By Ryan Fatica
The third of four articles from Unicorn Riot’s investigative series into the case of Marvin Haynes, who was sentenced to life in prison in 2006 at the age of 17 for a murder he says he didn’t commit. Almost a year after this article was originally published, Marvin Haynes was exonerated and released from prison. See the full series here.
Minneapolis, MN – When Officers Rollins and Smelter pulled up in front of Jerry’s Flower Shop on Sunday morning, May 16, 2004, they saw a woman run out the front door. She was screaming.
She told the officers that her brother was inside and that he’d been shot. When they entered the building they found Randy Sherer, 55, lying dead in a pool of blood.
It would take less than three days for police to identify the suspect they became convinced, based upon very little evidence, had committed the murder. In less than four days, they would formally charge 16-year-old Marvin Haynes with first-degree murder with no physical evidence linking him to the crime, even though he did not fit the description of the shooter. In fifteen months, he’d be sentenced to spend the rest of his life in a prison cell.
Within thirty minutes of the shooting, Sergeants Michael Keefe and David Mattson of the Minneapolis Police Department arrived on the scene. As lead investigators on the case, they took charge of the scene and sent officers to interview any possible witnesses.
The sergeants directed officers to use police dogs to track the route the shooter took out of the flower shop. In two separate attempts, dogs tracked the shooter north up the alley at the rear of the flower shop to a concrete pad at the back of 3343 6th St. North, a block away. Police interviewed those living in the house and only one, a young man named Jerry Hare, matched Cynthia McDermid’s descriptions of the shooter.
In her initial interviews with police, McDermid told them that the man who shot her brother was an African-American male, 5 feet 10 or 11 inches tall, with close-cropped, natural hair, who weighed about 180 pounds, appeared to be in his early 20s, and spoke “with clarity” and “as if he had an education.” Other physical characteristics, such as the tone of his skin, changed during her various descriptions from “real dark” on the 911 call to “medium” in an interview the following day.
Two hours after the shooting, Sergeants Keefe and Mattson took McDermid down to the police station to show her the first of three photo arrays they’d show her over the next three days. The photo lineup was conducted by another officer, Sergeant Rick Zimmerman, using a “double-blind” procedure designed to increase the integrity of the investigation and reduce bias. According to the officers, Zimmerman was not familiar with the case and did not know which of the photos, if any, contained the image of an actual suspect and which were fillers.
Investigators soon abandon this protocol, which was intended to prevent wrongful conviction of innocent people, without explanation.
The lineup contained six photos, including a photo of Jerry Hare, the young man living at the house identified by police dogs. McDermid was shown the photos one at a time and asked whether she recognized any of the young men. McDermid stopped at photo number two, Jerry Hare, saying that she recognized him from the neighborhood and that he may have been in the flower shop in the past. She also stopped at photo number four, who she said “looked like the suspect.”
The following day, McDermid was shown the same photo array a second time, this time with the photos enlarged. A different officer, Sergeant Bruce Folkens, conducted the lineup. According to Sergeant Folkens’ testimony later in court, McDermid again identified the same individual, number four, as the suspect, “and she further added that she wasn’t a hundred percent positive but more like 75 to 80 percent,” Folkens recalled.
The young man in photo number four was 20-year-old Max Bolden, whose photo had been used as a filler. Weeks later, police called Bolden’s mother at work to inquire about his whereabouts during the weekend of the murder. His mother, Tawanda Logan, told police that Bolden had been staying with family in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Police followed up with family members in South Dakota, who confirmed his alibi. Bolden is now serving a life sentence in South Dakota for an unrelated murder.
While McDermid was at the police station looking at photographs in the hours after her brother’s murder, police were collecting evidence at the scene. Sergeant Rodney Timmerman, with the Minneapolis Police Department’s Crime Lab, searched the flower shop for prints and other physical evidence. Timmerman found seven fingerprints, two of which would end up belonging to officers responding to the scene that day. None of the other five matched Marvin Haynes.
Forty-eight hours after the murder of Randy Sherer, Sergeants Keefe and Mattson found themselves with little to go on. Their only suspect, Jerry Hare, had been identified by their primary witness as just a kid from the neighborhood (police later confirmed that Hare was elsewhere at the time of the murder). In the process of identifying him, McDermid had shown how unreliable her memory was by pointing to a random filler photo and saying she was 75-80% sure it was the suspect.
Just then, according to a report (pdf) filed by Sergeant Mattson at the time, he got “an anonymous tip that the shooter in the flower shop murder was a 16 year old black male known as ‘Little Marvin.’”
The next morning, Sergeant Mattson called the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office to request Haynes’ juvenile records. They found that Haynes had failed to appear for court the previous day. Seeing it as an opportunity to bring Haynes in for questioning without any evidence linking him to the murder, Sergeant Mattson requested that a warrant be issued for Haynes’ arrest and sent officers to pick him up at his home. After interrogating him, they held him at the Hennepin County Juvenile Detention Center on suspicion of murder.
At trial, the prosecutor in the case spoke about “an unknown confidential reliable informant that provided some information to a member of the black community who provided it to us.” No information was ever given about the source of this information that appeared, just in the nick of time, and turned the police’s attention to a previously unconnected person, Marvin Haynes.
In some ways, Marvin was an unlikely suspect. According to booking records, he was 5 feet, 7 inches tall, weighed 130 pounds, had a 4-inch Afro at the time of the shooting, and didn’t look a day older than his 16 years. Police were looking for a suspect who was 3-4 inches taller, 50 pounds heavier, and at least 4 years older who spoke “with clarity” and “as if he had an education.” Marvin had dropped out of remedial school, could hardly read, mumbled his words, spoke in slang.
In other ways, he was the perfect suspect in the eyes of the Minneapolis Police Department. He was a young, Black male in a city that offered him few prospects. He’d had a string of past contacts with police and admitted to officers during his interrogation that he sometimes sold a little bit of weed. In cities all across the country, young men just like him were caught up in situations just like this. He was an easy target.
On the same day that Sergeant Mattson received his anonymous tip, a 14-year-old boy named Ravi Seeley reluctantly told a school police officer at St. Louis Park Junior High that he had been passing the flower shop after church when he heard a shot and saw someone run out the store. He described the person as “a slender black male” with a “natural haircut possibly faded on the sides.”
The next day, investigators showed McDermid and Seeley a photo array. While it was the first time Seeley was participating in a lineup, for McDermid it was the third. The day after that, they conducted an in-person, live lineup at the Hennepin County Juvenile Detention Center for both eyewitnesses. Both times, McDermid and Seeley identified the new suspect, Marvin Haynes, as the shooter, although Seeley would later testify in court that he “was very confused I think between two people,” that he was “shaky on it,” and that he had tried to tell the officers during the lineup that he wasn’t sure about his identification.
McDermid, on the other hand, said “he looks like him.” At trial, she would testify that she had “no doubt” in her identification.
Parsing through the evidence, it’s hard to understand the discrepancies between McDermid’s descriptions of the man who killed her brother and her later certainty that the shooter was Marvin Haynes. Unfortunately, modern psychology tells us that such discrepancies are not at all uncommon.
The explanation may lie in the fallibility of human memory.
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