Pedro is falsely arrested and sent to jail for yet another shooting :: September 12th, 2015

While riding his bike home at 4pm in the afternoon on September 12th, 2015, two police cars pulled up on Pedro and pointed their guns at him through the windows of their vehicles. We should just stop right there for a moment. Again, this type of behavior should not be normal. He’s a child. One such traumatic moment is enough for anybody to experience in their lifetime, but for Pedro it became a way of life. The officers then got out of their car, grabbed Pedro, and slammed him up against the police cruiser — searching his entire body from head to toe — telling him he “fit the description of a shooter.” Police then showed Pedro to a man sitting in the backseat of the police cruiser who literally said, “That’s not the guy.” One cruiser left, then came back with another witness. On the police report she complained that she didn’t have on her prescription glasses that day and said “I can’t identify the shooter. I couldn’t identify Mr. Hernandez as the shooter. All I know is that it was a Hispanic male with a white tank top t-shirt.” Nevermind that Pedro had on a long sleeve shirt and more hair than anybody in the entire neighborhood— the description was close enough for police so they arrested Pedro anyway.

For a week he sat in jail without ever even being formally charged with a crime. Finally, his mother bailed him out, but the police strangely refused to even say exactly what he was being charged with. For months and months the family wondered. They emailed, called, and even visited the District Attorney’s Office. They asked private investigator Manuel Gomez to help them get to the bottom of it and not a single soul would explain themselves.

Finally, a full 8 months after Pedro was arrested and jailed for yet another shooting he had nothing to do with, a crime in which an eyewitness openly told police it definitely wasn’t him, the charges were dismissed on May 4th, 2016. Here’s the dismissal paper.

Dismissal of Shooting that Pedro Hernandez Had Nothing to Do With

What happens next made it painfully clear that the police in the 42nd Precinct and the attorneys in the Bronx DA’s Office had a personal vendetta against Pedro Hernandez and were dead set on destroying his life by any means necessary. On February 29th, 2016, in the case we just discussed, all charges were dismissed for the second false shooting Pedro was accused of, but on the very next day, March 1st, 2016, police from the 42nd Precinct came and arrested him again — this time for yet another attempted murder he had absolutely nothing to do with, and held him in jail for nearly a week during the school year.

But here’s the thing — and this is criminal — no attempted murder even took place. It never happened. The police made the whole thing up. Yes, you are reading that correctly — the crime never happened. Detectives David Terrell and Daniel Brady, with support from other officers in the 42nd Precinct invented it — and forced another victim of theirs to go along with a disturbing series of completely false allegations.

Pedro Hernandez Falsely Arrested for the Attempted Murder of a Mystery Person :: March 1st, 2016

I must do a recap.

Tyrese Revels is shot on July 12th, 2015. Pedro was arrested for it on July 14th, 2015. All charges were dismissed against Pedro on February 29th, 2016 Someone, somewhere gets shot at on September 12th, 2015. Pedro gets arrested that same day. All charges were dismissed on May 4th, 2016.

Now, the day after the charges against Pedro were dismissed in the Tyrese Revels shooting, police from the 42nd Precinct arrest Pedro for yet another attempted murder, but refuse to give even the most basic details on who they are claiming he shot. As you could imagine at this point, this is a worst case nightmare scenario for Pedro and his family. It’s stranger than fiction. He’s a 16 year old boy and it appears that the most powerful police department in the world has it out for him.

The fog of war came over the family. Why was this happening? What were they going to do? What were police and prosecutors even claiming that Pedro did in this case? Soon, it would all start to come into focus.

Meet William Stevens

William Stevens, lifelong resident of The Bronx, and longtime victim of Detectives David Terrell & Daniel Brady

“Police from the 42nd Precinct came right here to our house to get William at least thirty different times,” said his mother, Rhonda Fuller, as we sat and talked at her kitchen table high up in a public housing building in The Bronx. “It might’ve been more than that. Sometimes they’d come multiple times in the same day to get him. Other times, we’d all be asleep and they’d drag my son out of bed in his underwear.”

I pressed William’s mother on this. “When you say the police came here to get William thirty different times, do you mean they came here a lot, or do you mean it was really thirty different times?”

“Listen,” Fuller responded. “It might’ve been fifty. It happened sometimes when I was at work, but I know of at least thirty times they came through here and snatched William up. I would demand that they show me paperwork or a warrant, but they didn’t care. They never cared. And who was I supposed to call to report them to?”

“When did all of this begin?” I asked.

“Detective David Terrell started abusing my son all the way back in middle school seven or eight years ago. He used to be an officer at the school and I had heard that he would mistreat the kids, but I had no idea it was as bad as it turned out to be. I think it was at that point that William stopped telling me anything at all about what the police would do to him.”

“On several different occasions, William would come home with a black eye or busted lip and try to go straight back to his room. I think he thought he was protecting our whole family, I have five kids, by not talking about it. Other times he’d tell me he had gotten into a squabble with his friends, but now I see the truth and it hurts so much,” Fuller continued.

I knocked on doors and spoke with other people up and down Rhonda’s hallway to confirm whether or not the police actually came there as often as she claimed. They all confirmed it — assuming that William was a problem child who simply couldn’t stay out of trouble.

Maybe that alternate reality would’ve been better for William than the truth. Police had completely broken his spirit and were now using him not just as a confidential informant, but as a false witness in dozens of different cases — many times against people he had never seen or even heard of before.

Pedro’s family and the private investigator they hired, Manuel Gomez, had an idea that some type of secret false witness was being used against him in the previous cases that had been dismissed. In each case, Gomez would pound the pavement and find reliable witness after witness who could easily prove that Pedro was innocent. The building supervisor could prove it. The neighborhood barber could prove it. Respectable business owners in the community could prove it. But Gomez could never find a single solitary soul who could confirm Pedro’s guilt in those cases. He looked. Not only that, he couldn’t find anybody who even knew of one individual person who was claiming that Pedro was shooting people all over The Bronx as the police and prosecutors continued to charge. Whoever the witness was, it was a secret.

It was William Stevens. He didn’t know Pedro. Pedro didn’t know him. They weren’t friends or even friends of friends. They didn’t hang. They didn’t live on the same block. But one day in court, as Pedro and his family fought back against this new attempted murder charge, Assistant District Attorney David Slott made a huge mistake.

Pedro was handed a court document that named what appeared to be the primary witness against him. It was a name he had never heard before — Steven Williams.

“I’m in court with Pedro and I notice he has a piece of paper in his hand, and all of a sudden his eyes get big. He’s clearly seen something shocking. He shows it to me. And there it was, plain as day, the name Steven Williams, the man who had turned our lives upside down,” said Pedro’s mother, Jessica Perez.

Suddenly, according to several witnesses, ADA (Assistant District Attorney) Slott rushed over to Pedro, snatched the paper out of his hands, and ripped it up right there on the spot.

“That was the turning point,” said Manuel Gomez. “That’s when we knew, when we had the proof, that this was so much more than just a bunch of bad luck or even bad policing. Police and prosecutors were using a false witness against Pedro, but we couldn’t find him anywhere. He was a ghost. I kid you not, I looked for this man for 10 straight months. I knocked on hundreds of doors, spoke to hundreds of people, and nobody knew Steven Williams. Guess what? We had his name backwards. The paper said Steven Williams, but his name is William Stevens.”

It is indeed.

For years now, William Stevens has been working with the NYPD and the Bronx District Attorney’s Office to falsify cases against whoever their targets were at any given moment. And at this point, the police and prosecutors were targeting William Stevens and Pedro, it appeared, was strangely being charged with the attempted murder of William.

Except the two kids had never even shared the same space at the same time before. It was all a farce. William didn’t even make the story up — the police and prosecutors did — and they threatened him if he didn’t refuse to go along.

Learning this, Sarah Wallace, the award-winning reporter of NBC’s New York affiliate WNBC, who has done some of the most amazing work covering the injustice Pedro has experienced, traveled to Green Correctional Facility to interview William and ask him if he has indeed been serving as a false witness for the NYPD and the DA’s office. You have to see the interview for yourself. What he says, at great risk to his own safety and well-being, is explosive.

It’s painful to watch. Speaking at great length to Sarah Wallace, William Stevens tells her that being in prison, far away from Detectives Terrell and Brady, is the safest he has felt in years.

“I was scared, terrified,” Stevens said. “They would always come and threaten me — saying that I’ve got to sign this, you’ve gotta sign this photo array about somebody. They’d come (and say) if you don’t sign this paper, we’re gonna take you somewhere and beat you up.”

When asked by Wallace how many people he lied on across the years, Stevens openly admitted that it was at least 25 people including…you guessed it — Pedro Hernandez — saying that he had been pressured not just by Detectives David Terrell and Daniel Brady, but by the Assistant District Attorney David Slott, to lie on Pedro on at least three different occasions.

“Officer Terrell came in and started punching me in my ribs,” said Stevens. “Then he started punching me in my face. And then he said, if you don’t sign this, this is going to happen every time we come and pick you up.”

Stevens continued, “He (Terrell) told me — you’ve gotta sign this about another shooting Pedro Hernandez did.” And so Stevens signed it. “I was just thinking if I did it, they were going to leave me alone.”

But they didn’t leave William alone — instead they continued to beat, humiliate, and threaten him. Kids in the community said that Detective Terrell routinely humiliated “Junior” in public — even pulling his pants down and exposing his genitals in front of crowds of people. Then, what Stevens told Wallace next may very well be the most disturbing statement of this entire series and explains how and why a young man would say he feels safer in prison than he did at home in The Bronx. After Stevens identified a photo of Slott, who is the lead prosecutor in the case against Pedro Hernandez, to Sarah Wallace, he then told her that Slott himself not only knew of the abuse he was suffering, but that he even used it to pressure Stevens to lie against Pedro. “He told me that if I don’t testify against him (Pedro) in court, he’s going to have Officer Terrell come to my house and harass me all of the time.”

But long before any of us ever heard of William Stevens — or even of Pedro for that matter — the bogus cases police and prosecutors concocted against Pedro with Stevens as the mystery victim started falling apart at the seams.

First, the bogus charge filed against Pedro for the attempted murder of William Stevens was dismissed six months later on September 6th, 2016.

Here’s a copy of that dismissal:

Dismissal of False Attempted Murder Charge

Let’s do another recap.

Tyrese Revels is shot on July 12th, 2015. Pedro was arrested for it on July 14th, 2015. All charges were dismissed against Pedro on February 29th, 2016 Someone, somewhere gets shot at on September 12th, 2015. Pedro gets arrested that same day. All charges were dismissed on May 4th, 2016. On March 1st, 2016 Pedro was arrested for the attempted murder of William Stevens. All charges were dismissed on September 6th, 2016.

At this point, police and prosecutors are basically claiming that Pedro Hernandez is something akin to a world class serial killer who evades police and prosecution like a pro — while amazingly using a public defender to beat the rap time after time after time, all while working hard to stay on track in high school, getting awards for his academic achievements, and garnering scholarship offers from around the country.

Instead of relenting after having three different cases against Pedro completely dismissed, each featuring violent armed felonies, police and prosecutors doubled down on him. Now they were embarrassed.

Pedro Hernandez Falsely Arrested for Disorderly Conduct & Resisting Arrest :: May 3rd, 2016

On May 3rd, 2016, Pedro Hernandez was falsely arrested for disorderly conduct and resisting arrest after police from the 42nd Precinct forced him out of his grandmother’s car, illegally searched him, found nothing, then were recorded aloud wondering if the car was perhaps stolen or had been vandalized or even had expired tags. None were true. You’d have to know Pedro to understand what I’m about to say, but the kid is never disorderly, combative, or uncooperative. Because it was all recorded by cell phone cameras, all charges were again dismissed. This is now the fourth different time Pedro was arrested on bogus charges by the 42nd Precinct with all charges dismissed each and every time. Here’s the video from the incident.