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GIST: Shawn Harrington stared down the road before him, his yellow safety vest reflecting any glints of sun the winter sky had to offer.
The forlorn street, flanked by woods and a creek and devoid of any lights, had been repaved in the years since the little girl’s death, but not much else had changed.
Stillness enveloped the terrain, and Harrington grew haunted by how dark it was that early morning—how fearful the girl must have been before the fatal collision. Did she attempt to flag down help while traversing the tight shoulder? he wondered. Did she cower as cars whizzed by with poor headlights?
Pushing emotion aside, the then-35-year-old forensic engineer and accident reconstructionist from suburban Philadelphia began his customary walk, starting from what he calls the hot zone.
Informed by a utility pole from the original police sketch, Harrington pinpointed the westbound-lane location where the girl’s body was discovered.
Working his way outward, he analyzed small circles of space while photographing everything relevant: photos of the fog line (the line between the lane of a road and the shoulder) where police found a tire impression and blood trail; of the bridge, where a wheel-well liner was retrieved; of the street leading to a small subdivision—the closest sign of life in these central North Carolina backlands 25 miles northwest of Fort Bragg.
During Harrington’s hour march down the road on this January 2020 morning, all the police reports, witness statements, and photos he’d studied over recent days—evidence that had been presented to a jury 21 years ago in a murder trial—became visceral.
The skid marks and car debris were long gone, but he searched for clues that might have been missed. From his 13 years scrutinizing the causes and effects of car crashes, he knew the key to many cases isn’t the bright shiny object, but the little marking in the roadway three yards to the right.
Several vehicles struck the girl’s body that darkened morning in 1999, but one man was sent to prison, for life, based on the police investigator’s theory that he ran her over intentionally. During trial, the prosecutor told the jury, “This may be the most horrible murder committed in Harnett County.”
Many years later, however, a North Carolina attorney who specializes in wrongful convictions grew doubtful about the imprisoned man’s guilt and agreed to represent him. He hired Harrington to investigate.
After walking the street, Harrington grabbed his DJI Mavic 2 Pro drone and launched it 400 feet in the air, spending the next half hour digitizing the landscape, matrix by matrix.
Later, he would upload his imagery to a Pix4D software program to create a three-dimensional point cloud: a scalable panorama that stitches together every x-y-z coordinate of an environment, crystallized by rich, color-contrasting profiles separating road from tree limb from sky.
Such photogrammetry technology allows reconstructionists to digitally zoom in on miles of roadway as if perched 10 feet in the air and to perceive irregularities as small as asphalt-sealed cracks.
With his point cloud, Harrington could overlay the original police diagram atop it, allowing him—or a judge or jury—to visualize every blood droplet, tire mark, and piece of flesh as if looking at a live police scene. It “breathes a different life into the analysis,” he explained.
Through Google Earth Pro, he would compare his creation to aerial footage captured by the federal government not long after 1999 to prove in court that his model is historically applicable.
In some situations, a new building might tarnish an older accident site with forensic ripple effects. But here in rural Johnsonville, North Carolina, the road was as desolate as it was over two decades ago.
Having reconstructed thousands of collisions across the country ranging from bicycle crashes to a 150-vehicle interstate pileup, Harrington is part of a growing field of specialists who rely on physics and math to determine how a crash occurred, who was at fault, driver reaction time, and vehicle speed before and after impact.
As new technologies have recently emerged, accident reconstruction has become big business. When collisions result in death or severe injury, lawyers rely on these experts to provide critical insight.
Their testimony, based on extensive site investigation, vehicle inspections, data computations, and computer analytics, can be pivotal in civil litigation, with millions of liability dollars often at stake.
Reconstructionists also investigate criminal cases to determine, for example, if a driver charged with vehicular manslaughter is in fact guilty.
Courtroom fights erupt over vehicle mass and dimensions, skid marks, street gouges, crush damage, paint transfers, road surface textures, inertia, and coefficients of friction.
But despite its Newtonian principles, accident reconstruction is hardly a perfect science.
Data can be omitted or misapplied. Reconstructionists might lack training, make math errors, or use improper analyses.
Human bias, and even greed—telling an attorney what they want, just to get hired—can mar a work product.
Against this vulnerable backdrop, a worst-case scenario looms: What if a defendant, charged with vehicular homicide, is sent to prison based on a faulty accident reconstruction?
By the time Harrington concluded his North Carolina analysis, that question took on a starker meaning.
The highway patrolman who produced the original reconstruction—and submitted the expert report and testimony in the criminal case that ended with a conviction of a suspect for first-degree murder—zeroed in on a single theory but seemed to ignore others.
“When I saw there was evidence of multiple vehicles interacting with that poor girl,” says Harrington, “I was like, ‘No way, no way at all.’”
Moreover, the patrolman’s application of physics to prove his case was completely off-mark, he ultimately concluded. “This was an embarrassing level of reconstruction.”
Cameron Hill Road was pitch black shortly after 4 A.M. on August 7, 1999, when a motorist noticed an incongruous shape on the road and pulled over. Before her lay a lifeless girl in a pink top and Winnie the Pooh shorts. Body contorted, head crushed. She dialed 911.
As the motorist awaited authorities, a burgundy Chevrolet Celebrity hurtled toward the body, struck it, stopped, and then left. Minutes later the driver of a red Honda Accord sports car pulled over, conversed with the motorist, and departed. Later, the motorist noticed what appeared to be the sports car parked at a distance, as if the driver was curious what happened to the girl.
An hour later, the rising sun illuminated a grizzly scene. Body debris, hair bows, and jewelry were strewn across 110 feet of road and shoulder. Four areas of blood could be seen in various patterns. Tire impressions stained the pavement on either side of the body, indicating turnaround marks. A plastic wheel-well liner lay a quarter mile away.
The North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation dispatched Special Agent Michael East to the scene. Focusing on the turnaround marks, the 11-year veteran determined the collision was intentional. “It was apparent that someone had driven in circles,” striking the body several times, East concluded.
A bracelet on the pavement bore an inscription: “Sharita.” The local elementary school principal identified the girl: 7-year-old Sharita Rivera, who lived three miles away with her mother, an Army servicewoman stationed at Fort Bragg. Her father was serving overseas.
Investigators sped to the family’s house, but their knocks went unanswered. Hearing an infant crying inside, they crawled through a window and discovered another gruesome sight. Sharita’s mother, 24-year-old Patrice Rivera, lay dead under a blanket. She’d been stabbed 22 times, her throat slit.
Officers canvassed the neighborhood looking for clues and found a woman who’d been out with Patrice the previous night.
She told them Patrice was having a romantic affair with a superior who wanted to end the relationship.
Hours before her killing, the friend said, Patrice had left angry voicemails on his answering machine, threatening to expose the tryst.
When investigators visited his home that day, he was washing his truck in his driveway. According to East’s report, the man confirmed the voicemails but denied the affair.
Patrice’s killer, he said, deserved the death penalty.
That same day, investigators questioned Quincy Amerson, a 24-year-old drug dealer who lived two houses over from Patrice and had been intimate with her. Amerson, who was on probation, told officers he’d spent the previous night cruising around in his girlfriend’s Honda Accord but didn’t mention a collision. The following day investigators noticed a missing wheel-well liner on the Accord, along with blood, hair, and human tissue on its undercarriage.
During a second interview, Amerson told East he’d been high on pot and booze that morning, and likely traveled Cameron Hill Road to avoid a route regularly patrolled by police. When East confronted him about the undercarriage evidence, Amerson said it was possible he ran over “pieces of her.”
Less than 48 hours had elapsed, but the district attorney instructed East to arrest Amerson on first-degree murder charges for Sharita’s death. He also became an immediate suspect in Patrice’s murder. Weeks later, lab analysts determined that the wheel-well liner retrieved from the scene was an Accord replacement part. What’s more, it contained traces of Sharita’s blood and clothing, and bore a tread mark consistent with Amerson’s tires.
The initial evidence seemed to impeach Amerson. But in the following months, the prosecution’s momentum waned.
East couldn’t find a motive in either death. No physical evidence inside Amerson’s car or home matched with Sharita or Patrice, and no evidence inside the Rivera house, including blood prints and fingerprints, were linked to Amerson. Two pieces of car debris collected from the scene didn’t match Amerson’s Accord.
A local teenager approached law enforcement to reveal that he, too, struck the body with his Chevrolet S-10 truck, but thought it was an animal.
The State struggled to build a narrative. Eventually, however, it found one, through a local drug dealer named Brendan Herring.
Eight months after Sharita’s death, Herring was arrested for larceny and booked in the jail housing Amerson as he awaited trial.
A short time later, Herring contacted East, claiming to have information about the deaths of Sharita and Patrice based on a cellblock conversation with Amerson.
Under the influence of pot and homemade wine during that jail discussion, Amerson confessed to stabbing Patrice with the help of a friend, Herring told East.
Afterward, Amerson knocked Sharita unconscious, used Patrice’s car to drive Sharita to Cameron Hill Road, dumped her, and—after backtracking to Patrice’s house to retrieve his car—returned to run the body over, Herring alleged.
Prosecutors added a kidnapping charge against Amerson and prepared for trial.
What if a defendant is sent to prison based on a faulty reconstruction?
Prior to the 1930s, the best crash reports came from journalists, and police relied on witnesses to draw conclusions. In 1940, the recently formed Northwestern University Traffic Institute in Evanston, Illinois, published the first accident investigation manual for police departments, and it was gradually adopted from coast to coast.
In 1991, a National Highway Traffic Safety Administration–funded task force established the Accreditation Committee for Traffic Accident Reconstruction, or ACTAR, to standardize competence through a daylong test.
Today, the U.S. reconstructionist community is relatively small but growing, with 1,400 accredited experts, double from 20 years ago. Most have law enforcement backgrounds, though the field includes a large proportion of private engineers.
When the field was in its infancy during the ’90s, Sgt. Harold Thompson was among the first officers trained in accident reconstruction by the North Carolina Highway Patrol.
By 1999, he oversaw the entire county on behalf of the patrol and was among the first to arrive to the Cameron Hill Road crash scene. Like East, he quickly determined Sharita’s death was an intentional murder.
Four months after Herring’s jailhouse declaration, Thompson offered to reconstruct the collision that killed Sharita. Though he had access to reconstruction computer software, he declined to use it. Relying on his original field sketch, he formed a sinister conclusion: After initially striking Sharita on the shoulder of the road, the killer exited his car, physically carried the body into the street, rotated in a circle before placing it back down—as if to pick the perfect spot—then used his car to strike it again and again.
Thompson based his findings on three areas of blood. One spot lay on the shoulder next to a hair bow embedded in the ground, signaling the first collision. The second pattern comprised eight half-dollar-sized blood drops forming a circle in the road “with no elliptical tail, indicating that they had been dropped from approximately a 90-degree angle,” he wrote in his report. The third piece of evidence was a blood trail leading from the body to a tire impression on the fog line, “indicating the vehicle made a turnaround at a high rate of speed.”
Six additional turnaround marks bore angles that Thompson attributed to a front-wheel-drive vehicle, just like Amerson’s Accord. To Thompson, this evidence confirmed his initial suspicion: Amerson mowed down Sharita on purpose.
Amerson went to trial for Sharita’s murder in 2001, while her mother’s case remained open—and would go unsolved. On the witness stand, Thompson repeated his blood-drop theory. “[T]hose droppings came straight down,” he said.
“[They] could not have occurred by this body being struck in the roadway.”
Moreover, Sharita’s remains were discovered not just on the wheel-well liner that was seized but also on Amerson’s naked well, suggesting that he struck the girl at least twice, he testified.
Nineteen years after the verdict, and two weeks after his site inspection, Shawn Harrington sat at his desk combing through documents about the Amerson case. Following his conviction, the prisoner had written letters seeking legal help. One landed in the office of Duke University Law School’s Wrongful Convictions Clinic, whose lawyers would go on to file numerous motions on behalf of Amerson, hoping a judge would consider new evidence. To secure a hearing, they needed an accident reconstructionist to support their theory, and their research led them to Harrington.
Typically, accident reconstructions follow a straightforward process. The first step is to gather raw data. Police photos might highlight skid marks, gouges, debris, fluid spills, and resting positions. Body cam, dash cam, and business surveillance footage might be available.
Information from a car’s event data recorder can be downloaded; these “black boxes” preserve the most recent data after an airbag fires, offering computational clues like the car’s speed, whether the driver hit the brakes or was accelerating, and whether a seatbelt was fastened.
Next, a reconstructionist might visit an impoundment lot to measure vehicle crush damage.
When compared to NHTSA crash-test data on individual vehicle models (generated by plowing empty cars into walls at 35 miles per hour), a damaged car can help determine dynamic variables like deceleration.
A reconstructionist might also review witness testimony, though some decline on principle. “If a reconstructionist figures out everything without witness statements, then that report itself is a witness—the witness is the laws of physics,” said Portland, Oregon, engineer Terry Day, who helped develop reconstructionist software programs.
Once data is collected, a reconstructionist uses physics and math to determine how vehicles interacted, working backward from point of rest, to point of impact, to skid marks. They might also apply a momentum, energy, or time-distance analysis to draw conclusions, or measure the Delta-v (the change in post-collision velocity that helps calculate a crash’s severity based on a vehicle’s center of gravity).
Because the Amerson incident involved a pedestrian rather than a second car, cracking the case was more challenging. NHTSA’s 35-mile-per-hour damage data doesn’t apply. Pedestrian crashes also lack the force to wake up a car’s black box.
While Harrington typically puts together a puzzle from scratch by pairing his data with scientific methodology to draw conclusions, here, as a rebuttal expert, he was doing the opposite: breaking apart a puzzle that seemed to be pieced together inaccurately. For this assignment, he tried to get inside Thompson’s thought process. “My goal was to become him,” he said. The job was intimidating, but “at the end of the day, someone is sitting in jail. That weighed on me.”
Harrington flashed back to some of his other pedestrian cases, but unlike this one, those scenes were fresh. Once, police summoned him to the site of a crash site an hour after impact. A Honda CRV had struck a man walking his dog, punting him into the air and killing him.
Working his way past police, Harrington was soon on his hands and knees, nose to the pavement, when he discovered a boot scuff mark confirming the point of impact. By measuring out to the body’s resting point, he was able to determine the CRV’s speed.
When I saw there was evidence of multiple vehicles interacting with that poor girl, I was like, ‘no way, no way at all.’
Here, it was impossible to determine the trajectory of Sharita’s body when she was first hit because multiple vehicles struck it. Moreover, the witness statements formed a Venn diagram of inconsistencies, maybe even outright lies. And there was something about Thompson’s blood-circle theory that didn’t make sense. Could a killer really pick up a bleeding body, twirl it around, then flee without leaving residue on his clothing or car?
Something else was grating on him, too. In the cloak of night, was it possible that additional drivers had struck the body and fled without telling the police? He wondered if the girl was initially clipped while standing upright, rather than physically placed on the ground, as Thompson theorized. This is a stretch of road in the middle of nowhere—no 7-Elevens, no gas stations, no lights, he thought. If you hit a body and want to leave, there will be no repercussions.
Accident reconstruction has evolved rapidly in the last two decades. Up through the 1990s, reconstructionists relied on tape measures, calculators, plumb bobs, cherry pickers, film cameras, and handwritten maps. But with the more recent computerization of cars and proliferation of video cameras, data can be found from myriad sources.
Despite the advancements, reconstruction varies widely by jurisdiction. California’s Highway Patrol, for example, boasts an elite multidisciplinary crash investigation team, with drones, scanners, and a peer-review process for every report. But most municipal agencies don’t employ any trained reconstructionists. Sometimes crash investigators don’t even take photos.
“There are still law enforcement agencies that treat car crashes as insurance problems,” said ACTAR Chairman Ron Sanders, who consults out of Washington State. “In part that’s because it takes several thousand dollars to get one person trained up, get the gear.” Many engineers—even some with policing backgrounds—say there’s a rift between engineers and law enforcement.
Police officers “know the formulas but don’t understand what’s occurring in the transfer of momentum and impulse, they get lost,” said reconstructionist Roger Barrette, a Chicago-area policeman who holds an engineering master’s degree. They “dig their heels in. They’ll keep saying, ‘I’m right, and don’t tell me I’m wrong.’”
Police reconstructionists counter that engineers don’t observe hot crash scenes or smell smoking tires. “The elitist idea that you have to be really good mathematically misses all the hands-on issues important in preserving and interpreting evidence and putting things back together,” said New Hampshire police officer Wade Bartlett, who administers the National Association of Professional Accident Reconstruction Specialists.
Many engineers say they’ve witnessed wrongful convictions based on faulty police reconstructions, a notion supported by numerous appellate court opinions.
In 2019, for example, a Florida appeals court reversed a man’s vehicular manslaughter conviction and 30-year prison sentence, lambasting the flawed methodology espoused by the State’s reconstructionist. The deputy relied on a crush-damage inspection, but rather than measuring the data, he simply eyeballed it. “I’m just testifying as to what this looks like to me,” he testified. “I can’t quote you anything specific off the top of my head as to a case study or somebody who is in the know.”
Courts have acknowledged the challenges of grappling with such heavy science. In reversing a DUI conviction resulting in a 15-year sentence, based on an unqualified expert, for example, the Supreme Court of South Carolina in 2019 posited that accident reconstruction is a field that “lay people—even trained officers—simply cannot understand.”
James E. Coleman, the director of Duke’s Wrongful Conviction Clinic, has investigated more than two dozen dubious convictions in the past 25 years, resulting in 10 exonerations and five gubernatorial pardons. But the Amerson case gnawed at him unlike any other. By 2015 half of his conference room bookshelf was crammed with Amerson paperwork, and a photo of Sharita still sits in his office.
When he first read the case file, Coleman grew doubtful of Thompson’s reconstruction. Though the patrolman linked nearly every piece of crime-scene evidence to Amerson’s Accord, lab analysts couldn’t find any physical matches.
The professor bridled at how Thompson blamed his wife for connecting the fog line impression to Amerson’s Accord, especially since the patrolman had gone so far as to link a photo to that erroneous conclusion.
“That couldn’t possibly have been a mistake by his wife,” Coleman believes. “Total bullshit.”
Coleman even wondered if Thompson used Herring’s jailhouse-confession story as a blueprint to anchor his reconstruction and expert report.
The Duke professor zeroed in on the wheel-well liner retrieved from the scene—the Accord replacement part that Thompson said came from Amerson’s car. But lab analysts never confirmed a match; the bolts and ripped bolt holes didn’t conclusively line up. Coleman tracked down the car’s three owners before Amerson’s girlfriend purchased it. None ever had it replaced.
Early in his investigation, Coleman formed a theory. At trial, the prosecution and defense agreed that the man who stabbed Patrice was the same person who kidnapped and murdered Sharita. But what if that was a false starting point? What if, instead of being kidnapped, Sharita witnessed her mother’s killing and fled her house in terror, only to be struck, accidentally, by several vehicles on a pitch-black morning?
Coleman searched the Internet for instances of children fleeing into the streets after witnessing violent crimes at home. He found several examples. “That’s when, boom, it hit me,” he recalled. “It didn’t make sense that someone would take the daughter two and half miles away to kill her after they killed her mother. What would be the point of that?”
Eventually he stumbled upon an investigator’s report, undisclosed to the jury in Amerson’s trial, that made his heart race. Two days after Amerson was arrested, investigators dispatched a 17-person team to comb the two routes Sharita could have taken had she fled her home.
The search crew found a scrunchie embroidered with the words “I love Jesus,” along with a child’s necklace and a pair of child’s socks. Coleman flashed back to the prosecutor’s closing statement: “she never even had her shoes on.”
When Sharita’s body was discovered, her bare feet were dirty. After placing a few calls, the professor learned the scrunchie was Sharita’s.
“It didn’t make sense that someone would take the daughter two and half miles away to kill her after they killed her mother.”
As Coleman continued his sleuthing, another piece of evidence emerged: a handwritten note that Herring offered Amerson’s defense attorney shortly before providing assistance to the State.
In it, Herring claimed that on the morning of Sharita’s death, two friends visited his house separately. Both confessed to running over a girl and used Herring’s hose to wash their cars.
The first friend owned the burgundy Celebrity that struck Sharita in front of the 911 caller—a fact not in doubt. But something in Herring’s note jumped out at Coleman.
After striking the body, the Celebrity driver “backed up to see what it was and he ran over it again and when he seen what it was it scared him so he gased [sic] on it and ran over her again,” Herring wrote.
Coleman was puzzled. The 911 caller saw the Celebrity strike the body just once—not three times. The Celebrity driver told authorities he drank a case of beer that night. Was it possible, in his drunken state, that he hit the body earlier that morning, on a separate occasion?
The second friend who struck the girl, according to Herring’s note, owned the red Honda Accord sports car that stopped by the crash scene before officers arrived. He wasn’t riding alone.
Coleman sent a private investigator to Harnett County, who couldn’t find the red Accord driver but did track down the passenger, who confirmed that they indeed struck the body.
Then he added a curious detail: When he and the driver arrived at Herring’s house afterward, he observed the Celebrity driver hosing off a jeep-like SUV—not a burgundy Celebrity as witnessed. Coleman reread the investigator reports, which confirmed that the driver’s girlfriend, who was traveling with him that morning, owned a Chevrolet Geo Tracker, which resembled a Jeep.
The evidence suggested to Coleman that this driver may have struck the body on two separate occasions—and with two separate cars.
Finally, Coleman learned about a woman who admitted driving up and down Cameron Hill Road that morning in her Honda Accord. During an interview with East five months later, she denied striking anything but said she’d hit a deer more recently, requiring body work to her right mirror and rear door. She’d also installed four new tires.
Coleman was beside himself. During trial, the jury was told that three vehicles hit Sharita. But to Coleman, it now appeared that five, and perhaps six, cars ran her over. Two of these other cars were front-wheel drive Accords.
A street sign marks Cameron Hill Road in Harnett County, North Carolina, where Sharita Rivera’s body was found on August 7, 1999.
In his 2020 report, Harrington didn’t mince words.
Thompson’s reconstruction wasn’t supported by any peer-reviewed or generally accepted methodologies of accident reconstruction, it concluded. “His opinions and conclusions are nothing more than speculation aided by junk science.”
“He built a house on a foundation that didn’t exist,” Harrington said. On the phone with Coleman, he confirmed the professor’s initial instincts: “There is no scientific basis for Quincy to be imprisoned based on this analysis,” he declared. As a first step, Thompson should have investigated the woman traveling Cameron Hill Road the morning Sharita died, claiming to have hit a deer months later, Harrington reasoned.
The damage to her right mirror and door was consistent with clipping an upright Sharita and knocking her onto the shoulder. Second, law enforcement should have factored other potential hit-and-run drivers into their analysis. “I’m convinced that multiple other vehicles they didn’t consider on this crazy road could have interacted with her body as well,” Harrington said.
But the engineer’s most biting critique homed in on what he called “the keystone” of Sgt. Thompson’s evidence: the circular blood-drop theory—that the killer lifted the body and spun it around in the road.
For that to be true, two things must have occurred, Harrington reported. First, the killer must have rotated in a 12-inch-wide circle while holding a lifeless or near-lifeless body bleeding from just one source, which seemed unlikely. Second, because the blood spots were pure circles, they must have been dropped without rotational velocity; the killer would have needed to stop eight separate times mid-spin, allowing each blood droplet to fall straight down. “If they are rotating with any velocity then you’d see an elliptical tail,” Harrington explained.
To him, a far more likely scenario was that the drops fell from a static source, like the undercarriage of one of the vehicles that had struck the body and then stopped for the driver to determine what they might have hit.
Thompson’s “dramatic scenario is the kind of thing that can enthrall a jury,” said Harrington. “They crave this. This is what makes some experts so dangerous.”
Given the uncertainty of the number of cars involved, the order of impact, and the location of the body following each collision, determining which car killed Sharita was an impossible feat, his report concluded.
Coleman is pushing the DA’s office to retain its own reconstructionist to look at Thompson’s report. (Thompson, who retired the year after Amerson’s trial, died in 2019.) Neither East, now a federal marshal, nor Suzanne Matthews, Harnett County’s recently elected DA, responded to requests to be interviewed for this story.
A North Carolina Highway Patrol spokesperson said in a statement, “We have great respect for the judicial process and look forward to assisting further with this case if called upon.”
Last year, Coleman filed a motion for appropriate relief in North Carolina state court, arguing that Amerson is innocent of Sharita’s death, and asking a judge for an evidentiary hearing to consider new materials and analyses that would exonerate Amerson.
That motion includes Harrington’s analysis and findings contained in his reconstruction report, Herring’s note, an affidavit from the passenger in the red Accord, the unearthed investigator’s report detailing the search team, and Sharita’s socks and scrunchie.
Coleman is also requesting the State to retain its own accident reconstructionist to take a fresh look at Thompson’s report, believing that no expert would ever defend it.
This past January the State responded, saying it stands by the trial evidence.
But in February, a judge issued an order allowing Coleman to depose, or formally question under oath, Highway Patrol representatives, East, and a sheriff’s detective to determine whether Thompson’s reconstruction was consistent with the Highway Patrol’s policies and procedures, and whether it reflects the investigations by the state sheriff’s office into Sharita’s death.
Those depositions will occur in October, says Coleman, who blames the delay on the State for dragging its feet.
Last November, I visited the Columbus Correctional Institution in Whiteville, North Carolina, to meet Amerson. We’d exchanged several letters during the six years since I learned about his case. The 47-year-old strode into a cinderblock conference room wearing a gray T-shirt, a pair of prison tattoo sleeves, and braids coned neatly behind his head.
Amerson recalled striking something that morning and didn’t think much of it, but when police questioned him, hinting at a murder investigation, he figured he must have hit the body. Still, he played dumb with investigators, reasoning that if he admitted to striking it, even if accidentally, he’d be an easy charge, considering his criminal history, he said. “I was arrogant.”
Amerson’s family, including two adult children, has been supportive, and prison has humbled him, he says. “Walking around with your head down—that don’t get you anywhere.” Yet he is critical of the system he says imprisoned an innocent man. “I realized that these people weren’t trying to find the killer, they had me,” he said. “They work to get you in here, hope that you give up, die, mess up some other kind of way, get killed, or lose your mind.”
I tracked down several people linked to the case, all of whom stuck to their stories. “He did it,” said Herring on his porch after I questioned his jailhouse-confession story. The Celebrity occupant said he never drove his ex-girlfriend’s Tracker that morning. “I think he’s guilty as all get out,” the ex-girlfriend said of Amerson, adding that it was impossible that her Tracker was driven that morning, “or we would have both been driving it.” The woman who claimed she hit a deer denied striking Sharita’s body. As for Amerson, she said, “I hope he don’t get out.”
Patrice’s murder remains unsolved. When I visited the Army officer who allegedly had an affair with Patrice, he stood behind his cracked door and asked, “What’s that got to do with me?” Asked about the angry voicemails Patrice apparently left him hours before her death, he denied them, then denied that investigators even asked about them, even when I noted that a police report said otherwise. “I was cleared on every charge,” he declared.
The judge overseeing the Amerson case recently ordered the State Bureau of Investigation to run a DNA test on a knife found near Patrice’s home on the road to Fort Bragg shortly after the murder. Results are pending. Coleman also intends to request that prints found at Patrice’s home be run against new fingerprint databases.
Meanwhile, Harrington, inspired by the case, plans to offer reduced fees for his services in cases where he is retained by public defenders. “It really opened my eyes to the power that law enforcement possesses in these accident reconstruction investigations.
“I’ve seen bad police reports, we get them all time [in civil court], but there’s no real ramification,” he said. “This bad investigation led to someone going to prison. That’s insane.""
The entire story can be read at:
PUBLISHER'S NOTE: I am monitoring this case/issue/resurce. Keep your eye on the Charles Smith Blog for reports on developments. The Toronto Star, my previous employer for more than twenty incredible years, has put considerable effort into exposing the harm caused by Dr. Charles Smith and his protectors - and into pushing for reform of Ontario's forensic pediatric pathology system. The Star has a "topic" section which focuses on recent stories related to Dr. Charles Smith. It can be found at: http://www.thestar.com/topic/charlessmith. Information on "The Charles Smith Blog Award"- and its nomination process - can be found at: http://smithforensic.blogspot.com/2011/05/charles-smith-blog-award-nominations.html Please send any comments or information on other cases and issues of interest to the readers of this blog to: hlevy15@gmail.com. Harold Levy: Publisher: The Charles Smith Blog;
SEE BREAKDOWN OF SOME OF THE ON-GOING INTERNATIONAL CASES (OUTSIDE OF THE CONTINENTAL USA) THAT I AM FOLLOWING ON THIS BLOG, AT THE LINK BELOW: HL:
https://www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/120008354894645705/4704913685758792985
FINAL WORD: (Applicable to all of our wrongful conviction cases): "Whenever there is a wrongful conviction, it exposes errors in our criminal legal system, and we hope that this case — and lessons from it — can prevent future injustices."
Lawyer Radha Natarajan:
Executive Director: New England Innocence Project;
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FINAL, FINAL WORD: "Since its inception, the Innocence Project has pushed the criminal legal system to confront and correct the laws and policies that cause and contribute to wrongful convictions. They never shied away from the hard cases — the ones involving eyewitness identifications, confessions, and bite marks. Instead, in the course of presenting scientific evidence of innocence, they've exposed the unreliability of evidence that was, for centuries, deemed untouchable." So true!
Christina Swarns: Executive Director: The Innocence Project;
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