Adnan's Story Page 16

  Vinson, however, recalls January 13 as the night that Jay showed up with someone she had never met before at her apartment between 5:30 and 6:00 p.m. while she was home with her boyfriend, Jeff Johnson. She had been at a conference all day and had gotten home shortly before they arrived.

  She says that Adnan was out of it, high as a kite, didn’t say a word, just came in and slumped over on some pillows on the floor. She tried to make small talk with Jay, whom she knew through Jenn, and he told her that they were coming from a video store and were waiting to be picked up. The conversation got confused, she said, so she dropped it. At some point, Adnan apparently popped up and asked, “How do you get rid of a high?” and she told him he had to wait it out.

  She describes a call to Adnan’s cell phone then, and his responses along the lines of “What am I going to do? They’re going to come talk to me,” shortly after which he jumped up and just walked out of her apartment. Jay, she says, is a bit taken aback, but then gets up and follows him, leaving behind his hat and cigarettes.

  Jay returned later that night, she testifies, this time with Jenn, around 9:30 or 10:00, and they were “acting really funny, really strange.” But no amount of questioning got her any answers about what was going on, so she dropped it.

  An important part of Vinson’s testimony is how she helps the State create a visual timeline of events for the jury. A large, blown-up map in the courtroom becomes the guide and, along with Adnan’s cell records, helps the State pinpoint which call corresponds to Vinson’s story, and which cell tower site on the map corresponds to her house. Everything fits.

  On cross, Gutierrez points out that Vinson first became aware of the crime when she took her good friend Jenn Pusateri to the police station on March 9, 1999. On that same day she had also given statements to the police, which differed a bit from her testimony. Gutierrez asks her about the discrepancy, noting that Vinson had earlier told detectives that Jay and Adnan had arrived at her home between 5:15 and 6:00 p.m. and stayed 35 to 45 minutes. She begins to question her about the description she gave the police about Adnan being Indian or mixed-race, but misses something crucial—that in her police interview she describes Adnan as five feet seven. Adnan, however, was around six feet tall at the time of his arrest. She does point out that Jay never introduced Adnan to her, implying that she may not know if it was Adnan or not—though at this point Vinson has already identified Adnan in the courtroom.

  After an exhaustive, repetitive cross, going over Vinson’s testimony and all manner of collateral subjects like Vinson’s favorite television show, Judge Quarles finally says, “In an effort to finish this millennium, Ms. Gutierrez, can we get back to the points at issue in this case?”

  * * *

  Jay Wilds is sworn in on the afternoon of December 14, the fifth day of the trial. Urick wants to get one thing out of the way immediately, the plea agreement. He asks Jay, in his own words, to describe it. And Jay does, in a single sentence: “The plea was just that, basically a sentence cap that I can only be sentenced to the maximum—sentencing for my part as long as I told the truth and nothing but the truth.”

  Urick quickly gets Jay to the night of January 12, when Adnan first got his cell phone and, according to the State’s theory, called Jay to set up Hae’s murder.

  But instead of telling the jury what the State said he would, in response to Urick’s question regarding what Adnan told him when he called him on the night of the 12th, Jay responds, “He just asked me would I like to join him. He asked me—asked me what I’d been doing. The next day was my girlfriend’s birthday, the 13th. Her birthday follows mine. I told him I was going to the mall and shop and he told me he’d give me a lift.”

  He goes on to testify that they later went to the mall, where Adnan called Hae “that bitch” and said he was going to kill her, but that Jay “didn’t take in the text of the conversation for what it was.” He says Adnan then said, “If I let you hold my car, can you pick me up later?”

  This is in contradiction to his previous police statements where he stated that Adnan called him the night before to request his help in the crime, having planned this all out before, premeditated.

  Jay says he has Adnan’s car until Adnan calls him to come to Best Buy, where he shows him Hae in the trunk of her car. He describes not being able to see her face, because she’s facedown, but knowing it was her anyway. He says she’s not wearing shoes, and he notes that she is “kind of blue.”

  How Jay manages to see her skin color when she is fully clothed, wearing pantyhose, and lying facedown is a question I wish Gutierrez had asked, but she didn’t.

  Jay describes leaving the car at the I-70 Park-n-Ride and then going to pick up weed at his friend Patrick’s house. Gone from the story is Patapsco Park. He says he then leaves Adnan at school for track practice and goes to Vinson’s house, a visit she never described in her testimony. After a bit he goes back to pick up Adnan and then again returns to Vinson’s home. He describes a series of calls to Adnan’s phone that Vinson, again, never testified to.

  He says Adnan received a call from Hae’s parents, then another call, again, maybe from her family, then a third call from a police officer.

  With more such inconsistencies, Jay continues his narration of their trek to Leakin Park where he helped dig a grave and bury Hae. During the digging, he says, a call came in to Adnan’s phone. He answered and said, “he’s busy,” and hung up.

  He describes a complicated dance of the cars where he and Adnan go back and forth, up and down a hilly road that intersects Franklintown Road. First they both park at the top of the hill. Then Adnan takes Hae’s car with her body down by the burial site as Jay waits in Adnan’s car at the top of the road. A while later, he says, Adnan returns with her empty car and orders Jay to come back to the burial site, where Hae is lying facedown, to help him cover her up.

  Jay moves through the timeline, describing ditching Hae’s car in a parking lot between a bunch of houses, and then Adnan dumping some of her things in a dumpster, and finally Jenn picking him up in front of the Westview Mall, or his house—he can’t recall anymore.

  Urick then calls his attention to the cell records, pointing to different incoming and outgoing calls, trying to match Jay’s recollection with Jenn’s and Nisha’s.

  Knowing his prior statements have all kinds of contradictions, Urick attempts to stave off Gutierrez by broaching the subject head-on. He asks Jay why he changed his story about where Adnan popped the trunk and showed him the body from Edmonson Avenue to Best Buy.

  Jay responds, “Really there was no reason. I just felt more comfortable if the cops had returned me to a place I feel comfortable in.”

  While the answer is a bit cryptic, it seems to be suggesting that Jay changed his statement because initially the police had told him to make the trunk pop at Edmonson. Urick, of course, doesn’t follow that up for any clarification.

  Urick then asks why Jay didn’t mention meeting up with Jenn or saying anything to her in his first statement when he did in his second statement.

  Jay states, “I didn’t want her to have to be questioned by the police.”

  He seems to be forgetting that according to the State’s official version of events, the police only came to him after Jenn had already given them a detailed statement, with a lawyer present, regarding her involvement.

  Nonetheless, Jay manages a number of convoluted responses as to why he followed Adnan’s orders (scared he would be turned in for dealing weed and because Adnan threatened Stephanie) and the State finally rests.

  Instead of beginning her cross-examination, Gutierrez asks for an overnight recess to review Jay’s statements and taped interviews. In doing so she loses a valuable opportunity to immediately press Jay on these responses.

  On December 15, the last day of the trial, Gutierrez cross-examines Jay.

  One of her first punches misses completely when she asks if, on January 13, Jay was already working at the porn video shop and he responds i
n the affirmative. That’s completely untrue, however, and Gutierrez has the interview of Jay’s employer Sis noting that he didn’t start working there until the very end of the month. But she moves on, missing the chance to show that the call Nisha Tanna remembers in all likelihood didn’t happen until a few weeks after Hae disappeared.

  She spends a considerable amount of time painting a picture of the social order at Woodlawn, and how Jay wasn’t part of the group of gifted and talented students that his girlfriend, Adnan, and Hae were part of—the Magnet Program. She then spends as much time drawing out the fact that Jay was, for much of the past few years, a drug dealer, pointing out that while Stephanie is now at college, Jay isn’t. Gutierrez’s strategy seems to be to show Jay’s character and his motive for wanting to frame Adnan—out of jealousy for the kind of lives Magnet School kids were going to lead versus the kind of life Jay had.

  She notes that Jay is always borrowing other people’s cars, getting him to admit that he borrowed cars from his friends Laura Strata, Jenn Pusateri, and Chris Baskerville as well as his girlfriend Stephanie.

  Gutierrez’s cross is long, and exhausting. She repeatedly goes over many of the same things, Jay’s drug dealing specifically, until the judge can’t take it anymore and says, “Ms. Gutierrez, I’m trying to get this finished again by Christmas. You’ve used an hour. Perhaps we can be more pointed in the cross-examination. It might be helpful to all of us.”

  Gutierrez continues unfazed, though. She jumps from when Jay met with detectives, to how many people he dealt drugs to, to how and when he learned Hae’s body was found. Every so often Jay would say something incredibly odd, for example, when Gutierrez asked if he knew that Hae’s body had been discovered inside Leakin Park when he was interviewed by police on February 28.

  Jay answers, “That’s where it turned out to be, yes.”

  Jay’s cross-examination goes on for another few hours before Gutierrez finally rests and the State starts to redirect. They are just getting started when an astonishing exchange takes place. Urick attempts to present State’s Exhibit 31, cell phone records for January 12–14, to the jury. Judge Quarles asks Gutierrez if she has seen the records and she says no.

  Urick counters, saying she has seen it and that it was entered into evidence by stipulation, meaning by the consent of both parties.

  Gutierrez again says she has not seen the exhibit Urick is referring to, even when the judge also reminds her she agreed to the exhibit being entered into evidence.

  The judge then calls both attorneys to the bench to figure out what is going on. Gutierrez had stipulated to Exhibit 31, meaning she did not challenge its admission. She absolutely knew about the records, yet here she was telling the court that she hadn’t seen them.

  Judge Quarles admonishes her, saying, “Ms. Gutierrez, if you are going to stand there and lie to the jury about something you agreed to come in, I’m not going to permit you to do that.”

  Gutierrez gets belligerent.

  It is impossible to understand how an attorney with decades of criminal defense experience (1) stipulated to the admission of documents she had not looked at and (2) could tell a judge with a straight face that she stipulated to admitting documents without looking at them because she “did not care.”

  Gutierrez explains to the court that the documents “didn’t concern me on any other date,” getting louder as the judge asks her twice to “please be quiet.”

  She responds, “It’s very hard to be quiet when a court is accusing me of lying.”

  The white noise machine is on the entire time to prevent the court from hearing this exchange, but it didn’t work all that well.

  Jay’s redirect continues as Urick asks him about the significance of Best Buy to Adnan and Hae’s relationship—Jay responds that according to Adnan, they had sex there. Urick then tries to establish the importance of the map book in Hae’s car, which had a page torn from it, the page that happened to include Leakin Park. He asks Jay if he knows, as Adnan is driving Hae’s car and he is following, how Adnan is navigating. Jay says no.

  Gutierrez gets a chance at recross and takes Jay back to this issue, asking Jay about following Adnan all around the city before finally making it to Leakin Park. Jay agrees that this is indeed what happened. Gutierrez lands her point that the long, uncertain route Adnan took there must show he hadn’t decided on the location beforehand.

  Jay is finally released from the stand, even though Urick wants to re-redirect, but is cut off by the judge.

  Dr. William Rodriguez of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology is next called to testify about examining the burial site.

  He describes the location and condition of Hae’s body as follows:

  We observed initially that the body was placed in a position near a very large log or tree that had been downed. It was in very close proximity to this and that the body was partially covered with dirt. It was very shallow. However there were three components of the body that were partially exposed; that being some portions of the hair, a portion of the hip, and a foot and knee area. And in examining those, it was obvious that these had been exposed as a result of post-mortem animal activity; that is, animals coming to feed or that are attracted to the remains, and through their activity, they basically had teased out the hair from underneath the ground and also had uncovered dirt and removed it from areas that covered portions of the body.

  He describes small scratch marks and mud prints of small animals that had uncovered portions of the body. This would seem to contradict the autopsy report that shows no evidence of animal activity on her body, which is also a bit of a mystery, given that in most such circumstances, soft fleshy parts of a body so exposed (such as the ears, fingers, nose) are often quickly nibbled on by foraging animals.

  Rodriguez then explains how the body was disinterred, carefully, using small trowels and brushes, and discovering two fluorescent fibers—one orange, on top of the body, and another bright blue, underneath the body.

  Urick asks whether the condition of Hae’s body was consistent with her having been killed on January 13, 1999. Rodriguez says yes.

  On cross, Rodriguez is asked by Gutierrez about the condition of the park itself and the ease or difficulty of reaching the burial site, agreeing with her when she says the terrain is hard to get through to take a body and that there was no path, other than the ones the officers ended up creating, leading from the road to the body.

  Gutierrez is attempting here to show the unlikelihood of Sellers traipsing back to the burial site to take a leak, and she’s done a good job.

  As she’s wrapping up her cross, she notices a juror is trying to say something to the judge and calls the clerk’s attention to it. Rodriguez finishes his testimony and they take a short break.

  Once court reconvenes, Gutierrez tells the judge that she has just been told that their exchange, in which she was called a liar by the judge, was heard over the white noise machine by colleagues Chris Flohr and Doug Colbert as well as others. She moves for a mistrial based on the fact that the court has attacked the credibility of Adnan’s attorney.

  Judge Quarles already knows what happened, because the juror who was trying to get his attention sent him a note, reading, “In view of the fact that you’ve determined that Ms. Gutierrez is a liar, will she be removed? Will we start over?”

  The judge immediately grants Gutierrez’s motion for a mistrial, and Adnan’s trial for first-degree murder ends on the sixth day.

  * * *

  Doug Colbert was still deeply invested in the case even though he no longer represented Adnan. On the afternoon of December 15, after the heated exchange between Gutierrez and the judge, he had to leave. But he returned as soon as he could, only to find the proceedings had abruptly ended.

  Colbert later submitted an affidavit to assist with yet another attempt to grant Adnan bail as he awaited a new trial, now scheduled for January 21, 2000. In it he states that as the jury filed out he spoke to most of them and they advised that
had the trial resumed, they would have acquitted Adnan based on the State’s case so far. Colbert notes Adnan’s stellar record and inexperience with the criminal justice system and that his life could be “needlessly destroyed by wrongful incarceration or conviction.” He cites the hardship Adnan is experiencing while incarcerated and requests the court grant Adnan’s bail as he awaits trial.

  But like the past three applications, this too was denied.

  Adnan would remain incarcerated pending another trial, which, thankfully, would begin soon.

  Though denied bail, at least the defense, Adnan, and his family now knew this: despite many rambling moments by Gutierrez, and not yet having even put on the defense case, jurors were still likely to acquit. Maybe all this time Gutierrez had been right—it was the State’s job to prove their case, and they couldn’t. The evidence they presented would not pass the “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard.

  But Adnan was still worried, and considering a plea deal. He knew the State hadn’t yet presented its full case when the mistrial was called, and he saw how effective they were in using the only real evidence in the case, the cell phone records, in corroborating Jay’s timeline. He worried about whether another jury would find Nisha’s testimony about the cell phone call damning, and if the State would return with an even stronger presentation. After all, it wasn’t just the defense that got a preview at the first trial, the State also got to do a trial run with Jay Wilds.

  Adnan sat through Jay’s testimony mostly stunned. None of it was true, but he had to sit there and listen to the lies, conscious of the eyes and attention of the courtroom of people behind him. He pretended to scribble on a legal pad, trying to hide his mortification.