An Engineered Injustice

by William L. Myers Jr.

  OTHER TITLES BY WILLIAM L. MYERS, JR.

  A Criminal Defense

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2018 by William L. Myers, Jr.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781542046480

  ISBN-10: 1542046483

  Cover design by Damon Freeman

  This book is dedicated, first, to the men and women who work for our nation’s railroads. You are the backbone of this country. It is my honor and privilege to fight for you.

  I also thank the team at The Myers Firm. Pat Finn, Mike Kelly, Dominic Itri, Ivana Gonzalez, Courtney Johnson, Kathy Ho-Piccone, Greg Lott, Bill Smith, Steve Milone, Lisa Chalmers, Lisa Schmoke and Ellie Moffat. That you work so hard, and care so much, for our clients makes me prouder than I can say.

  CONTENTS

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  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  1

  MONDAY, JUNE 16

  The moment of truth.

  It’s 2:00 p.m. Vaughn Coburn, his client Raymond Harris, and Vaughn’s boss Mick McFarland stand side by side at the defense table. The foreman of the jury is also standing, the verdict sheet in her hand.

  It all comes down to this. Years of appeals, months of trial preparation, two weeks of trial, three days of jury deliberations. The foreman will read the verdict, and Ray Harris will either go free or he will spend the rest of his life in prison for a murder that Vaughn Coburn is convinced he did not commit.

  Ten years earlier, Harris was convicted and sentenced to death for killing his five-year-old special-needs son, Jacob. The boy perished when the family’s South Philadelphia row home burned to the ground. Harris and his wife escaped. Their ten-year-old daughter, Rebecca, was at a sleepover. The prosecution’s theory of motive was that Ray had intended to kill his wife, Penny, who had recently threatened divorce. The DA told the jury that Harris wanted his son dead, too, because it would have been a headache to raise a child with Jacob’s limitations alone.

  The jury bought the story hook, line, and sinker, ignoring the testimony of friends and neighbors who swore that Ray had doted on Jacob, while Penny did everything she could to pass off the boy’s care to others. A longshoreman, Ray Harris was also an intimidating-looking man with tattooed arms and hands. Penny was an elementary-school teacher straight out of an Ivory Soap commercial. Ray never had a chance.

  After sweating it out on death row for a decade, Ray Harris managed to get his sentence reduced to life imprisonment due to ineffective assistance of counsel. That same year, Vaughn’s boss Mick agreed to represent Harris pro bono and persuaded the Superior Court that Harris’s first attorney was so incompetent that his client deserved a new trial.

  For the second trial, Mick hired a nationally renowned fire expert, the former fire commissioner of New York, now teaching forensic fire investigation at St. John’s University. The DA hit back by hiring an equally distinguished expert. On the nontechnical side, Ray, ten years older, now looked more pathetic than tough. Penny’s lined and aging face betrayed her as the hard-drinking party girl she’d always been. Plus, Vaughn and Mick presented evidence dug up by their investigator, Mick’s brother, Tommy, that Penny had been running around on Ray for years before the fire and later bragged that his conviction “got him out of my hair” forever.

  The trial turned into a knock-down, drag-out ordeal. The prosecution and defense teams are both exhausted. So are the jurors.

  When the judge asks the foreman to read the verdict, Vaughn holds his breath. He hasn’t been this nervous since he sat through the roller-coaster trial of Mick’s law-school classmate, David Hanson, two years earlier.

  The foreman looks at the judge, her face serious, hands shaking. “On both counts, of arson and murder in the first degree, we the jury find the defendant . . . not guilty.”

  The courtroom erupts and Ray Harris breaks down in sobs. Just behind him, his daughter, Rebecca, now twenty, is crying, too. Ray turns and they embrace, shaking as they weep.

  Vaughn smiles at Mick. This is what it’s all about.

  Ray turns back to Vaughn and Mick and shakes their hands, pauses, then bear-hugs them both. “You guys . . . you . . .” Ray steps back and searches for the words to thank them, but Mick and Vaughn wave him off.

  “Get outta here,” Vaughn says. “Let Becky take you out for a steak.”

  Ray smiles, turns away, and joins his daughter on the other side of the bar. Vaughn watches them leave the courtroom arm in arm.

  “Enjoy it,” Mick says. “It doesn’t get any better.”

  Vaughn blows out air. “I can’t imagine what would have happened—”

  “Yeah, you can. You’ve been there. We both have.”

  Vaughn nods. He’s suffered through his share of guilty verdicts, first during his five years as a public defender, and now, for the past four years, working for Mick and his partner, Susan, at McFarland and Klein. But this verdict means something to him. He believed to his core that Ray Harris did not set the fire that killed his son. The way the man’s eyes welled up whenever he talked about Jacob, his pain when he learned that his wife had run around on him, his naïveté in failing to understand how a jury could convict an innocent man. Vaughn read the man’s goodness in all of it.

  “Come on,” Mick says, shaking Vaughn out of his thoughts. “Let’s get back to the office, take our victory lap.”

  Fifteen minutes later, Vaughn and Mick enter their building on Fifteenth and Market Streets and take the elevator to the twentieth floor. Vaughn is surprised to see that the firm’s secretary, Angie, is not at the front desk. Walking down the hall, he sees that the paralegals aren’t in their offices, either. When he turns the corner, Vaughn sees why: everyone is in Mick’s office watching the large, wall-mounted, flat-screen TV.

  Angie sees Vaughn and Mick and shakes her head. “It’s awful.”

  Vaughn walks into the office with Mick behind him. He looks at the TV and is instantly jarred by the image on the screen: a zigzag of wrecked train cars. Most of the cars tilt dramatically or lie on their sides. One is upside down. Another is so obliterated it’s impossible to tell which side is up. Ahead of the passenger cars, the engine is smashed into a giant yellow railroad machine, the two vehicles forming a V that straddles the track.

  An army of police, firefighters, first responders, and railroad workers swarms t
he wreckage. Passengers are crawling out of windows—or being pulled out—and carried on stretchers or limping along on foot. Some lie on the ground covered, or half-covered, by coats and blankets.

  The Chopper 6 camera zooms in on one of the tilting cars. The top half of a woman’s motionless body hangs out a window. Her face, arms, and torso are covered in blood. Two men carefully pull the woman through the window and lay her on the ground. She doesn’t move. One of the men kneels down and lifts her arm, takes her pulse. He looks at the other man and shakes his head. The other man drops to his knees over the woman’s body. The camera pans out and scans the rest of the scene.

  “Where exactly is this?” asks Mick.

  “North Philly,” says Jill, the senior paralegal. “The Torresdale curve. The train was going to New York.”

  “Oh, no. Susan!” Mick’s face is white. “She was going to visit her mother in New York.” He races for the phone on his desk. He dials and waits. “She’s not answering her cell.”

  “I’ll call her apartment,” Angie says, running out of the room.

  “We have her mother’s number in New York somewhere on the computer,” Vaughn says. “I’ll look for it.”

  “Andrea and I can start calling the local hospitals,” says Jill.

  Vaughn rushes to his office and pulls up the contact-management software on his computer. He finds Susan’s information and dials her mother’s number in Manhattan.

  Candace answers on the first ring. “Is this Mick?” she says. “Are you calling about the train? I was just about to call down there. I think Susan was on it. Oh my God.”

  “This is Vaughn Coburn, Mrs. Klein. I work for Susan. We’re making calls now. As soon as we find something out, we’ll call. I promise. If we hear from her in the meantime, we’ll tell her to call you herself.”

  “Oh God,” Candace repeats.

  Vaughn’s phone buzzes as soon as he hangs up. It’s Mick, calling everyone into the conference room.

  “Let’s do this calmly and methodically,” Mick says. “Angie, you keep calling Susan’s numbers—her cell and her apartment. Call Amtrak and see if they’ll confirm that she was on the train, or that she wasn’t.

  “Jill, Andrea, you start calling the area hospitals. Temple, Aria, Hahnemann, Jefferson, and Einstein. Get to the ER departments and ask if a Susan Klein has been brought in.”

  “Maybe we should go to the hospitals,” Vaughn offers. “I’m thinking the emergency rooms might be too overwhelmed to be fielding calls.”

  “Good point. You take Jefferson and Hahnemann. I’ll go to Temple and Aria.”

  “We should have Tommy go to the crash site,” Vaughn says. “He knows a lot of cops. Maybe they can give him information.”

  Mick nods. “Good point. I’ll call him.”

  Fifteen minutes later, Vaughn enters the Thomas Jefferson University Hospital emergency room. It’s bedlam. Scores of people pack the waiting area. Some are crying; others are pleading with the intake nurses. Many are on cell phones, talking with relatives. Everyone is terrified.

  Vaughn makes his way to the front desk, impatiently waits his turn, then runs Susan’s name by the frazzled intake nurse. She checks her computer screen, flips through some papers.

  “I don’t see her name. But that doesn’t mean she’s not here. She could have just come in. She could have been admitted without any ID. I’m sorry I can’t be more definite, but—”

  Vaughn thanks her and leaves for Hahnemann, where he finds the same scene. He tries Susan’s cell and gets her voice mail. He calls Angie at the office.

  “I’m so worried,” Angie says. “She’s not answering at her apartment or on her cell. I can’t get through to Amtrak. Jill and Andrea can’t reach anyone at the hospitals.”

  Vaughn thanks Angie and tells her to keep trying, then calls Tommy. He’s already at the accident site.

  “I talked to some cops,” Tommy says, “but they can’t give me any information. They’re not letting anyone near the crash except for the rescue people.”

  Vaughn tells Tommy he’s going to keep running back and forth between the hospitals. Tommy promises to stay put at the crash site until he hears something.

  It’s not until hours later that Vaughn gets word—from Mick. “She’s at Frankford Hospital. I’m there now. An ER doctor told me she has some serious injuries, though nothing life threatening. She’s going to be admitted, but no one’s allowed to see her. All we can do right now is go home, get some rest, check up on her tomorrow. I’ll call her mother right now and share the news.”

  “I’ll call the office, let everyone know,” Vaughn says. He hangs up and exhales. He hasn’t been so shaken up in a long time.

  Late that night, in his apartment, Vaughn feels unnerved. He’s sitting on his couch in front of the TV and watching the aftermath of the crash play out on the news. CNN, Fox, MSNBC, and the big three networks are all waist deep in the story. All three have reporters at the crash site. In the studios, the anchors grill their talking heads—the transportation, railroad, emergency, and other experts quickly lassoed to dispense their knowledge. All the while, video of the wreck, its victims, and the responders plays ceaselessly on the wall screens behind the anchor desks.

  Vaughn stops channel surfing, picks up his laptop, and opens the YouTube app.

  Already posted are a dozen passenger videos of the crash. Many were taken inside the railcars after they came to rest. They show people trying to make their way out of the wreckage: a man trying to force his way through a door that’s almost horizontal, a woman crying as she crawls over a pair of bloodied legs extending from underneath the wreckage of a passenger seat, two male passengers trying to lift an older woman in a business suit who’s sitting spread-eagle on the floor.

  Other videos show passengers, dazed and bloodied, being walked to ambulances—next to others being wheeled on gurneys. Passengers are shown sitting and lying on the ground, some wearing oxygen masks while scores more are loaded into buses to be taken to a local school.

  Vaughn closes his laptop and focuses again on the television. He watches the reporters interviewing passengers trying to describe what they’ve just endured. The words “nightmare” and “chaos” and “hell” are used repeatedly.

  “One minute, everything was normal,” one passenger, a man in a ripped business suit, tells a reporter. “The next thing I knew, there was loud banging and the train was shaking back and forth. Then we tipped over and people were falling on top of one another. And everything just went flying through the air—seats, baggage, laptops, cell phones, you name it.”

  Another passenger, a college student, tells a pretty blonde reporter that he was traveling with his brother. He tells the reporter his brother’s name, asks if the reporter has come across him. She says sorry, but no, and quickly makes her way to someone else.

  Watching it all play out, Vaughn is overwhelmed by the horror and loss of it all. How the hell could this happen?

  He’s pulled from his thoughts by the ringing of his cell phone. He lifts it from the couch and answers.

  “Vaughn? Is this Vaughn?”

  “Yes. Who’s this?” He recognizes the voice but can’t place it.

  “It’s Kate, Eddy’s wife.”

  As soon as Vaughn hears Eddy’s name, his chest constricts. He knows instantly why his cousin’s wife is calling him. He can’t believe he hadn’t thought of Eddy as soon as he heard about the crash.

  “We need your help,” she says, her voice unsteady. “It was Eddy’s train. Eddy was driving. He was the engineer.”

  Vaughn struggles to catch his breath. His mind starts spinning a hundred miles an hour.

  “Eddy told me that if he was ever in trouble, real trouble, you’d be the one he would call. He said you’d help him.”

  “Where is he? Where are you?”

  “I’m at the hospital. Thomas Jefferson. Eddy’s just getting out of surgery. He’s in a recovery room somewhere. I haven’t seen him yet. The doctors say he’s hurt
real bad.”

  That his cousin is even alive seems miraculous, given the condition of the locomotive as he’d seen it on TV. The whole front end was bashed in. The windshield was gone, busted out completely from the impact with the giant yellow machine the engine crashed into.

  “All right. I’m on my way. I can be there in about fifteen minutes,” Vaughn says as he starts rushing around his apartment, turning off the TV and the lights. Then the lawyer part of his brain kicks in, and he stops. “Kate, listen. Do you know whether Eddy talked to anyone? Did he talk to the police?”

  “I can’t imagine that he did. The man from Amtrak who called me said Eddy was unconscious when they pulled him from the engine and didn’t really come to afterward. He only knew to call me because I was Eddy’s emergency contact with the railroad.”

  “Okay. I’ll be there shortly. Do you need me to pick anything up for you on the way? Have you eaten anything?”

  “I can’t eat. Just get here, please. I’m so scared. I know they’re going to try and blame this all on Ed. But it’s not his fault. It can’t be. He’s a good engineer, Vaughn. He’s always safe. I know in my heart he didn’t do this.”

  Despite her calm words, Vaughn can hear the panic in Kate’s voice.

  I hope to hell she’s right.

  But whether Eddy is at fault or not, Vaughn knows he’s going to do everything in his power to help him.

  Eddy and Vaughn were raised like brothers in North Philadelphia. Their fathers—John and Frank Coburn—were thick as thieves growing up, and they wanted their sons to share the same closeness, especially since each boy had two sisters. So they saw to it that Eddy and Vaughn, born a month apart, spent a lot of time together. The elder Coburns took their families for joint vacations down the shore, had frequent picnics and cookouts together, and always visited each other for the holidays. When the boys were thirteen, Frank, a cop, took a bullet to the knee and had to retire. He had been a boxer while in the navy, so he took some of his disability money and opened a boxing gym in Kensington. Frank and John decided it would be a good thing if the boys—both short and skinny—learned to box together. Vaughn and Eddy took to it like gangbusters. They trained hard, jumped rope, ran, lifted, hit the bags, then each other. They got older, tougher, faster, smarter, and bigger. And better, too, though not good enough to become real fighters. But they were fine with that; neither boy wanted to get beaten up for a living, and they were both smart enough that they wouldn’t have to. They both got good grades at Central High and won acceptance to Temple University.