GIST: "He spent his life being a good soldier, but this order he could not follow. Former Riverside County prosecutor Christopher Ross, an ex- Army Green Beret, says he was told to withhold DNA evidence pointing to the innocence of a murder suspect.
The order, according to court documents, allegedly came in 2014 from the highest echelons of the Riverside County District Attorney’s Office. One official went on to become a Superior Court judge. Another is now the highest ranking executive for Riverside County.
The last was a one-term district attorney who was voted out of office that year amid charges that he vandalized a rival’s campaign signs.
Ross, 48, says he defied his bosses and quickly found himself off the case and, ultimately, out of a job.
“I’m not programmed to follow an illegal order,” Ross said in a recent interview. “I’m not geared for that.”
4 years in jail:
The murder defendant, Roger Wayne Parker, was freed after spending four years in county jail amid mounting evidence of his innocence. He was released in 2014 after Ross indicated he planned to sue the county for retaliation and disability discrimination.
On Thursday, Parker filed suit against Riverside County for malicious prosecution.
The evidence in the March 18, 2010, homicide in Desert Hot Springs now points toward another person, whom police have not arrested. So the murder of 29-year-old Brandon Taiwan Stevenson, found with his head nearly severed from his neck in a house on Flora Avenue, officially remains unsolved.
The murder:
Friends knew Stevenson as “Tennessee.” He was homeless and hung around the garage of the house rented by then 50-year-old Willie Womack. Stevenson slept in a junked out truck on the street outside Womack’s home.
Parker, then 20, was Womack’s roommate and barely knew Stevenson. Almost immediately, police zeroed in on Womack and Parker because they were the only people living in the house where Stevenson died, according to case documents.
On the night of the killing, Womack told police he returned from his girlfriend’s house at 11. The front door was open and his prized television set was in the doorway, he told police.
Stevenson appeared to be asleep seated on the couch in the entrance way. Womack put his TV back in his bedroom and yelled at Stevenson for leaving the door open. But Stevenson didn’t hear him.
Womack tried to wake Stevenson, and noticed his throat had been sliced clear to his spine, he told police. An autopsy found Stevenson had been stabbed in the head as well, and his blood contained methamphetamine and amphetamines.
Womack didn’t have a telephone, so he called “911” from a neighbor’s house. After officers arrived, a friend of Parker’s told him something was happening at Womack’s house. Parker, who was visiting a friend, went to the scene and was taken to the police station for questioning. It would be four years before he was free again.
Focus of investigation:
Police that night convinced themselves that Womack was not the killer. So they focused on Parker.
According to internal documents from the District Attorney’s Office, Parker arrived at the station at 1 a.m. and was left waiting for more than three hours until police interrogated him at 4:15 a.m. Detectives left, then returned to talk to him at 8 a.m., left again and resumed the interrogation at 12:40 p.m.
Parker repeatedly told them he had left the house in the early evening — no one was home – and returned after the police got there. Investigators didn’t believe him and kept feeding him details of the killing, said a memo by prosecutor Lisa DiMaria. She was the first deputy district attorney assigned to the case and the first to suggest Parker may be innocent.
Investigators pushed Parker long and hard, showing him photos of the knife found in the bedroom and the blood smear where the blade was wiped. They told him who the victim was, how he was killed, the injuries, where his body was located, the knives that were found, where they were found and where blood was discovered.
But most of all, they drilled into Parker the concept of self-defense, saying he couldn’t be punished if he was defending himself from an intruder, said DiMaria’s memo on July 22, 2011.
Finally, Parker took the bait and confessed that he was asleep and caught Stevenson sneaking in. Parker was confident that he would be let go soon because he claimed self-defense, said the memo.
But the fingerprint on a knife did not match Parker. Parker also did not match the DNA from a white sweatshirt that contained the victim’s blood. Additionally, blood found on Parker’s shorts did not belong to the victim. Lastly, DNA swabs taken from the suspected murder weapon did not match Parker.
DiMaria quickly concluded the confession was coerced by police and they had the wrong guy.
Troubled past:
Why would Parker falsely confess? The answer may lie in his past. From the time that he was 11 years old, Parker had been institutionalized.
“Group homes, foster homes and mental hospitals, that’s all I knew,” Parker said in an interview taped by his lawyer. “I’ve been through hell ever since the day I was born.’’
He repeatedly attacked fellow patients, security staff and other inmates. He was no stranger to jail. Police told him that his roommate, Womack, didn’t want him back.
“I literally gave up on the world. I knew I didn’t do it, but I would be somewhere safe in jail.”
DiMaria saw holes and inconsistencies in the confession and recommended the prosecution ultimately drop the case.
“I have serious concerns about his guilt (if we have the right person),” DiMaria wrote to her boss, former Assistant District Attorney Sean Lafferty, now a judge in Hemet’s family court.
Case reassigned:
Lafferty responded by taking the case from DiMaria and giving it to Ross, the Green Beret who chalked up 59 convictions in nine years with the Riverside County office. The one blemish: an appellate court overturned a murder conviction because Ross told jurors in his opening statement that the killing was premeditated — but didn’t provide evidence to back that statement during trial. The State Bar investigated and took no action against Ross.
Ross said Lafferty rolled his eyes when he handed over the Parker case and said DiMaria believed Parker was innocent.
“They gave it to me because I’m like Mikey, I’ll try anything,” Ross said in an interview taped by his attorney.
Ross examined Parker’s story and ordered more DNA testing. The confession didn’t hold up — for one thing, detectives thought the victim was hit on the head with a flower pot, but Parker misunderstood their prompts and said he hit the victim with a cooking pot from the kitchen, Ross said. Plus each new DNA test seemed to clear Parker.
Prosecutor: ‘Dismiss the case’:
“Dismiss the case, as it appears rife with reasonable doubt,” Ross wrote in a undated memo to his bosses. “There are many unanswered questions still pending from the investigation of this case.”
He continued in the memo: “Many of these questions cannot be answered by ‘further investigation.’ There were many mistakes made during the investigation of this case. These mistakes cannot be undone, nor can many of them be remedied by further investigation.
Forensic evidence hurts our case against the defendant and illustrates the mistakes made by law enforcement during the case investigation. It creates very reasonable doubt as to the defendant’s guilt. Therefore, it is recommended that this case be dismissed.”
Ross’ lawsuit sums it up this way: “The facts demonstrated extremely shoddy police work that coerced a confession from an innocent man with significant intellectual disabilities who plainly knew nothing about the crime. The evidence, in fact, pointed to another individual as the guilty party.”
Desert Hot Springs Police Chief Jim Henson declined comment on the quality of the police work and why the case remains unsolved. Henson, coincidentally, was one of the lead investigators on the Stevenson murder case.
Exculpatory evidence withheld:
Not only did Lafferty insist on proceeding with the case, he ordered Ross not to turn over the exculpatory evidence to Parker’s defense team, a violation of federal discovery law under a landmark case known as “Brady v Maryland,” the lawsuit says. Also knowledgeable about the decision was then-Chief Deputy District Attorney Jeffrey Van Wagenen, who is now the head administrator of the county, says Ross’ legal team, headed by James Parkinson.
Ross had already turned over the DNA evidence to defense attorney Jose Rojo. Ross also obtained two recorded confessions that he says were made by Womack, who allegedly talked to a girlfriend on a recorded phone line at the jail. But Ross says in a sworn deposition that he was forced to turn over the recordings to Lafferty before he could give them to Parker’s attorney. Rojo said in an interview that he finally got the recordings — on the eve of the case being dropped by the District Attorney’s Office.
“I could sense the tension with Chris, that he wanted to drop it, but he couldn’t,” Rojo said. “It’s an awful thing, unbecoming of any prosecutors’ office if (what Ross said) happened.
Not a whistleblower:
Attorney Keith Dobyns, representing the county and its officials, did not return two telephone messages for comment left with his legal assistant. However, legal papers filed on behalf of the county contend Ross never complained to Lafferty about any violation of discovery laws. The county argued in court documents that Ross also made unsubstantiated health claims and did not qualify as a whistleblower just because Lafferty didn’t agree with him. Former District Attorney Paul Zellerbach did not return calls for comment. Van Wagenen, through a county spokesperson, said he couldn’t comment on the litigation.
Around the same time as the Parker case, Ross started seeing a medical specialist in Arizona for a neurological condition related to his time in the Army, according to Ross’ lawsuit.
Ross had asked that no more cases be added to his workload of eight. Lafferty declined to comply and labeled him “nonproductive,” the suit says.
Ross said he was forced to resign in April 2014 when supervisors placed him on administrative leave and demanded illegal access to his medical records. The department later responded by firing him for abandoning his job, records said.
According to court documents, Ross would not provide his boss a note from his physicians explaining why he needed a less stressful job. The office’s Human Resources department told Ross he didn’t need a note.
Forced out
“There’s no doubt I was forced out. They were setting me up to fire me,” said Ross, whose lawsuit initially was dismissed by a Superior Court judge before it was reinstated on appeal. “What they were asking me to do was akin to stealing, it was robbing someone of their due process rights.”
He now lives in San Antonio, Texas, practicing commercial law. Ross says it took him about 1,500 applications to get that job.
Parker is a dishwasher in Desert Hot Springs, grateful for the opportunity after so many doors were slammed in his face by employers concerned he had been a murder suspect.
“I try to forget,” Parker says. “I try not to stay mad.""
The entire story can be read at:
- Not a whistleblower?