On Feb. 6, 1996 at about 10:30 a.m., George Bryant, 33, was shot to death outside his home at 7009 Monroe St.
Inside, police found Oscar Bridges, bound with duct tape and shot in the head. Bryant's 4-year-old daughter Kayla was home at the time. Ricky Kidd and Marcus Merrill were both convicted of the crime in 1997 and sentenced to life without parole.
Now, attorney Sean O'Brien is raising new questions about Kidd's guilt and seeking a new trial. Yesterday, he brought the original eyewitness, Richard Harris, into federal court to recap what he saw that February morning. Here's how he remembers it:
Harris was chilling with his homey Big Mike at Mike's house on Monroe Street. Dudes were watching The Young and the Restless and smoking a blunt. They got the munchies so they polished off a pot of gumbo. It was good, but it wasn't enough. So Harris got up off the couch and wandered down the street toward his mama's house to see what she had.
As he walks by George Bryant's place, he sees the garage door start to open. Then Bryant, who is Harris' drug supplier, bolts out the door, running for his life and screaming "Somebody help!"
Bryant smacks his head on the door, because it's not fully open yet,
and Harris hesitates like he's going to help. But then another guy runs
out after Bryant, drops a trash bag one-third full of dope and cash
that Harris figures is about $200,000 worth, and tackles Bryant. The
man wrestles Bryant behind a car and holds him. Then a third guy,
dressed in black pants and a red turtleneck, sporting a 'do-rag and a
big ol' gold chain and walking like the Terminator, flashes a gold .45 semi-automatic and shoots Bryant maybe 15 feet from where Harris is standing, watching.
Harris peels off running. He's trying not to see what's
going on, because that's how it is in the neighborhood. No one ever
sees shit, and Harris is trying not to get shot. He runs back to Big
Mike's house and bangs on the door. Then he runs between houses,
through a patch of woods, and stops at a gas station. But then he sees
the murderers roll past in their white Oldsmobile Ciera. So he takes
off running again, this time to a nearby health center where he used to
work as a janitor. He calls his uncle to come pick him up.
He escapes, but can't keep his mouth shut. Doesn't take long for him
to start telling his friends this crazy thing that went down while he
was high and on the prowl for munchies. He tries to lay low, but one of
his crackhead friends turns him in to the police for a $100 reward. By
March 11, he's giving a statement, looking at photos and picking Ricky
Kidd out of a video line-up, based on facial features and that stiff
Terminator walk.
Harris will later testify that Kidd was the
shooter -- the man with the golden gun. But O'Brien, the lawyer, is
claiming that Kidd is innocent and that his previous defense lawyer
botched the job. ("She's an idiot," he says.) In neither Kidd's
original murder trial nor his appeal did public defenders strongly
question the validity of Harris's testimony, which is O'Brien's main
point. "The thing about Richard Harris is he's a very facile liar," he
says. "The key to dealing with a witness like Harris is investigation.
When you independently investigate what he has to say that's when you
discover how deeply his lies tend to go."
Noting several inconsistencies in Harris's testimony, DistrictJudge Scott O. Wright summed up the hearing, saying, "It's all a hell
of a mess." At the earliest, Wright could rule by September.
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