Colin deduced on his blog that Jay felt railroaded into taking the plea and that he didn’t trust Benaroya. Urick had manipulated him and Jay was deeply worried.
While I had always imagined Benaroya to be a good buddy of Urick’s, someone who helped him out in this matter, it turned out from her conversations with Colin that it was nothing like that at all. According to Benaroya, Urick hated her. With a background in public interest and social justice law, Benaroya wasn’t exactly the shrewd prosecutor’s cup of tea. They didn’t have anything close to a cordial relationship, which is why on September 7, 1999, when he found her at the courthouse and asked her to step into a room where a young black man was sitting, she was extremely surprised.
Urick explained the situation to her—this young man, Jay, had two choices: either accept a plea deal as an accessory after the fact in exchange for testifying against Adnan, or Urick would charge him with the murder of Hae Min Lee and prosecute the case in Baltimore County, where a majority white jury would be much more likely to find a black man guilty, and he could end up facing the death penalty.
Urick told Benaroya that Jay had no attorney, and if she didn’t help him he was basically screwed. Urick was not only putting Jay up against the wall, it seems to me he was railroading Benaroya, playing on her sympathy for the young man in a precarious situation. Realizing that Jay had really no option, having given multiple on-the-record statements to police implicating himself, Benaroya advised him to take the plea deal. Her real concern was keeping him out of jail while he awaited sentencing, and she was successful at it.
This is where things are murky for me. To hear Benaroya’s story, Jay was a reluctant State’s witness being heavily coerced by the prosecutor. I immediately felt terrible for him.
Then I took a step back and remembered that seven months prior to the plea, Jay was already working with the police, making deals for a motorcycle and reward money. He was definitely in a bad spot—Urick hadn’t charged him until now in order to prevent him from getting a public defender, but basically had charges against him secured with his statements. Jay couldn’t afford a lawyer, so he was at the State’s mercy and had to take the plea. Still, his cooperation, given the reward, did not seem to have come completely from being pressured by the police. But Urick needed to make the plea legit, and for that he needed Jay to have an attorney. He needed to find someone he could guilt into representing Jay for this drama. If the wool was being pulled over anyone’s eyes, maybe it was Benaroya’s.
* * *
One question kept coming back to challenge the theory that Jay was fed information about the crime by the police themselves: how did Jay lead the police to the car? At a minimum he must have known where the car was.
It has never been beyond the scope of my imagination that the police already knew where the car was, but the level of unethical behavior that it would take was a bit hard to swallow for some. It was even harder to accept that Hae’s car could not have been where it was found for the six entire weeks, meaning it was deposited there fairly recently by someone—meaning the cops may have moved it there.
But that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.
In October of 2015, after having gotten some new documents as a result of an MPIA filed with the Baltimore County Police, Susan discovered one that seemed to indicate the police had more information than they ever revealed.
It was a case report that listed a series of boxes with “factors” A through F, all of which were rated for solvability. The factors corresponded to suspect, suspect vehicle, physical evidence, stolen property, whether any type of M.O. (modus operandi or method) was present, and whether the crime could be solved with investigation at the field level. The ratings went from 0 to 12, with 12 being the highest, presumably meaning the issue was solved.
All reports leading up to February 24, 1999, have zero ratings for all the factors. But the report dated and stamped February 24, 1999, indicates that two investigatory factors were in essence solved—suspect and suspect vehicle factors were both rated 12 and stolen property was rated 4. Remember, this is ostensibly before the police have talked to Jenn or Jay, but apparently they have already “solved” who the suspect is.
“Suspect vehicle” seems to indicate they are talking about Adnan’s vehicle, but if you look closely the “other” box is marked. The vehicle solvability being rated is not Adnan’s—it’s Hae’s. How and why did Baltimore County Police determine that both the suspect in the crime and the victim’s vehicle are solved, three days before the Baltimore City Police ever officially speak to Jay?
Maybe because something else pretty significant happened on February 24. Detective O’Shea, with the Baltimore County Police Department, ran a National Crime Information Center (NCIC) check for the car, an odd thing for him to do given that the case had been out of his jurisdiction since February 9, when Hae’s body was found in the city. But not an odd thing to do if her car was found somewhere in the county itself, which the results of the NCIC search seem to indicate.
The last five hits on Hae’s vehicle, the last five times her tags were run through the NCIC system, all placed her car in Baltimore County. Unfortunately, at the time these inquiries were made, Hae’s car had not yet been linked to her missing person’s report in the NCIC system, a mistake by the detective. If patrol officers came across her car and ran the tags, they’d never know the car was connected to a missing person’s investigation.
An ABC news report from the day Adnan was arrested, still found on YouTube, mentioned that the police had “discovered her 1998 Nissan Sentra a short distance from where her killer attempted to bury her body in a shallow grave in Leakin Park, key details they had withheld as they sought out a suspect.” The language of the report seems to indicate the police had told the media (perhaps the police media liason/PR office had done so inadvertently) that they already knew where her car was.
Then there’s Jay himself, who on the stand agreed with Gutierrez when she stated that he’d initially taken the police to the wrong place when he led them to the car. And at his first on-the-record interview on February 28, right before Adnan is arrested, he mentions something weird.
Lastly, there’s this: initial Maryland Public Information Aact results from Baltimore City Police show that a request was made on February 17 to the Maryland State Police Aviation Division to do a helicopter flyover of the area to search for Hae’s car. The request was denied. Nearly a year later we received a new batch of documents from the Baltimore County Police Department showing that another request for a helicopter flyover had been made, presumably after the first one was denied. This request was made to the Baltimore County Police aviation unit and was apparently accommodated. They did a search with their helicopter, but the results of the search don’t exist in the documents.
Something significant happened on February 24, it seems. It may have been the day that Baltimore County did a helicopter flyover and found Hae’s car, which is why the county files a final report noting ratings of 12 for suspect and car—at this point the city police have already honed in on Adnan and are meeting with Jay off the record. And it could be that once the car was found in the county, Detective O’Shea ran the NCIC checks to see if anyone had ever spotted it. Looks like they had. If the car was found in the county, the city police would have been contacted. This was their case, after all.
So, how did Jay lead Baltimore City detectives to the car? Maybe because they told him where it was, because they moved it from the county to the city themselves after it was found on February 24. It would explain the fresh grass on the tire wells, the green grass underneath it, and the fact that it was untouched in a heavy-crime neighborhood. Is it beyond the scope of our imagination, considering these are detectives who are accused of coercing false testimony in other murder cases, that they would go this far to make their case against Adnan?
For me, the answer is no.
* * *
Thiruvendran Vignarajah, the deputy attorney general of the Stat
e of Maryland, is representing the State of Maryland in Adnan’s PCR appeal proceedings. A PCR appeal is usually handled by the local-level State’s Attorney’s office. But the high level of scrutiny from Serial may have pushed it up the chain of command.
I first encountered Vignarajah when I read the brief he submitted to the Court of Special Appeals (COSA) opposing our Application for Leave to Appeal (ALA) in May 2015. I immediately loathed him.
His brief, which got dismissed less than two weeks later when COSA remanded the case back down to the circuit court, set the tone for Vignarajah’s defense against the issues we raised for the PCR appeal: dramatic (the “bloom” of Hae’s love for Don), misleading (saying Hae described Adnan as “possessive, jealous, and overprotective”), and pages and pages of irrelevant details where he wastes space on regurgitating the State’s case at trial from fifteen years ago instead of addressing the very specific issues raised in this PCR. He calls Gutierrez Adnan’s “celebrated attorney,” her defense “vigorous,” the State’s case at trial “unimpeachable,” and Adnan’s accounts “vacillating.”
It wasn’t the harlequin-style writing that made my stomach turn, however; it was the disingenuous nature of certain arguments. Jay’s interview in The Intercept was published six months prior, in which he says he never saw anything at Best Buy, he never saw Hae being buried, and the burial took place around midnight, but in the brief Vignarajah stuck to Jay’s story from 2000, reciting the same Best Buy trunk-pop and 7:00 p.m. burial time. He tried to mask the discrepancy in a cringe-worthy way, saying, “For Syed and Wilds there were points at the burial in Leakin Park where both men seemed disturbed and disoriented by the gravity of the moment.”
Jay, apparently, is still disoriented fifteen years later.
Vignarajah also depicted Adnan’s behavior after Hae died as shady, saying that he tried to “thwart” Hope Schab’s effort to assist the detectives’ investigations, neglecting to mention her assistance was all about getting the details of Adnan and Hae’s sex life.
Two of the most egregious misrepresentations Vignarajah made were these: that Adnan “elected” not to attend Hae’s memorial and that Adnan fought to keep Gutierrez as his attorney. It was reprehensible—Vignarajah knew that during Hae’s memorial Adnan was in prison. And he also knew that Adnan had fought to retain Gutierrez at the beginning of her representation, long before she screwed up his case.
I wanted to scream, but instead I blogged. I blogged vigorously and vociferously about the shameless fudging Vignarajah was engaged in. I knew it was only going to get worse; we had gotten calls from attorneys around the state warning us about him.
My worst fears were confirmed for me when, in November 2015, a Brady motion demanding a new trial was filed in Baltimore Circuit Court in the case of Maryland v. David Hunter, in which Hunter’s attorney alleged that Vignarajah had withheld evidence and prosecuted an innocent man.
The gist of the claim was that Vignarajah had videotaped evidence that Hunter was innocent in the murder he was charged with, yet he proceeded to prosecute him anyway and withheld from the defense the evidence of a witness who actually saw the murder and told the police that it wasn’t Hunter.
My blog in response to this news screamed, “CAN THE ATTORNEY GENERAL FIND US A SINGLE FUCKING HONEST PROSECUTOR FOR ADNAN’S CASE? Just one???”
Still, I was kind enough not to blog about a smarmy “sting” reported about a month later by The Daily Caller, in which Vignarajah, who is married, spilled political secrets to a pretty, blond undercover reporter in hopes of getting some action.
All of the Baltimore legal community, including Judge Martin Welch himself, according to one of my sources, knew about the misconduct allegation and the reporter scandal. Vignarajah was going to go into Adnan’s PCR hearing a couple months later with some major bad publicity on his back.
* * *
I spent a month in Pakistan from late December to the end of January 2016.
During my travels I had intensified the prayers that I had recited for years for Adnan. All prayers are answered in some way, Muslims believe, but in certain conditions they are especially powerful: when a woman is pregnant, in labor, or nursing; when it’s raining, in the predawn hours, in prostration; when made by a parent for a child, by a traveler, and by the victim of injustice and oppression.
I visited five Sufi shrines and five mosques. In the shrines I watched people in pain beseech their Lord, sway with prayer, light candles and incense, and scatter intensely scented rose petals over the graves of their saints. In mosques I saw people spend forever with their foreheads on the floor, backs bent in submission, rising with tears.
In every place I whispered God’s names, counting on my fingers or on prayer beads, my heart and intention focused on Adnan, the appeal, and all the forces working against him.
“Ya Adl, the Most Just, Ya Raheem, the Most Merciful, Ya Muhaymin, The Guardian of all, Ya Hakam, The Judge, Ya Haqq, The Truth, Ya Hasib, The Reckoner, Ya Muntaqim, The Avenger, Ya Shaahid, The Witness, Ya Salaam, The Source of all Peace, Ya Wadud, The Most Loving, Ya Wali, The Protecting Friend, Ya Allah, The One God.”
Thousands of times I recited these names and asked everyone I met to do the same, to keep Adnan in their prayers. Prayers for him have been said in Mecca, at the Prophet’s mosque in Madina, at the Al Aqsa and Dome of the Rock mosques in Jerusalem, at the Ibrahimi Mosque and Tomb of the Patriarchs in Palestine, at the Church of the Nativity, at a dozen mosques in Istanbul, and at the shrine of Jalaluddin Rumi and other saints, and prayers have been said by Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, and even atheists all around the world. Very few people can say the world prayed for them.
When I returned from Pakistan, the PCR appeal hearing was just a couple of weeks away, scheduled for February 3–5.
The night before the hearing, we organized a community prayer gathering at the ISB, Adnan’s mosque, but a big fat wrench got thrown into our plans when we learned, two days prior, that President Barack Obama had decided to visit a U.S. mosque for the first time ever in his presidency. Not just any mosque, but the ISB.
He’d be there on the morning of Wednesday, February 3, as the PCR hearing got under way in downtown Baltimore, and Secret Service protocols demanded that the building be secured the night before—the prayer meeting wasn’t going to happen there.
We moved it quickly to another local mosque and were joined by about three hundred community members. Aunty Shamim sat in the audience as Saad, Yusuf, and I sat at a table at the front. We each said some words, and I invited Bob Ruff and Michael Wood, a retired Baltimore City Police officer and whistleblower, to say some words. Together we rallied, cried, and prayed.
The next morning around seven o’clock I arrived at Adnan’s home to pick up Yusuf and Aunty Shamim. I spoke to Adnan’s father, who was hanging out with my husband (who he has a special fondness for), and he gently told me he would be better off staying home and praying.
I, on the other hand, would not have missed it for the world. A couple of weeks prior Justin had broken some bad news: I might have to sit the hearing out because he had put me on the witness list as a potential rebuttal after Asia testified. Witnesses can’t be in the courtroom because they might be influenced by other witness testimony; they have to be sequestered.
I protested: with Asia there, my testimony was unnecessary. Justin said he’d think about it, but when Adnan found out he said absolutely not—he wanted me in the courtroom. He asked Justin to remove me from the witness list so I could finally see Asia testify after all these years.
We met Saad and half a dozen other friends at Justin’s office and walked to the courthouse together. We passed through security and marched up to the second floor, where a media room had been set up and a line was forming. Many friends and supporters had come from out of town for the proceedings; it lifted our spirits to see so many loving, familiar faces.
Sarah Koenig was also there, standing in line with others from the media as
we waited for the courtroom doors to open. Aunty and I went over to greet her and I thanked her with tears in my eyes, acknowledging we would never have gotten this far without her.
The doors finally opened and I could hear a collective “bismillah” from the posse of Muslims around me as we entered. The court seating was divided into three sections. The far left was reserved for media, the center section was for Hae’s family and community, and the right section was for Adnan’s family and supporters. None of Hae’s immediate family were able to attend, but community members close to her represented the family, their grief, and their love for Hae throughout the hearing.
We ended up being directly behind the State’s table. I sat between Susan and Yusuf, in the front row right behind the prosecutors. Vignarajah and his team had walked past a few times, even smiled meekly in our direction—it turned out many people from our community knew him personally. He had, ironically, also attended Woodlawn High School and his parents lived in the same neighborhood as Adnan’s in the ISB area.
I had to run to the restroom, and when I returned Adnan had already walked in and gotten seated. I frowned, knowing that he wasn’t allowed to turn around (and probably couldn’t because of his neck and back issues, not to mention the five-point restraints he’d have to wear the entire time), so I missed a chance of seeing him and him seeing that I was there. He sat stick-straight, face forward, directly in front of Sarah Koenig.
Next to him sat both Justin and his legal partner and co-counsel on the defense, Chris Nieto. I had never met Nieto before, but Justin trusted him and told us he was a sharp, experienced criminal defense attorney who had handled numerous high-profile cases. I said a prayer and blew it the direction of all three men.
Opening arguments began with Justin, and in the very first few minutes I realized something: we had never been so prepared before. This was not the same Justin I had seen at the PCR hearing nearly four years earlier, when he was less assertive and confident. Right out of the gate, this time Justin was taking no prisoners. His experience was showing. He wasn’t the only one who was ready, I realized. All of this had happened, Serial had happened, when we were all as ready as possible. I had the blogging, writing, public speaking, media and social media experience to leverage Serial’s popularity and keep public interest high; we had a team of volunteers doing research; we had private investigators following leads; Susan was a master of the case files and cell phone evidence; Colin brought the entirety of case law precedent to us; and both of them had been working alongside Justin for the past few months to cover every base for the hearing. There was no way the State could be as prepared as our team.
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