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Helmkamp Celebrates 87 Years of Excellence with a Strategic Succession Plan and Key Leadership Promotions

3 months 3 weeks ago
EAST ALTON – Helmkamp Construction Company is pleased to announce a long-term succession plan and three long-term employee promotions that will help drive the company into the future. Helmkamp, a trusted name in construction for 87 years, has grown into a premier provider of construction services for industrial, building, and life science clients. The company’s enduring success is rooted in its dedication to safety, quality, and strong client relationships. As Helmkamp approaches nearly nine decades in business, owner Rob Johnes remains focused on proactively planning for the future. Kyle Ogden has been promoted to President where he will oversee the day-to-day operations of the company as well as support business development, employee engagement, and long-term planning for the company. Ogden joined Helmkamp as a project management intern in 2007. He subsequently grew his career to Project Director, and then Vice President in recent years. He has made a strong and

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Eye Thrive campaign funds free eyeglasses for children

3 months 4 weeks ago
Eye Thrive has launched a fundraising campaign to continue providing free eyeglasses to children in the St. Louis region through its Mobile Vision Clinic program, which provides eye exams and glasses to students in pre-K through eighth grade.
Shirley Washington

Rudi ’splains it: State control of St. Louis and Kansas City police

3 months 4 weeks ago
In the spring of 1861, St. Louis was seething. Seven slave states had seceded by the time Abraham Lincoln was inaugurated as president on March 4, 1861, but Missouri and seven others hadn’t decided whether to stay in the Union or join the nascent Confederate States of America. Missouri sympathizers to the Southern cause of […]
Rudi Keller

Tuesday, March 11 - Job cuts cast cloud over science students' plans

3 months 4 weeks ago
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, fired 800 employees earlier this month. Experts are warning that cuts to the agency could have serious impacts on weather forecasts and climate research, but As Harshawn Ratanpal reports, University of Missouri students are grappling with what cuts to the agency mean for their careers.

Warm temperatures roll on, Friday to bring wind and storms

3 months 4 weeks ago
ST. LOUIS - We hit 76 F for a high on Monday and we’ll be right back there again Tuesday afternoon. A weak cold front is dropping in from the north and may cool things back a touch for northern MO and western IL, but it never clears the St. Louis area. Sunny Tuesday with [...]
Angela Hutti

How Eric Adams Has Backed a Secretive NYPD Unit Ridden With Abuses

3 months 4 weeks ago

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

In the fall of 2022, the New York Police Department began posting videos online to promote one of its latest initiatives: the Community Response Team, an elite unit formed under the city’s new mayor, Eric Adams.

Punctuated by dramatic music and quick cuts, the first video, dubbed “True Blue NYPD Finest,” looked like the TV show “Cops.” Officers run and shout as they chase people joyriding on motorbikes and ATVs.

One points a Taser at a motorcyclist and his passenger. Others tackle a rider, pinning him to the ground. Still others chase a motorbike onto the sidewalk, endangering nearby pedestrians.

Within the NYPD, department officials were disturbed by what they saw. “I threw red flags,” said Matthew Pontillo, a former chief who noted what he called “constitutional concerns” in the footage. But Pontillo and two former department executives say that when they raised the videos and the officers’ conduct with one of the unit’s leaders, he pushed back and complained to an unlikely party: the mayor himself.

If Adams was troubled by the unit’s actions, he hasn’t shown it. Instead, for more than two years, the mayor has repeatedly championed the CRT and his allies who run it, even as NYPD officials have warned its policing has been too aggressive.

In 2023, for example, Pontillo wrote a scathing internal audit after finding that some CRT officers were wrongfully stopping New Yorkers and failing to document the incidents. Weeks later, the mayor took to Instagram to boost the unit. “Turning out with the team,” he wrote, showing a photo of him wearing a wide smile and khaki pants, CRT’s official uniform.

The mayor has been so closely connected to the unit, former senior officials said, that at one point he had special access to a livestream of the team’s body-worn cameras.

“The unit effectively reported directly to City Hall,” recalled a former top NYPD official with direct knowledge of the interactions, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity because of fear of reprisal. “If you raised concerns, they would go directly to the mayor. All the time. It was insanity.”

In 2023, Mayor Eric Adams posted a photo of himself with the Community Response Team, in which he wore the unit’s uniform, khaki pants. (Screenshot by ProPublica)

In a few instances, after getting a call from one of the unit’s leaders, the mayor questioned department lawyers who objected to officers’ actions, another former official recalled. In one case, the mayor demanded to know the name of the lawyer and asked whether they were stating the law or just their opinions. The CRT leader, Kaz Daughtry, then ignored the lawyer’s objections, the official said. (Daughtry said he always cooperated with department lawyers.)

The dynamic underscores a central irony around policing during the Adams administration: As a former police captain, Adams railed against the injustices of gung-ho policing, but as the mayor, he has embraced a unit that perpetuates it.

Within the department, Adams’ views are clear. “Our mayor has given us the mandate to start playing offense out here,” one of CRT’s other leaders, John Chell, told a local TV station in 2023, months after the promotional videos.

The CRT has played a central role in carrying out Adams’ public safety priorities, from breaking up college campus protests to cracking down on illegal motorcycles and shuttering unlicensed cannabis shops.

The fallout for New Yorkers has been significant.

An officer chasing unlicensed motorcyclists killed a rider after swerving into him, body-camera footage shows. A commander punched a driver and kicked him in the head, according to cellphone video posted to social media. Officers stopped a young man without apparent cause, according to the audit, and, when he complained, a supervisor slammed him into a car window.

Body-Camera Footage Shows CRT Officer Shoving Man Into a Car Window (Body-camera video obtained by ProPublica)

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The questionable conduct has sometimes extended into the bizarre. In November, a CRT officer repeatedly grabbed and squeezed a man’s genitals without searching him elsewhere, according to an investigation by the city’s Civilian Complaint Review Board that was obtained by ProPublica. Police then cited the man for littering.

“When you put your thumb on the scale, it tips the culture,” Pontillo said. “And that starts with the mayor.”

Adams declined to be interviewed for this story. A mayoral spokesperson provided a statement that said, in part, “While there is no one-size-fits-all approach to public safety and we are always working to improve operations, CRT has been an important addition to the NYPD’s mission to ensure community members are both safe and feel safe.” She added that the mayor has always instructed the team to follow the guidance of department lawyers.

ProPublica interviewed more than a dozen former and current members of the NYPD, reviewed internal department records and watched video footage of several police encounters.

As Adams faces calls to resign over federal corruption charges, our reporting provides a new window into how the mayor has wielded power — and whom he’s entrusted to carry out his vision for public safety.

Among them are Daughtry and Chell, longtime leaders of the CRT. The two are allies of the mayor and were photographed with him at a group lunch in Washington in January around President Donald Trump’s inauguration. An NYPD spokesperson said they were part of a department contingent that was there “to assist with security efforts.”

Within law enforcement circles, Chell and Daughtry have long stirred controversy.

Chell shot a young man in the back in 2008, killing him. He was not criminally charged and has denied any wrongdoing. Chell said he fired by accident, but a jury in a civil suit determined the shooting was intentional. He now holds the NYPD’s top uniformed position, where he oversees a wide swath of the department. (Chell did not respond to requests for comment.)

Daughtry has been found by the Civilian Complaint Review Board to have repeatedly engaged in misconduct, including for pointing a gun and threatening to kill a motorcyclist. Adams recently chose him to be deputy mayor for public safety, a role that will likely place him at the center of the city’s response to the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. (Daughtry did not respond to questions about his record. When the New York Daily News reported on it in 2023, he said, “At the end of the day, we have a job to do.”)

Overall, more than half of the officers assigned to the CRT have been found to have engaged in misconduct at least once in their career, according to a ProPublica analysis of Civilian Complaint Review Board records. That compares with about 15% of officers across the NYPD. More than 40 have three or more cases of substantiated misconduct. The supervisor who shoved a man into the car window had 28.

“It’s not like they’re taking the best of the best,” said a current senior officer who spoke with ProPublica on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to comment publicly. “They’re grabbing a bunch of cowboys and just letting them loose on the city.”

A spokesperson for the NYPD touted the team’s record, saying it has confiscated nearly 4,000 motorbikes and ATVs, as well as hundreds of fake license plates and guns.

But even department leaders have at times found it hard to track the team’s work.

The 2023 audit of CRT, obtained by ProPublica, found that officers were going out on patrols even though they weren’t actually assigned to the team, making it difficult for commanders to track which officers were involved in particular actions. They were also frequently turning on their body-worn cameras too late to record full incidents, in violation of the patrol guide.

A recent report by a city watchdog slammed the unit for its secrecy. Citing a “lack of public transparency,” the report noted CRT has no required training or policies on officers’ conduct. “The absence of clear rules,” the report concluded, “limits NYPD’s ability to effectively oversee CRT.”

The NYPD spokesperson said Commissioner Jessica Tisch, who took office in November, is making changes. Among them, Tisch ordered hundreds of officers to return to their assigned units. “She will continue to review the department, including CRT, and make any changes necessary to ensure accountability and strengthen our ability to fight crime,” the spokesperson said.

A Unit “Acting Recklessly”

CRT Officer Drove Into Motorcyclist Samuel Williams (Body-camera video obtained and edited by ProPublica)

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Samuel Williams died in 2023 after an encounter with the CRT that lasted about a second.

It was Memorial Day weekend, and the Bronx man had gone riding on his motorbike after feeding his 6-year-old daughter breakfast and kissing her goodbye. He was crossing the University Heights bridge when CRT officers driving in the opposite direction spotted him.

Unlicensed motorcyclists joyriding in the city have long been a nuisance to New Yorkers and of particular concern to Adams. “We need to hold these drivers accountable,” Adams said when first running for mayor.

That day on the bridge, CRT officer Raymond Perez decided to take drastic action. Body-camera footage shows that he swerved his unmarked police car across the yellow line and into oncoming traffic, hitting Williams head-on and sending him flying through the air.

Officers found Williams splayed across the hood of a nearby car, suffering horrific injuries. His right leg was bent unnaturally — the tibia so badly broken it pierced his jeans, according to a report from civilian investigators.

In the body-camera footage, Williams can be heard screaming in pain. “Why would you all hit me?” he asks between moans. “For a fucking dirt bike, are you serious?” Williams begged the officers for help. Instead, they pushed him against the car hood and handcuffed him.

Williams, seen here with his daughter, died after CRT officer Raymond Perez hit the motorcycle he was riding head-on. (Courtesy of the Williams Family)

Perez did not respond to requests for comment, but the NYPD previously said the officer was trying to pull Williams over.

Williams’ mother, Joyce Fogg, soon got a call that there had been an accident and her son was in the hospital. When Fogg arrived, she found police guarding Williams’ door and refusing to let anyone in. “They didn’t want nobody talking to him,” Fogg said.

By the time Williams’ sister, Sha-Sha Prince, was allowed into the room, she recalled, “he was covered in a sheet.”

After an autopsy, the New York medical examiner listed Williams’ cause of death as “complications following blunt injuries.”

His family never heard from anyone at the NYPD. They did, however, get a bill from the city demanding $3,429.23 for the damage Williams caused to the police car when officers ran into him. (The bill was rescinded after the news organization The City reported it.)

The family is now suing the city and the police. “It was CRT doing what they do, acting recklessly, and Sammy is not with us today as a result,” said their lawyer, Jaime Santana. (In a response to the suit, the city said Williams’ “culpable conduct caused or contributed, in whole or in part,” to his injuries.)

The NYPD said Perez, as punishment, had forfeited 13 days of vacation. The department’s website shows the officer is still with the CRT.

“We Will Avoid Mistakes of the Past”

Adams has not always embraced aggressive police units. About 25 years ago, he launched a campaign to shutter one after its officers fired 41 shots at an unarmed man named Amadou Diallo. The killing was just the latest in a long trail of violence and abuse by the so-called Street Crimes Unit. Its motto was “We Own The Night.”

At the time, Adams was a 38-year-old NYPD lieutenant and leader of a group of Black officers that spoke out against police brutality.

To bring attention to the abuses, Adams orchestrated City Council testimony by a disguised officer who had been in the unit.

He sat next to the officer as she laid out a pattern of rampant racism. The NYPD fired the officer an hour after her testimony. But Adams kept up his campaign, and the unit was eventually closed.

Adams, right, at a City Council hearing in New York in 1999 when he was a 38-year-old NYPD lieutenant. He orchestrated the testimony of a disguised officer, center, from the Street Crimes Unit who spoke about racism within the unit. (Librado Romero/The New York Times/Redux)

In the years that followed, Adams continued to push for change. He gave key testimony in a historic lawsuit that challenged the NYPD’s use of a tactic known as stop-and-frisk, where officers were stopping, questioning and frisking residents without reasonable suspicion. After the murder of George Floyd in 2020, Adams spoke powerfully about how police leadership needs to step up. “We have to create a culture of zero tolerance,” Adams said. “That accountability really starts at the top.”

But Adams had a different focus when he ran for mayor a year later. Amid concern over rising crime, Adams positioned himself as a former officer who would keep New Yorkers safe. One of his main proposals was to take guns off the streets by bringing back a refashioned Street Crimes Unit. “We should not throw out the baby with the bathwater,” Adams said. “We can do it right.”

After he took office, Adams announced the creation of new roving anti-crime units. “We will avoid mistakes of the past,” Adams said at a press conference. “These officers will be identifiable as NYPD, they will have body cameras and they will have enhanced training and oversight.”

The units were dubbed Neighborhood Safety Teams, and officers in them did get more oversight.

But a few months later, Daughtry, Chell and another Adams ally created the CRT. The unit was essentially off the books — it had never gone through the NYPD’s process for creating teams, there was no announcement at its debut and many of its members weren’t formally assigned to the group.

“It was one of those teams where everyone is a ghost,” said Pontillo, the former chief.

Even top NYPD officials were kept in the dark. When they eventually learned of the CRT’s existence, they were befuddled, noting the launch of the similar much-publicized effort at nearly the same time. “What’s the difference between NSTs and CRTs?” said one of the former NYPD officials. “If you can answer that, lemme know.”

CRT Commander Punched Unarmed Driver and Kicked Him in the Head (Cellphone video obtained by ProPublica)

Watch video ➜

Operating in the Shadows

The CRT began to make waves after the department started posting videos in the fall of 2022. In one 38-minute spot, Chell described how the team was created to address so-called quality-of-life issues, such as unlicensed motorbikes and ATVs.

“We attacked quality of life,” Chell says. “Our Community Response Team was all over the city of New York. And I’ll tell you this, it’s been highly, highly successful.” As he speaks, the video shows roughly a dozen CRT members, with Adams standing in the middle.

A still from a CRT promotional video showing Adams standing among members of the team. (NYPD)

By the spring of 2023, it was not only NYPD officials who were asking questions. Pontillo, a top department oversight official at the time, said the federal monitor’s office charged with overseeing the NYPD’s use of stop-and-frisk called him to ask about the CRT. Pontillo told ProPublica that he went to Chell, who told him, wrongly, the team was only a short-lived experiment.

“There was an effort to conceal the reality and conduct of CRT,” Pontillo recalled.

Neither Chell nor the NYPD responded to questions about the exchange.

Another instance of secrecy involved body-worn cameras. Early in 2023, the team had purchased new models that allowed users to send live feeds to select individuals — including the mayor — but unit leaders had not informed others at the NYPD, according to an official’s notes from the time.

For weeks, videos from the new cameras were not stored in the NYPD’s main database for footage, rendering it invisible to the department lawyers responsible for sharing evidence in criminal and civil cases. “Footage wasn’t being produced for discovery,” recalled one former department executive. “We lost our minds.”

Jerome Greco, head of digital forensics at Legal Aid Society, said failing to turn over the footage “could get cases dismissed. It could have significant consequences, and frankly it should.”

It was after the body-camera issue that Pontillo wrote his audit of CRT, which flagged the team’s aggressive policing. Adams’ first police commissioner, Keechant Sewell, ordered commanders to gather and discuss it. But the conversation didn’t go far.

After meeting with the mayor that same day, Sewell resigned with no explanation. She did not respond to requests for comment for this story. But a former official close to her said she had grown tired of being undermined by Adams and his deputies.

“I don’t think Sewell resigned because of CRTs,” the former official said. “But it was another thing on the list.”

As for Pontillo, he said he was offered a choice: be demoted five ranks or retire. He chose the latter. The NYPD has not commented. The department previously told the news organization The City that leadership changes are common when a new commissioner arrives, as happened here.

CRT members, in their trademark khakis, breached Hamilton Hall at Columbia University on April 30, 2024. (Caitlin Ochs/Reuters) Mayoral Priorities

Over the past year, the CRT’s actions have often reflected the mayor’s priorities.

Last spring, for example, Adams became the public face of opposition to demonstrations at Columbia University over the war in Gaza. Blaming “professional outside agitators,” he said, “This must end now.” That night, khaki-wearing CRT officers led the way in breaching a building that had been barricaded by protesters. The NYPD made a video of the operation, set to dramatic music.

Days later, the mayor announced a new initiative to close down unlicensed cannabis shops. The CRT was again at the forefront of the operation.

Surveillance footage from one store shows officers jumping over the counter to grab and arrest the shopkeeper after he had asked to see a court order. “When a cop tells you to do something, you fucking do it,” one officer said.

It is difficult to tally the number of civilians who have had these types of encounters with the CRT. The NYPD does not disclose data about the team, as it does for most other units.

But over the past two years, New Yorkers have filed at least 200 complaints of improper use of force by CRT members, according to Civilian Complaint Review Board records obtained by ProPublica. Among them was the incident with Williams, the motorcyclist who died. The similarly sized Neighborhood Safety Teams had about half as many complaints.

Others have also been hurt by the team’s high-risk tactics. About a month after police ran into Williams, Daughtry and other officers pursued an alleged car thief into New Jersey, according to an internal report. Daughtry turned his car on the road in an attempt to block the driver, who slammed into it. The man was seriously injured after he fled the scene and jumped over the side of the highway.

The report noted that Daughtry did not have his camera on during the chase.

Kaz Daughtry was just tapped to be Adams’ deputy mayor for public safety. (Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times/Redux)

Chuck Wexler, who has studied chases as head of the nonprofit Police Executive Research Forum, said Daughtry and the others shouldn’t have even started a pursuit. Given that there hadn’t been a violent crime, Wexler said, “why would you engage in a high risk chase that puts officers and civilians in danger?”

Neither Daughtry nor the NYPD responded to questions about the incident.

Tisch, the new commissioner, ordered officers in January to curtail chases. Meanwhile, Daughtry has not been punished, according to disciplinary records.

Instead, he was promoted in July 2023, about two weeks after the chase, for what his official bio described as his “significant contributions as a leader and trailblazer.”

“Let me tell you,” Adams said at a press conference last November, “Deputy Commissioner Kaz Daughtry, you don’t realize how much this young man has really changed the game of policing in this city.”

In January, asked by an interviewer on YouTube about Daughtry, the mayor said: “Love Kaz, man.”

Daughtry, just named as a deputy mayor, regularly boasts on social media about the CRT. One Instagram post from last summer showed dozens of officers posing in Central Park. “Your Community Response Teams own the night,” Daughtry wrote. It was an echo of the motto of the street crime unit that Adams had once fought to shutter.

Do You Have a Tip for ProPublica? Help Us Do Journalism.

Do you have information about the NYPD or policing that we should know? Contact Eric Umansky at eric.umansky@propublica.org or securely on Signal at EricUmansky.04.

by Eric Umansky

Trump’s Third Rail

3 months 4 weeks ago
The sneak attack on Social Security creates new vulnerability for Elon Musk and for the entire Trump project of destroying government.
Robert Kuttner

He Was Convicted Based on Allegedly Fabricated Bite Mark Analysis. Louisiana Wants to Execute Him Anyway.

3 months 4 weeks ago

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with Verite News. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

Update, March 11, 2025: A federal judge has temporarily barred Louisiana from carrying out its first nitrogen gas execution, which had been scheduled for March 18.

Attorney Scott Greene warned those present in a Louisiana courtroom last September that the video they were about to see was disturbing. Created as part of a murder investigation, the 1993 tape showed a dentist repeatedly grinding a dental mold of the suspect’s teeth into the face and arm of a dead toddler during a post-mortem examination.

Those marks, which prosecutors decades ago had told jurors came from the suspect, were critical evidence in convicting Jimmie Chris Duncan, who has spent the past 27 years on death row for the killing of his girlfriend’s daughter. They were also a fraud, Greene argued at the appeals hearing.

Nine other prisoners have walked free after being convicted in part on inaccurate evidence presented by Michael West, the dentist, or his pathologist partner, Dr. Steven Hayne, once stars of the Mississippi forensics field. Seven of those convictions had involved bite mark identification analysis, a discipline that has been called into question. And three of the freed men had been sentenced to die.

There is only one person who still awaits an execution date based on evidence produced by the pair: Duncan.

Since his 1998 conviction, Duncan has maintained his innocence. Now, with a tough-on-crime Republican governor in office, he faces the very real threat of being put to death as Louisiana is slated to resume executions after a 15-year pause, with the first scheduled for March 18.

Louisiana has a long record of convicting and sentencing to death people later found to be innocent. In the past three decades, the state has exonerated 11 people facing execution, among the highest such numbers in the country, according to The National Registry of Exonerations.

Prosecutorial misconduct such as withholding evidence accounted for about 60% of wrongful convictions in Louisiana, nearly twice the national average, according to the registry.

And yet, upon taking office last year, Gov. Jeff Landry, a staunch death penalty advocate, has attempted to expedite executions. Louisiana has not put anyone to death since 2010 because of the unavailability of execution drugs. Landry recently approved the use of nitrogen gas, a controversial method allowed in only three other states.

“For too long, Louisiana has failed to uphold the promises made to victims of our State’s most violent crimes,” Landry said in a February news release. “The time for broken promises has ended; we will carry out these sentences and justice will be dispensed.”

Louisiana prosecutors say they have no doubt Duncan is guilty and insist he be put to death without delay. In a Jan. 9 brief, they acknowledged questions surrounding the credibility of bite mark analysis but said there is no consensus on whether it is junk science. They also downplayed the importance of the evidence presented by the dentist, saying it was not needed to connect Duncan to the crime scene, despite his defense team’s argument that it was the only physical evidence linking Duncan to the child’s death.

This is the purest manifestation of the harm of junk science, bad lawyering and pro-prosecution bias that one can imagine.

—Chris Fabricant, director of strategic litigation at the Innocence Project

Robert S. Tew, district attorney for Louisiana’s 4th Judicial District, and Michael Ruddick, the lead prosecutor in the case, declined through a spokesperson to be interviewed, citing the case’s ongoing nature. Neither answered follow-up questions about allegations of prosecutorial misconduct or of West manufacturing the bite marks.

In Duncan’s original trial, the video of the dentist’s post-mortem examination was never shown in court. Nor did prosecutors show it to their own expert testifying in the case. And yet, they used photographs of the bite mark evidence prepared by West even though they chose not to put him on the witness stand because he had been temporarily suspended by a professional board for a pattern of errors.

As defense expert Dr. Lowell Levine watched the video during last year’s hearing as part of Duncan’s post-conviction appeal, he recoiled.

“It’s a fraud, simply put,” Levine, former president of the American Board of Forensic Odontology, said from the witness stand.

Dr. Lowell Levine, a defense expert, testified in a September hearing as part of Jimmie Chris Duncan’s post-conviction appeal over the death of his girlfriend’s daughter. He is quoted in a brief summarizing Duncan’s case following his appeal hearing. (Obtained by Verite News and ProPublica. Highlighted by ProPublica.)

The bite marks are not the only evidence in Duncan’s case that has been cast into doubt by the defense team. A jailhouse informant who claimed Duncan confessed to the crime has since recanted his testimony. And in what Duncan’s current attorneys described in a 2022 court filing as a “bizarre, one-sided” deal, prosecutors and Duncan’s previous defense team had agreed not to present evidence at his original trial that his current team says indicates the child could have died due to a seizure caused by prior head injuries.

In a January court filing, Ruddick dismissed all the new evidence presented by Duncan’s current defense team, accusing it of “throwing another handful of spaghetti on the wall to see if anything can stick.” He wrote that the video of West does not show what the defense claims and said the dentist was simply doing his job.

West did not respond to emailed requests for an interview or questions about the case that were hand-delivered to his Mississippi home.

In a 2023 interview with The New Republic, however, West said that while he believes Duncan is guilty, he does not believe he should be executed. “You can be 99.9999999%, but you will never be 100%,” he said, adding, “It is a lot easier to get you out of jail than it is to get you out of the cemetery.”

Duncan’s fate now rests in the hands of a judge, who is expected to issue a ruling on his appeal in the coming months. The court can either grant Duncan a new trial or decide that his original verdict stands. Duncan’s defense team would not grant Verite News and ProPublica an interview with him.

“This is the purest manifestation of the harm of junk science, bad lawyering and pro-prosecution bias that one can imagine,” said attorney Chris Fabricant with the Innocence Project in New York, who is part of Duncan’s legal team.

He said moving forward with Duncan’s execution would not amount to justice, as Landry purports; it would be murder.

The Original Charge: Negligent Homicide

On Dec. 18, 1993, Detective Chris Sasser pressed record on a tape deck as he sat across from Duncan at the West Monroe Police Department headquarters. Haley Oliveaux had been pronounced dead just three hours earlier. In a clipped Southern drawl, the 13-year veteran officer instructed Duncan to “tell us exactly what happened.”

The 25-year-old sniffled and breathed deeply, then spoke, his voice barely above a whisper: “I got up this morning and I fed the baby. …”

At the time of Haley’s death, Duncan was living with Haley’s mother, Allison Oliveaux, in West Monroe, a struggling town about 280 miles northwest of New Orleans. Duncan’s father, Bennie, described the couple’s relationship as strained but said his son adored Haley, even though he wasn’t her father. “If the baby got sick, he was the one carrying her to the doctor,” Bennie said.

On the morning Haley died, Oliveaux left for work around 8:30, Duncan said. He got the toddler out of bed, fed her oatmeal, then left her in the bathtub while he washed dishes. At some point, Duncan said, he heard a loud noise.

“I thought I heard her splashing in the tub. I thought she was just playing,” he told Sasser, his voice starting to quiver. “I went in there and she was face down in the tub.”

Duncan said he yanked the 23-month-old girl out of the bathwater and attempted CPR. She spit up oatmeal but didn’t regain consciousness. “I was shaking her, holding her and just shaking her as much as I could,” he told the detective.

He ran next door with Haley, screaming for help. His neighbors also tried CPR without success. Someone called 911. Paramedics arrived and failed to revive the girl.

“Nobody could wake her up,” Duncan said, sobbing uncontrollably as he recounted the scene to the detective.

Duncan and his girlfriend, Allison Oliveaux, were living in this home at the time of 23-month-old Haley Oliveaux’s death. (Kathleen Flynn for ProPublica)

Haley was taken to a local hospital where she was pronounced dead less than an hour later. Child welfare workers and a coroner examined her and noticed some scratches and a faded bruise on her face but no bite marks, according to recent court filings. Sasser said he didn’t see any bite marks either but noted the bruising and “extensive injuries to her anus” in legal filings.

The detective searched the couple’s home for any evidence of sexual assault but didn’t find a trace of blood or semen — not on Duncan, his clothing or any of the items within the house. Later that evening, Sasser arrested Duncan for negligent homicide, which carried a maximum sentence at the time of five years in Louisiana.

That charge would only stick for a few hours.

Shortly after Duncan’s arrest, law enforcement and prosecutors would send the girl’s body to a morgue 120 miles to the east in Jackson, Mississippi, where West and Hayne were awaiting its arrival.

The Pathologist and the Dentist

At the time of Haley’s death, Hayne and West dominated the autopsy business in Mississippi and were making inroads into Louisiana. Hayne could turn autopsies around quickly, and his findings nearly always supported the working theory of law enforcement, implicating their main suspect in whatever crime they were investigating, defense attorneys in multiple cases said.

Hayne had found an ideal collaborator in West, one of the leading experts in forensic bite mark analysis, a relatively new science that claimed to be able to match bite marks on a victim with the teeth of the suspected biter.

On multiple occasions, Hayne claimed to be performing up to 90% of all autopsies in Mississippi and boasted that he completed 1,200 to 1,800 procedures in a single year. If true, that would far exceed the recommended annual maximum of 250 set by the National Association of Medical Examiners. When pathologists surpass that number, they risk engaging in shortcuts and making mistakes, according to the organization.

Hayne, who died in 2020, had a long, documented history of errors, according to news reports, court records and books written about the pair in the years after Duncan’s conviction. In one case, he testified that he removed a victim’s spleen when in fact it had already been removed prior to the man’s death. In another, he said he found in a female child a fully formed prostate gland, an organ that does not exist in girls.

Hayne, however, dismissed questions over his workload, saying he had a superhuman capacity for labor, according to the 2018 book “The Cadaver King and the Country Dentist” by Radley Balko and Tucker Carrington. “I work at a much more efficient level and much harder than most people,” Hayne said, according to court testimony from a 2003 murder trial outlined in the book. “I was blessed with that and cursed with that, but that’s what I carry with me.”

West held an equally high opinion of his own abilities. When a defense attorney in an unrelated case later asked how often he is wrong, the dentist replied that his error rate is “something less than my savior, Jesus Christ.”

In 1993, after receiving Haley’s body, Hayne performed what Duncan’s defense described in legal filings as a preliminary examination and noted what he believed to be bite marks on the body. He called Sasser that same night to report his findings, saying there was also evidence of sexual assault. Shortly after that call, the detective told the DA to upgrade Duncan’s charge from negligent homicide to first-degree murder, which can be punishable by death.

The next morning, West examined the girl’s body and, according to the video he recorded, appeared to manufacture the bite marks that confirmed Hayne’s findings.

West has said he was simply using what he called a “direct comparison” technique, in which he presses a mold of a person’s teeth directly onto the location of suspected bite marks because it provides the most accurate results, according to a 2020 interview with Oxygen.com.

At Duncan’s trial in 1998, Hayne took the stand. West didn’t.

By then, West was serving a one-year suspension from the American Board of Forensic Odontology for “overstating his credentials” and misidentifying tooth marks. So prosecutors brought in another bite mark expert, Dr. Neal Riesner, to testify — but they never showed him the West video. Instead, Riesner commented only on photographs taken from West’s examination, a move by prosecutors that Duncan’s current defense team called an “appalling failure.”

The prosecution had pushed for the West video to remain hidden, arguing to Judge Charles Joiner that the only reason the defense wanted to show it was so it could “drag Dr. West into the case” and “create ancillary issues for the jury to consider.”

Joiner agreed that the video was inadmissible after determining there was nothing on it that would point to Duncan’s innocence. Joiner did not explain his reasoning.

West, in the interview with The New Republic, disputed the merits of his suspension, saying his methods are valid because other people have used them. He said he chose not to testify because of Haley’s physical resemblance to his daughter, and it would have been too emotional for him.

When Hayne took the stand, he testified that Haley had suffered a savage attack in which she was bitten, sexually assaulted, then drowned to cover up the crime. It was later revealed that Hayne had misrepresented his forensics pathology credentials during the trial, according to the Innocence Project.

Haley’s mother did not respond to requests for comment. She had testified during the trial that she never saw Duncan physically or sexually abuse the child and said she told him to follow the doctor’s guidance not to leave Haley unattended in the tub.

First image: Duncan, center, with his family and friends during a visit at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. Second image: Duncan’s parents, Sharon and Bennie. (Kathleen Flynn for ProPublica)

After about two weeks of testimony and arguments, the jury found Duncan guilty and later sentenced him to death. Rape, the jury determined, was an aggravating factor that prompted them to recommend the death penalty, even though such charges were never brought. He was taken to the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola while prosecutors continued to call upon Hayne and West to help them solve some of the worst crimes in Mississippi and Louisiana.

Cracks, however, continued to grow in the forensics team’s facade. And in a few years, it would completely shatter.

A Broader Pattern of Misconduct

A decade into Duncan’s sentence, two men from Noxubee County in Mississippi walked out of prison after problems emerged with Hayne’s and West’s testimonies used to convict them.

Juries had sentenced Levon Brooks to life in prison and Kennedy Brewer to death after the testimonies connected them to the separate rapes and murders of two 3-year-old girls. In each instance, Hayne conducted an autopsy, during which he found what he characterized as human bite marks. He then brought in West, who confirmed the presence of those bite marks and, after pushing dental molds of suspects’ teeth into the victim’s bodies, connected the marks to the prime suspects identified by police.

Throughout their trials, Brooks and Brewer insisted they were innocent and offered alibis to clear their names.

Their exonerations in 2008 marked the first high-profile cases in which the testimonies of Hayne and West were found by the courts to be riddled with errors and, in some instances, completely fabricated.

In Brooks’ and Brewer’s cases, DNA evidence proved that the two girls were murdered by the same man, Justin Albert Johnson, who was later convicted. Forensic experts determined that the marks Hayne and West said were created by human teeth in the Brewer case were actually created by bugs and crawfish eating away at the girl’s corpse while it floated in a pond. In Brooks’ case, West and Hayne misidentified scrapes as bite marks, according to news reports at the time.

West told Oxygen.com that while he accepts that Johnson confessed to the killings, he doesn’t believe Johnson acted alone and still believes Brooks and Brewer were responsible for the bite marks on the two girls. Brooks died in 2018; Brewer declined to comment through his attorney.

A year after Brooks and Brewer were freed, the National Academy of Sciences issued a damning report on bite mark analysis in which it stated there is “no evidence of an existing scientific basis for identifying an individual to the exclusion of all others.” Other reports found that skin cannot accurately hold the form of teeth, that there is no proof teeth provide unique individual markers and that analysts often have trouble determining if a bite mark is in fact a bite mark and if the source is even human.

Since 1982, there have been 32 people in the United States who were convicted largely due to bite mark evidence and later exonerated, according to the Innocence Project.

Following the exonerations of Brooks and Brewer, civil rights attorneys began to dismantle many of Hayne and West’s most high-profile cases.

When I testified in this case, I believed in the uniqueness of human bite marks. I no longer believe that.

—Michael West

West even admitted that he no longer believed in bite mark analysis in a 2011 deposition that was part of the post-conviction appeal for Leigh Stubbs, who had been sentenced to 44 years in prison for assault. West had testified at her 2001 trial that he found bite marks on the victim’s hip, which he matched to a mold of Stubbs’ teeth. As in Duncan’s case, West is seen on a video using that mold to make bite marks on the victim, who was in a coma at the time, according to Stubbs’ attorney who saw the video. West has said pressing the dental mold against the victim’s flesh was part of his verification method.

Stubbs was exonerated in 2013 after more than a decade in prison.

“When I testified in this case, I believed in the uniqueness of human bite marks. I no longer believe that,” West said during a deposition when a defense attorney asked if he was still confident in his analysis of bite marks. “And if I was asked to testify in this case again, I would say I don’t believe it’s a system that’s reliable enough to be used in court.”

When pressed as to whether he made mistakes in previous cases, West said, “I made bite mark analysis that turned out to be wrong, yes.”

In 2021, the courts overturned Eddie Lee Howard’s murder conviction and death sentence after noting the absence of bite marks in the autopsy photos — and the presence of another man’s DNA on the murder weapon — despite West’s 1994 testimony connecting bite marks to Howard. Hayne had had the body of murder victim Georgia Kemp exhumed and unembalmed three days after her burial because he believed he might have missed several bite marks during her autopsy. West then examined the body and claimed to have found those bite marks.

Mississippi Supreme Court Justice James Kitchens said in his opinion about Howard’s case that West and his methodology have faced “overwhelming rejection by the forensics community,” and that the court “should not uphold a conviction and death sentence on the testimony of a proven unreliable witness, Dr. West.”

Hayne’s reputation had also been unraveling over the years. A Louisiana judge on the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals described Hayne as the “now discredited Mississippi coroner” who “lied about his qualifications as an expert and thus gave unreliable testimony about the cause of death” in a 2014 opinion about a different murder case.

Prosecutors Suppressed Evidence

All the while, Duncan, now 56, remained locked behind bars.

During that time, his defense team discovered more examples of what they characterized as prosecutorial misconduct.

Aside from the discredited bite mark analysis, the most damning testimony during Duncan’s trial had come from a jailhouse informant, Michael Cruse, who briefly shared a cell in the Ouachita Correctional Center with more than a dozen people, including Duncan, as he awaited trial.

According to Cruse, a distraught Duncan willingly provided graphic details about raping and killing Haley, insisted he blacked out at one point during the attack and claimed “the devil took over.”

What prosecutors did not reveal at the time, though, is that when Cruse initially wrote to them from his jail cell, he offered to share Duncan’s confession for “obvious” reasons. Cruse, who had been arrested for burglary and was facing up to 12 years in prison, then suggested if the DA helps him, he could return the favor. “If I can work this out perhaps I can help in other areas as well.”

Michael Cruse, a former cellmate of Duncan’s in 1993, wrote a letter to prosecutors offering to testify about an alleged confession Duncan made. Duncan’s defense team claims Cruse did so in exchange for leniency. (Obtained by Verite News and ProPublica. Highlighted by ProPublica.)

After testifying in Duncan’s case, Cruse was given a three-year suspended sentence; prosecutors said in the January brief that his sentence was “not an out of the ordinary plea offer.”

The DA’s office never gave Duncan’s defense team a copy of Cruse’s letter in which he appeared to offer his assistance in exchange for leniency, something that could have been used to undermine his testimony. Duncan’s team, which only learned of the letter years after his conviction, described the transgression as a flagrant violation of a federal law requiring prosecutors to hand over all evidence that could help in their client’s defense.

Prosecutors, in their January filing defending Duncan’s conviction, pointed to a Louisiana Supreme Court rejection of Duncan’s 1999 appeal in which the court stated that even if the letter had been produced, it would not have affected the outcome of the trial.

In November 2022, more than 24 years after Duncan was convicted, his legal team tracked Cruse down and pressed him about the accuracy of his testimony. Cruse admitted to an investigator hired by the defense that Duncan “never said he was guilty” and spent the majority of this time in their jail cell with his “head down … mumbling and crying to himself,” according to Cruse’s statements in the court filings. The defense team also found another cellmate of Duncan’s, Michael Lucas, who said that Cruse was constantly harassing Duncan about the baby’s death, and that Duncan never confessed.

He “just cried over and over again saying he did not do it. He didn’t do it,” Lucas told the investigator, according to court documents filed by the defense.

Ruddick, the lead prosecutor, dismissed the new statements, saying in last year’s appeals hearing that Cruse, who could not be located to testify in 2024, had previously testified twice under oath that Duncan had confessed. Any statement given decades later is worthless hearsay, Ruddick said.

Verite News and ProPublica could not reach Cruse for comment through email or phone calls.

Allegations that Duncan had raped Haley were similarly problematic, according to court filings. Dr. Judy Melinek, a forensic pathologist and an expert witness for the defense, said in court last September that Haley’s anal injuries were likely caused by hard stools, constipation or an infection, which can often mimic an assault.

“There’s absolutely no sexual assault,” Melinek said in court after reviewing Haley’s post-mortem exams.

Duncan’s defense team also uncovered evidence, not heard at the first trial, that provided a potential cause of Haley’s death. In the weeks prior to her drowning, Haley had suffered several head injuries, the worst happening when she attempted to climb a chest of drawers and the entire structure fell on her. Haley spent six days in the hospital during which a CT scan showed three skull fractures.

When she was discharged, doctors warned her family to not leave her unattended in a bathtub as she might suffer seizures, according to court filings. Haley spent most of the next two weeks with her maternal grandparents. She returned home to her mother and Duncan the night before she died.

None of that evidence, however, was presented at trial. Louis Scott, who represented Duncan at the time, struck a deal with prosecutors that neither side would raise the issue. Scott’s wife told Verite News and ProPublica that he is experiencing health challenges, including memory loss, but would relay a message to him; Scott has not responded.

In October 2023, Duncan’s current legal team flew to the DA’s office in Monroe to present to prosecutors all the additional evidence it had uncovered. Greene, one of the defense attorneys, said he wanted to give Tew, the DA, a chance to reconsider his position and avoid a miscarriage of justice before the new evidence was laid bare in court. But Tew did not show.

Instead, Ruddick sat patiently through the defense team’s hourlong PowerPoint presentation, asked a question or two and said very little, according to members of the team.

Greene offered to fly back at any time to meet with the DA to further discuss the case. “Ruddick said, ‘I’ll let you know,’” Greene recalled. “And then nothing happened.”

One year later, following the six-day appeals hearing last fall, the state filed its response, making clear what it thought of all the new evidence: “Defendant, Jimmie Duncan, is a murderer.”

Mariam Elba contributed research.

by Richard A. Webster, Verite News

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