Tyree Bowie filed a federal malicious prosecution case against a York City police detective, prosecutors and a forensic pathologist, alleging they falsely accused him of murdering 2-year-old Dante Mullinix in 2018.
The case, filed Friday in U.S. District Court in Harrisburg, is two years in the making.
A jury found Bowie not guilty of first-degree murder and child endangerment in Dante’s death at trial in December 2022. Bowie vowed to sue county officials upon his release from York County Prison for the first time in four years.
Bowie opened a civil tort case in York County in January, but he discontinued that case as he and his current attorney decided to pursue the lawsuit in federal court instead.
The 45-year-old Bowie’s suit calls for damages of more than $150,000, citing lost income from the four years he was jailed while awaiting trial for first-degree murder plus $75,000 in legal costs that mounted for his defense.
Bowie’s complaint, filed by his current attorney Aaron Martin, includes counts of malicious prosecution on federal and state grounds against Detective Kyle Hower and Dr. Wayne Ross, a consulting forensic pathologist.
Assistant district attorneys Tim Barker and Rachel Sherman, along with Hower and a county detective, Dana Ward, were also accused of violating due process during Bowie’s trial. And the City of York is accused of failing to properly train Hower.
Bowie alleged in his complaint that Hower pursued the murder case that left him jailed for four years without real probable cause, ignoring potentially exonerating evidence, and failing to consider other suspects as involved in abusing Dante.
Ross was accused of a “reckless disregard of the facts” when he was tasked with examining Dante’s body and giving a medical opinion on the cause and manner of the boy’s death.
Barker, Sherman and Ward were accused of lying by misrepresenting what the complaint identified as a partial video that showed Bowie and Dante together the night the boy was hospitalized.
The York County District Attorney’s Office and the City of York declined to comment, citing their decisions to not speak about ongoing litigation.
Dr. Ross did not respond to a message seeking comment from him.
Of his suit, Bowie said the murder case had a huge impact on his life, but the situation is also bigger than him.
“How many people has this happened to regularly that don’t have the means nor the support to be able to fight back,” he said Monday.
A look back at the case: Investigators charged Bowie with murder in September 2018 after Dante died at Hershey Medical Center from severe brain damage. They pinned the death on him since he was alone with Dante on Sept. 6, the night the boy stopped breathing.
Prosecutors argued a theory that Bowie beat, savaged and strangled Dante in a short window of time before taking the child to WellSpan York Hospital. The allegations were based on severe bruises doctors saw on Dante’s body and medical opinions that the boy’s brain trauma would’ve had immediate effects.
Doctors also found Dante had herpes which had earlier been misdiagnosed as another genital infection.
Bowie disputed the allegations, saying Dante choked on a Teddy Grahams cookie he’d given him during a car ride, and that the boy fell unconscious despite his efforts to unclog the cookie from his throat.
Another medical examiner was brought into the trial to give his competing expert opinion that, siding with Bowie’s account, Dante had choked accidentally which cut off oxygen to his brain and helped cause the damage that led to his death.
Bowie’s attorney at trial, Farley Holt, also alleged that Mullinix physically abused and neglected Dante that summer, while they lived homeless in her car in York, as he suggested the treatment contributed to the death.
Holt’s allegations included Mullinix’s associations with several other men, including alleged members of a local gang. One of those men, he alleged, was the likely culprit who gave Dante herpes.
Evidence at trial showed Bowie met Mullinix and Dante that summer, and he grew close to both of them. As part of that relationship, Bowie helped the two get into a local shelter.
The trio hung out together on Sept. 6 where evidence indicated Dante seemed listless and ill throughout the day.
That evening, Mullinix said she had an intense migraine. Bowie agreed to drive and drop her off at the hospital, and he’d watch Dante for her.
She waited there while Bowie drove Dante back to a friend’s apartment where they’d hung out. On the way, he and the boy stopped at a Rutter’s gas station to make a few purchases.
Security camera video recorded them there, which prosecutors used to show as the last moments Dante was seen alive, alert and walking around. The video evidence, they argued, supported the case that since he was mobile at the Rutter’s, he had to have been injured and disabled in the time after he and Bowie left the store and went back to the apartment.
The two hung out outside the home — Bowie argued he misplaced his key — for a while, and trial evidence showed Bowie messaged Mullinix and was on video calls for much of that time.
They talked about Dante, and she showed no indication that anything seemed wrong with her son. Prosecutors estimated Bowie had a 16-minute window of time that night, after he and Mullinix stopped chatting, when he could have beaten Dante.
Bowie, in his account, testified that Dante fell in the car twice, once at Rutter’s and again when they got back to the apartment.After the video calls, Bowie said he decided to drive Dante back to Mullinix at the hospital, and he gave Dante a Teddy Grahams on the way.
But while on North George Street, Bowie said he heard a thud. He looked back and saw Dante slumped on his seat. He testified that he pulled Dante to him on the driver’s seat and tried to clear the cookie mush from the boy’s mouth.
Dante still struggled to breathe, and Bowie testified he managed to drive the boy to the hospital with him on his lap and while he was on a new video call with Mullinix, seeking help.
Bowie carried Dante, limp and nearly lifeless, into the emergency department as Mullinix met him there. After staff took the boy, Bowie left Mullinix at the hospital and went home, freaked out, he testified.
Dante was later transferred to Hershey, and he died several days later.
Police interviewed Mullinix at the hospital that night and took her account before investigating Bowie.
His lawsuit alleges that Detective Hower was “extremely aggressive” when he interviewed Bowie the next day and again nearly two weeks later, and that he refused to consider his account of what happened.
Hower was also accused of not taking a Teddy Grahams package when Bowie’s friend offered it to him to support Bowie’s account. The suit argues that Bowie had taken the empty package out of Dante’s diaper bag and thrown it away when he got home from the hospital.
Hower allegedly refused the wrapper by saying, “We don’t need them. He’s guilty,” the lawsuit states.
The friend turned the Teddy Grahams wrapper over to Holt to help the defense case, and the suit alleged that Hower threatened to arrest the friend for evidence tampering in retaliation.
The suit accused Dr. Ross of forming a medical opinion “in reckless disregard of the facts of the case,” saying he formed conclusions while testing on evidence was still being conducted.
At trial, prosecutors refuted Bowie’s choking account by arguing there was virtually no evidence of cookie mush found on Bowie’s clothes or in his car, and that there wasn’t gobs of chewed goop to support the account.
One scientist testified to finding trace amounts of apparent cookie residue from Bowie’s jeans and from the car.
The suit further accused attorneys Barker and Sherman let Ward, as a police witness, lie in his testimony about the Rutter’s video they showed during the trial, which they said it was an unedited video showing Bowie’s car pull into a parking spot near the door.
The suit alleges the video was actually edited and shortened, and that it cut out several seconds that apparently showed Bowie checking on Dante.
That check, according to the suit, aligned with Bowie’s account that Dante fell in the car before they went into the store, and that the boy hadn’t been in good shape all day.
The suit linked its argument about Dante’s health by further accusing Hower of not investigating other possible leads on who abused the boy and gave him herpes. Neither Bowie nor Mullinix had the sexually transmitted disease.
The suit mocked one piece of trial testimony that herpes can also be transmitted via water droplets, saying the suggestion that Dante got the disease from water was an “utterly implausible theory.”
The suit, though, blames Hower for pushing the theory. But a doctor had raised the idea while explaining general herpes transmissions under cross-examination.
Bowie’s suit alleged that Hower didn’t have probable cause to seek the murder charge, arguing the evidence gathered when the case was filed in 2018 was insufficient to support the count.
The case seeks damages on the malicious prosecution allegations, as well as on false testimony charges about the video and the charge of failing to properly train investigators.
The complaint is still newly filed, and little other action has been taken yet in the case. The D.A.’s office indicated it hadn’t been served with documents as of Monday."
https://www.yorkdispatch.com/story/news/crime/2024/12/09/tyree-bowie-acquitted-in-dante-mullinix-case-files-malicious-prosecution-lawsuit/76866432007/
PUBLISHER'S NOTE: I am monitoring this case/issue/resource. 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
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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;
