Charles Wakefield (Lisa DeJong, The Plain Dealer)

Don't Edit

CLEVELAND, Ohio – The fourth episode of Serial’s season examining Cleveland’s justice system uses the investigation into the 2015 shooting death of 5-month-old Aavielle Wakefield to highlight the “no-snitching” code that police often malign as hampering their investigations.

The episode is built around interviews with Davon Holmes, who spent a year in jail on murder charges before prosecutors dropped the case and released him, and Aavielle's father, Charles Wakefield, who told host Sarah Koenig that he knew Holmes wasn't the shooter.

Wakefield said he knew the identity of the real shooter and has relayed the information to police detective on the case, and expressed frustration.

Since his release from jail in November 2016, Holmes has been indicted on felony charges in three different cases. He was just charged on Tuesday in an August 2017 shooting that also included children, according to court records. He spoke with homicide detectives on Sept. 6 and is in plea negotiations in at least one of the cases, records show.

Here is a recap of the episode, some expanded and updated background information and the cleveland.com videos and stories that were mentioned in the episode.

Don't Edit

Don't Edit

Cory Shaffer, cleveland.com

Don't Edit

A cop's call to arms

Don't Edit

Don't Edit

The episode starts with comments from a seasoned homicide detective, Rhonda Gray, imploring the public to step up and help police solve the little girl’s killing.

Aavielle was the third – and youngest -- child bystander in a month’s time to be gunned down in a drive-by shooting. She was strapped in a car seat in the back of her father’s Oldsmobile in November 2015, when someone opened fire on the car from another car on East 154th Street. A bullet pierced the back door and the baby’s chest.

Investigators at the time had no leads in the case.

Gray described at a news conference hearing Aavielle's mother's screams in the hospital the night the infant died.

The episode also quoted Chief Calvin Williams from the same news conference telling the city, less than a year since one of his officers shot and killed 12-year-old Tamir Rice, to “stop marching and do something.”

Don't Edit

Ryllie Danylko, cleveland.com

Don't Edit

Suspect in custody

Don't Edit

Enter Davon Holmes, who was arrested about a month later on Thanksgiving weekend. Officers with the U.S. Marshals task force nabbed Holmes, a member of Cleveland's Heartless Felons gang, at his mother's house as he was reheating leftovers, he told Koenig.

Another man charged alongside Holmes in the case, Lawrence Hilliard, is not mentioned in the story. He is accused of tampering with the bullet casings left after the shooting. Hilliard did not show up for a pretrial in July 2016 and a warrant remains active for his arrest.

A third man who was later charged with murder in the case, Charles Caldwell, also saw charges against him dropped.

The episode dives into how investigators identified Holmes and finds the case was hinged not on physical evidence, but eyewitness identification from a landscaper who was working near the scene of the shooting. The landscaper, court records show, took more than a month to identify Holmes from a photo lineup after seeing his picture several times and, records say, passing over it at least once.

Holmes’s criminal history, which Koenig mentions, dates back to when he was a 10-year-old child infatuated with the streets. He was admitted to a youth prison in 2011, when he was 14. Holmes attacked two female social workers in separate incidents while he was incarcerated, extending his sentence.

Holmes told Koenig that he got arrested in Wakefield’s shooting just as he was starting to back away from the street life.

Don't Edit

Cleveland Police Chief Calvin Williams at news conference after Aavielle's death (Lisa DeJong, The Plain Dealer)

Don't Edit

Don't Edit

No-Snitching

Don't Edit

Holmes told Koenig that he had nothing to do with Aavielle’s shooting. But he also told her that, even if he had seen the shooting or any other shooting, he would never come forward to police, and even if they interviewed him, he would purposely give vague answers and be as unhelpful as possible.

Even if the crime was against a member of his own family, Holmes said he would take care of things himself before helping police.

“That’s not how I was raised,” Holmes told her. He later added, “it’s against my religion.”

Don't Edit

Aaron "Pudge" Ladson (Family photo)

Don't Edit

Murder of a state's witness

Don't Edit

That attitude has cropped up over and over again in homicide investigations, including some of the city’s most high-profile cases.

Aaron "Pudge" Ladson told police that he witnessed Douglas Shine Jr., a member of the Heartless Felons, walking out of a Warrensville Heights barbershop holding pistols just seconds after he opened fire inside, killing five people, in February 2015.

Ladson was shot and killed his driveway later that year as he was on his way to court in an unrelated drug case. Shine was convicted of both the barbershop shooting and conspiring to kill Ladson from his jail cell and was sentenced to life behind bars several times over.

Efforts by the Heartless Felons to scare witnesses out of testimony were also at the center of a case earlier this year, in which Da'Montais Banks was charged in a shootout outside a restaurant that left two men who police said were his accomplices dead.

Prosecutors said in a motion that Banks and his cohorts launched a campaign to threaten and terrorize witnesses in the case. Several witnesses either did not show up to testify, changed their story on the witness stand or took the stand and refused to testify all together.

The judge declared a mistrial after jurors could not reach a unanimous verdict. Banks is set for a new trial on Nov. 13.

Don't Edit

Don't Edit

Lynn Ischay, The Plain Dealer

Don't Edit

'The code's already broke'

Don't Edit

But the episode uses the case of another drive-by shooting of a child to illustrate how that code can "muddy the waters" of the legal system, Koenig said.

Cleveland.com introduced Northeast Ohio to Robert "RJ" Scott, a self-described member of the Benham Boys street gang who originally told detectives he witnessed the drive-by shooting of 3-year-old Major Howard. Scott tried to save the boy's life on the way to the hospital and told cleveland.com in the days after the shooting that he believed the bullet that killed Major was meant for him.

But when Scott got on the stand during Lindsey's trial, he changed his story and said he never actually saw the shooting. The prosecutor on the case, Anna Faraglia, confronted Scott with a photograph of the child on an autopsy table. The image made Scott visibly upset, but he insisted he didn't see the shooting, and only relayed what he heard from other people who claimed to have seen the shooting.

Scott said he had already broken the code of silence by talking to police and showing up for trial.

Lindsey was ultimately convicted and sentenced to life in prison with his first chance at parole after 37 years, largely based on the testimony from Major's mother, Brittany Anderson, who said she saw Lindsey's face in the car where the shooting came from, and testimony from a man who said he let Lindsey borrow the car tied to the shooting.

Don't Edit

Aavielle Wakefield (Family photo)

Don't Edit

Charles Wakefield

Don't Edit

Don't Edit

That brings the episode back to Aavielle’s case, with an intriguing interview with the girl’s father, Charles Wakefield. He did not witness the shooting, but said that people in the neighborhood have told him who the real shooter is and said he has confronted the man. Koenig bleeps the man’s name, but she noted that she actually ran into him at the county jail. He refused to talk to her about the case, she said.

Charles Wakefield expressed frustration with the police detective on the case, Art Echols, and said that police shouldn’t have to rely on members of the public to solve cases for them. That leads to a back-and-forth, chicken-and-egg-type of exchange with Koenig about how police should be expected to solve cases without the public when it’s members of the public who become witnesses and have the information police need.

Koenig notes that Cleveland officials refused to let anyone speak to her on the record, not only for this story but at all for the year that she and other spent reporting for this season.

“I’ve frankly never encountered a city government with its jaw locked up tighter than Cleveland’s,” she said.

Don't Edit

Rhonda Gray (Screenshot)

Don't Edit

Rhonda Gray suspended, demoted

Don't Edit

Gray was suspended for 10 days earlier this year after the department found she failed to follow up on a DNA match in another homicide case for two years. She was removed from the homicide unit and placed back on patrol in the city's Fourth District after the Cuyahoga County prosecutor's office said in a letter that her credibility would be called into question.

The case was a stain on a unit in the department that has come under fire for having a solve-rate below the national average at a time when homicides are up.

A 2016 study by the Police Executive Research Forum linked the department's low-homicide solve rate to the unit's shrinking membership. In 2009, the city had 19 detectives, investigated 122 homicides and solved 77 percent of the cases. By 2015, the department had only 13 detectives, 128 homicides and solved only 56 percent of the cases, the report found.

The unit currently has 15 detectives, after two detectives were transferred to the unit in May. The unit is budgeted for 23 detectives.

Don't Edit

Don't Edit

Don't Edit

Holmes accused of shooting into car with children, again

Don't Edit

Holmes too has found himself in trouble after Koenig’s reporting for this episode, including recent charges that accuse him of shooting into a car that had children in it.

He and another man are accused of shooting a man in the leg during a June 15, 2017 robbery near East 145th Street and Kinsman Avenue, just around the corner from where Aavielle was shot. The victim in that case recognized the shooter as “Tink,” Holmes’s nickname, and told police it was the same guy who got arrested in Aavielle’s case, according to court records.

He is also charged in an October 2017 home invasion and pistol-whipping in which a man told police two masked men burst into his home at gunpoint looking for a safe, court records say. The assailants ordered the man to lie face-down on his bed and bound his feet with an electric cord. They ordered him at gunpoint to go get a safe and pistol-whipped him when he said he didn’t have a key, according to court records. A neighbor called police and reported the burglary, and, when officers showed up to the house, two men ran outside. One of the cops yelled “hey,” and one of the men turned around and fired a single shot toward the officers, according to court records.

That same month, police stopped an SUV and three men ran from the truck. Police found a loaded 9mm pistol with an extended magazine in the car, according to records. Holmes is accused of being one of those three men.

And a grand jury on Tuesday handed up felonious assault charges against Holmes in connection with an Aug. 18, 2017 shooting that wounded a woman. The indictment also list two children, ages 9 and 6, as victims, but it’s unclear if either of them were shot.

The gunfire damaged the woman's vehicle, according to court records.

Holmes is set to for arraignment on Friday.