“Paint me as a villain”- Childish Gambino
“Just as quick as you rise, just as quick as you could fall.”-Logic
Throughout all the proceedings in my case, many lies have been told and perpetuated, from the time of the first news reports up until today. Having already been convicted and sentenced to life without the possibility of parole, it was easier to let the lies lie and just fade from the public consciousness. A part of me always knew that no matter what I did, I would be used by government officials to further their own political aims, or by newspaper editors to sell papers and get hits on their website. I knew there would be people continuously smutting up my name for their own various reasons. Separating the truth from the lies was unimportant to those people, and while people knowing the truth was important to me, I knew I could never convince people—the general public—that lies formed the heart of the State’s case against me. So, my thinking went, why even try?
The easier thing to do would be to give up. Just live a quiet life in prison, live off the State the rest of my life, and never try to contribute anything to society or humanity. By trying to get out of prison, trying to use everything I have to contribute to society and make a positive impact on the world, I open myself up to public ridicule and humiliation, as well as the threat of physical violence against my person. I could take the path of least resistance, then turn my back on the world, and never contribute anything to the world. The right thing is rarely the easy thing. I truly believe I have much to contribute—mentally, physically, and emotionally—to the world as a whole, and to my family and friends. More so, I owe an eternal debt that can be better repaid out there than in here.
One thing I’ve learned about district attorneys and the attorney general lawyers in Nevada over the years is that they do not care about right or wrong, and they don`t care about the truth: they only care about winning, and they will do whatever it takes to win, at all costs. My case is bad enough without using lies to make it seem or sound even worse than it is, yet the D.A. continues to do that. To lay out all the lies will take a while, so it’s not going to all fit in this one post. Wherever it’s available, I will use documentary evidence to show the truth.
One of the original lies propagated by the police detectives and the D.A. was that there was surveillance video that showed me entering the women’s restroom, following Sherrice in there. They perpetuated that lie because it fit their narrative they tried to spin (and successfully spun) of my being the one and only clearly guilty party. The actual fact and truth is that the surveillance camera did not show the entrance to the women’s bathroom. It actually only showed the area leading to both the men’s and women’s bathroom, with no way of knowing which bathroom any given person was entering or exiting. Click Here to see the grand jury transcript explaining this. Grand Jury Transcript pages, 51 (lines 19-25) to 52 (lines 1-4). I point this out because this was one of many lies propagated in order to ensure I not only looked as guilty as possible, but also to make sure Dave Cash was protected so that it would make it easier to get a conviction on me, and me alone. Anything that called into question my guilt, or pointed toward Dave Cash being guilty of anything, would be buried by the police and D.A., or outright lied about. The lies by the D.A. and police multiplied over the course of the case, and that habit of lying to inflame the public to keep focus off the truth for the sake of maintaining their narrative and keeping me in prison until I die continues to this day. They want to win, and the truth doesn’t matter to them.
Which brings us to today, and the judge’s denial of my writ of habeas corpus, and the lies the judge is propagating at the behest of the unethical D.A. There are a plethora of them, but I`m focusing on two specific issues today. The first lie by the judge that I`m countering is that this was a well thought out, planned, premeditated crime against Sherrice on my part. Nothing could be further from the truth. When Dave invited me out to Las Vegas with him and his dad that weekend, I had been tweaking (smoking and snorting meth) for about two months at that point. I’d stopped going to class for the most part and was pretty much failing all the classes I’d been getting A’s and B’s in just a few months before. I’d been prescribed Dexedrine a few days prior and had been on a meth-fueled runner of no sleep for about five days. So even though I needed sleep, I wanted to go to Vegas with Dave, and thought I could pop a few extra Dexedrines to stay awake.
I thought we would head to Vegas, where we would be able to party—drinking, gambling, hitting the strip clubs, and hooking up with some college chics or some hookers. My plan was to get shitfaced to the point of oblivion and forget my problems. See, I was a suicidal, self-destructive, self-centered, self-loathing asshole punk kid. I self-medicated my depression while doing anything and everything to impress and shock my peers. I desperately wanted to be loved and liked by my peers, to the point of my own destruction.
It was in this thrill-seeking, self-destructive frame of mind that I went with Dave. The detectives and D.A. made, and make, every attempt to paint me as a sober, full-grown man at the time, to paint me as a predator whose sole purpose was to seek out a victim. They try to make it sound like I went to a videogame arcade full of children, looking for a victim. The actual truth is that I had no clue Dave’s dad would want to stop at the State Line on our way to Vegas, and when he did, Dave and I went looking for things to do. We wanted to party, but there wasn’t much going on at State Line at one in the morning. Yeah, there’s a fact the D.A., detectives, and the media like to bury: this crime occurred at around three to four o’ clock in the morning. This wasn’t during the day: it was in the middle of the night. Logically, if someone is looking for kids to victimize, are they out at three in the morning when there are no kids around? No, of course not. They would be trolling schools or playgrounds during the daytime.
So, I popped a bunch of Dexedrine and immediately started drinking when we got to State Line. I drank a whiskey & coke, a daquiri, and four or five beers. In the past, I had blacked out from drinking alcohol and mixing it with pills, and from just alcohol by itself. I hadn’t been drinking much the past couple of months, because I was tweaking all the time, so my tolerance was low. I was probably about 135 pounds at the time, too. It was the first time I had mixed alcohol with Dexedrine, and I had no clue what the effect on me would be, and I didn`t really care. A part of me hoped it would kill me.
Dave and I tried to hang out on the casino floor and in the bar, but we got kicked off the casino floor because we were, by laws, minors. We wandered between multiple casinos, looking for things to do, a couple of 18-year-old boys wandering aimlessly in the middle of the night. I had a fake ID, so I kept drinking, until we ended up in the arcade at the Primadonna.
I went into that arcade to play videogames. I wasn’t in there looking for kids to victimize, or for anyone to hurt. The last things I remembered before blacking out were hitting on some Asian high school girl (remember that I was still in high school), flicking my lit cigarette butts randomly around the arcade, and urinating on one of the videogame machines. When flirting with the Asian girl, I told her I was from Long Beach, what high school I went to, and my name. I also showed her my tongue and nipple piercings. What kind of person planning and premeditating a crime makes a drunken spectacle of himself at the crime scene and tells everyone who he is and where he’s from? Not even the stupidest criminal planning and premeditating something would do that. And who would be so stupid as to plan a crime at a casino where there are surveillance cameras everywhere? Nobody. I don`t know what happened that night, what snapped inside of my mind or why. I don`t know what actually happened in that bathroom.
What I do know are all the factors that caused me to lose control of my own mind and body. I was always trying to lose control at that age. Though I had blacked out a few times before that night, I had never physically harmed anyone during any of my blackouts. Now, as an adult, an actual full-grown man, I always maintain control of myself. I don`t let my emotions control me, and I stay away from drugs and alcohol. No matter what the situation, I always try to think things through and never do anything impulsively. Even to this day, I am shocked that I was ever capable of such violence, but now I understand that every human being is capable of violence, and one must be self-aware to avoid violence.
The point is, this was not a premeditated crime. It was not planned or thought out in advance. It was a convergence of factors all at the same place and time. Had even one of the factors been different, this never would have happened. I wish with all my heart that this had never happened, but we can’t change the past, no matter how much we want to, for better or worse. Which brings me to the second lie from the D.A., propagated by the judge, that I want to address: their labeling me a racist.
Let me be 100% clear: I am not a racist. I do not judge any person based on their race or the color of their skin. I judge based on the content of a person’s character. My best friend in prison is black, and my wife is Mexican. I love them and would lay down my life for them. My best friend is Andre Breland, #43088, so you can look him up and see for yourselves. He is a good man who made a series of bad choices when he was younger, leading to a tragedy, and now he’s serving life without the possibility of parole. I pray he gets a second chance out in the world, and he may. He deserves it. I spent more than five years living in a cell with him, so he probably knows me better than anyone except my wife.
Here’s my history with race. I grew up in Long Beach, California, probably one of the most multiethnic cities in the world. I lived there during the riots of 1992, when race was a major issue. When I was about ten years old, my parents sponsored a black man for parole from prison, named George Johnson. He had been convicted of murder in SoCal and paroled to our house after serving about twenty years in prison. I don`t know how my parents knew George, but I remember him being very kind, going shopping with him during the holidays, and sharing a bathroom with him while he lived with us.
The first girl I ever French-kissed was a black girl named Stormy Jenkins, when I was in sixth grade. That was at a birthday party at Bolsa Chica beach. My first girlfriend was a Mexican girl named Melinda Ojeda, in eighth grade. My first year and a half of high school was spent at Los Alamitos, the stereotypical Orange County all-white high school. My best friends there were a couple of white guys and a Mexican, and we were inseparable. As a teenager, I was a complete idiot, doing the stupidest things—and saying the stupidest things—to make people laugh, to get their attention, to get them to like me. My friends and I grew up watching Saturday Night Live skits by the likes of Eddie Murphy, before we understood the concepts of satire and irony. Those skits—some of them, anyhow—were racist as fuck. But we only saw the hilarity of the skits and emulated accordingly. Sure, we would say shit to make each other and other kids laugh, and to shock for the sake of shocking, but we weren’t racist. I don`t think any kid can really be a racist: they haven’t had the chance to be exposed to other cultures, and so they are susceptible to believing the stupidest shit out of pure ignorance.
Halfway through my sophomore year of high school, I moved to Singapore, where I lived for a year. My best friends over there were British, Canadian, Indian, and Turkish. My girlfriends were Indian, Chinese, white, and Malaysian. When I moved back to the Long Beach, halfway through my junior year, I went to Woodrow Wilson High School, which was the opposite of Los Alamitos. At Los Al, I had been part of the white majority. At Wilson, I was the minority, as whites were just a small part of the overall population. It was during the next year that I met the worst influences in my life: Dave Cash and Agnes Lee. My best friends at Wilson were all white, and I kind of lost touch with my friends from Los Al (though we still hung out and partied together from time to time). A topic of conversation among my Wilson friends was that we were the minority there, but I wouldn`t say that any of them were racist, except Dave, though we would all say stupid shit from time to time. My girlfriends during that period were Cambodian, white, Mexican, and Korean. Ironically, my Korean girlfriend was pretty racist.
When I was eighteen, I had no moral courage. I would go along with whoever I was around at the moment, right or wrong. I was the kid who would jump off a bridge if my friends told me to, and I literally did one time (the Second Street Bridge in Long Beach, with about a forty-foot drop to water below). Regardless of my moral weakness as a kid, I was not a racist. From the very start of this case, the detectives and the D.A. tried to infuse this crime with a racial animus. After my arrest, many lies were told about me, but the racial thing was something that the D.A. pinned on me after the fact, based on their own inventions, as well as pinning comments made by Dave onto me.
Dave was smart. Even though he and I had already agreed that I would take all the blame for the crime and I would protect him by not implicating him, he made sure to contact our friends to brag about what happened, and to tell them it was me who had committed the crime. Though once I was arrested and he had locked in an immunity deal to testify against me, he bragged to friends that he had committed the crime, at least in part. However, any involvement on Dave’s part didn`t fit the simple narrative the D.A. was pitching in order to convict me. There was no physical evidence at the crime scene tying me to the crime, and the physical evidence at the crime scene did not match the false confession police got me to give, nor did it match Dave’s statements. Yeah, there were fingerprints and hair at the crime scene, but none of them matched me.
The Las Vegas detectives and D.A.’s directed the FBI on this case, turning over evidence to them after I was convicted, instead of safeguarding that evidence. One of those pieces of evidence was a sexual assault evidence collection kit containing hair evidence. The hair in the kit wasn’t mine. Whose was it? Click Here to see documentary proof of the existence of this evidence. Dave Cash said he stood on the toilet seat in the bathroom stall next to the one where Sherrice was sexually assaulted and murdered, that he looked over the top of the stall and saw me in there with Sherrice. The police dusted the toilet seat for footprints: there were none. Here’s the police report.
But I digress. The focus here is the lies about the race stuff. My best friends at Wilson were Dave Cash, Justin Ware, and Jordan Wheeler. Another friend of ours was James Trujillo, who was more just a guy we partied with, getting drunk and high with, and who was friends with one of the chics I was friends with from Los Al. Within a day or two of my being arrested, detectives interviewed these guys. I`m including the pertinent parts of the interview transcripts below.
James said I would make off-color remarks about other races. But when asked if he ever heard me say anything racist, he couldn`t state anything specific. The truth is, Dave was the one who would make racist comments, using racial epithets regularly, not me. But because I was always with Dave, James put that on me. However, when asked if I told him I committed this crime because of race, he said I did not. Trujillo transcript here. Jordan told detectives that he asked me why I committed the crime and I said, “I don`t know.” Wheeler transcript here. Justin Ware was also interviewed and asked if I made negative comments about minority groups and if I was a racist, and he said no. When asked if race had anything to do with Sherrice’s death based on his discussions with me and Dave, Justin said no. Ware transcript here.
During the Grand Jury proceedings, Dave’s ex-girlfriend, Aleana Garcia, was questioned under oath. She testified about Dave bragging about taking part in the crime. She also testified that Dave was very racist and he broke up with her because she was Mexican. Transcript here.
It’s against this backdrop that the D.A. was pushing any angle they could to get a conviction and the death penalty against me. I think at this point in our history as a society, we all know that police detectives and district attorneys are manipulators and liars. Their case against me wasn’t as strong as they made it out to be, so they falsified evidence by writing a memo, sending it to themselves, and saying that witnesses stated I made remarks that I most certainly did not make. The D.A. sent this memo to itself on June 3,1998, more than a year after I was arrested, after multiple interviews of witnesses by police detectives and the D.A. Copy of D.A. memo here. In the Kinko’s parking lot, Dave did all the talking. I sure as hell didn`t confess to James Trujillo, much less make this statement. Whether James Trujillo and Jordan Wheeler actually made these statements to the D.A., or the D.A. made this up, I don`t know. What really irks me is that the judge for my appeal, in his Order denying my appeal, stated these lies whose only basis for existence is in a memo from the D.A. to itself, as facts, saying that I said these things when I unequivocally did not.
Now here’s where things get interesting. Here’s an FBI memo stating that during the Las Vegas D.A.’s third trip to interview witnesses in preparation for trail (their June 3, 1998 interviews), a witness told them Cash made racial slur comments. The names are redacted, but you can tell which names go where based on the sizes of the redacted spaces. So, Trujillo or Wheeler (or both) said that Dave was the one spouting racial slurs (a year later, after multiple interviews where they said I did not make any racial comments after the crime). Dave made racial slur comments after the crime, then the D.A. sent itself a memo attributing Dave’s comments to me, and twenty years later the D.A. presents these lies to the judge as facts, and the judge regurgitates them as fact when they are actually lies. And, yes, I will be raising this in court and demanding that the record be corrected. I will no longer sit silently while I am slandered.
I don`t often talk about the things I do to help people in here because I don`t help people for recognition. However, this post has taken me a couple weeks to get to in part because I’ve been helping a few guys out, and who I’ve been helping goes to the heart of the false statements against me. I’ve spent a lot of time learning the law in here, and though I have no formal training, 99% of the dudes in here have zero knowledge of the law, so I can use what I’ve learned to help them. When someone asks me for help, I help them, regardless of race, nationality, sexual orientated, crime, religious beliefs, or political beliefs. Right now I`m helping a black guy research and attack the illegal computation of time for his sentence, a white guy the prison refuses to treat for his Hep C (I`m helping him pursue an injunction), and I`m helping a friend of mine, Rasta, prepare for his parole and release in the next four months.
As you might have guessed, Rasta is black, and a Rastafarian. He has some anger and emotional control issues, so I’ve helped him understand his own psychology, so he won’t revert to violence when in any given situation that causes him mental or emotional distress. Like a lot of guys in here, he’s a good person who made mistakes, and has paid for them, with addiction, drugs, and lack of control over one’s self being major contributing factors. Rasta and I have spent a lot of time discussing history, religion, race, forgiveness, the criminal justice system, and a myriad of other things. He recently gave me a priceless gift of a poem that he wrote for me. Here’s the poem, and a picture of Rasta, a man I`m proud to call my friend. The poem touched me deeply because being forgiven, and redeeming myself, for my past is a big deal to me.
When I first got to prison, my time would have been a lot easier if I had joined a white gang, but that shit’s not for me. That’s not who I was, and that’s not who I am. I was painfully aware of how my weakness in the face of peer pressure led to such a horrible outcome. It probably would have been easier on me, too, if I hadn’t befriended blacks, Hispanics, and Asians in addition to whites. The truth is, even if it had been easier, it still wouldn`t have been that much easier. Let there be no illusions: I have been punished for the past 21 years, for the whole of my adult life, and I’ve been punished worse than any other prisoner in this state. My notoriety has followed me this whole time, with both guards and inmates treating me like shit regardless of who I am at the time. I’ve been almost murdered, choked out until losing consciousness with the thought that I was going to die. I’ve been assaulted, harassed, conspired against, kept from the privileges every other inmate had. I’ve had to spent 21 years looking over my shoulder, constantly wondering if today is the day I`ll be murdered. So, yeah, my life has been hell for the last 21 years.
Regardless, I try to do good things, make a positive impact, help others wherever and whenever I can. The people closest to me, in here and out there, see who I am, that who I was as a boy is not who I am as a man. Maybe one day the rest of the world will see it, too.
Before I go, here’s something I support. Check it out: Erasethehate.org.
a life without parole 
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