feet away by a camera in the upper deck of the stadium’s southeast corner, that the authorities used to link Rogers to the crime.