July 6, 2021 • 40 mins
A time-of-death innovator deepens the mystery around Danyé's last night. New evidence of racism by the lead detective causes a risky visit to his home by our hosts.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Content warning. This podcast discusses violence, murder, suicide, civil unrest,
aggressive policing, racism, and lynching. If you or anyone you
know is considering suicide or self harm, or just need
to talk about problems, please call the National Suicide Prevention
Lifeline at two seven three eight two five five, or
(00:25):
text the Crisis text line at seven four one seven
four one. Previously and after the uprising, I call now
one one and all I remember screaming, is my baby?
All signs right on the bad point that this was
a suicide. They feel like we don't appreciate law enforcement here. Therefore,
(00:47):
it has in the first effect of certain cops not
being as ill as you when it comes to straight
up and down police work. I just know that the
one detective Debt, the one with the black eye, did
not give us his business card, gave us a card
for h the airport police. But at the same time
investigation of speaking with the police anyone else who's also
(01:10):
been to the scene. I guess it's just it can
kind of become sort of a self reinforcing circle. And
I will say this, do you know how many suicides
do we have a year? I'm sure it's a lot,
and when we have them, there is a certain amount
of investigation, but it is not much more than this.
(01:39):
What you're looking at is the aftermath of the grand
jury deciding not to indict Officer Wilson. A young man
found hanging from a tree in October. His mom believes
someone murdered son targeting him. Don Ye became an activist
(02:05):
in the wake of the shooting death of Michael Brown
by a white police officer. But that's why Melissa mckinnis
wants St. Louis County police to dig deeper to her
son's death. He was not suicidal. This is after the uprising,
the death of Donye Dion Jones. People are asking, like,
(02:32):
if you were promotionally, we wouldn't hear it because we
live on track, Like it's who as you jumped the
bank mark, you're you're standing on train track. During our
first long phone call with Melissa, we asked how a
struggle could have happened in her backyard without anyone in
the house having heard it. Her answer was that there
(02:55):
are freight train tracks right behind their home, and when
a train passed, it would be so loud that it
would shake the house. When we visited for the first time.
Her husband, Derek, said the same thing as he walked
us into the backyard, where it took a minute and
(03:16):
a bit of work to track down which line ran
past their home, but we eventually found that it is
the Hannibal subline operated by b NSF. Hello, Mr Williams. Yes,
this is Andy Williams. He works as a media rep
for b NSF. And let's just say he was certainly
(03:37):
curious as to why I was so curious. I talked
to you a couple of months ago and sent you
some emails about trying to find whether or not you kids. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
But I do have a question. What differences when a
train went by. Basically, this person died in the backyard, correct,
and the train tracks are he died by heus? Sure, No,
(03:59):
I don't. I don't mind telling you at all. He
died by hanging, and the family is suspicious that he
was murdered. And since these trains run behind the house,
it makes a lot of noise. So if there was
a period where there was a struggle, a train going
by could have covered up the sound of the hung him. Well,
(04:21):
the train was going by, and they didn't hear it.
Here's the struggle that that is a possibility. Correct. Have
you been back there when a train goes by. I
have been to the house, but not when a train
goes by. They said they allot them go by in
the night, and they said that it it basically shakes
the house, and that it's very, very loud within the house.
And what did the police saying? The police have ruled
(04:44):
a suicide. And you know, we're digging into all the
details there. Now there's some back and forth stuff like
there's d n A that's on the bedsheet of a
second individual that never got tested. There's a lot of
you know, little caveats to the pace, which makes it interesting.
And so they're they're basically saying, not only could this
(05:05):
train have covered it up the sound, but these people
who are involved may have known sort of a rough
time frame when these trains went by. Well, the trains
don't operate on a set schedule, so there's no way
to predict when a train is gonna come through. Okay,
and so what's your I mean, why are you investigating it?
(05:26):
The mask is nobody has time to be looking into this,
so I've got to have some good reason other than
some guys interested in You know, I'm trying to figure
out what why you're so persistent in what it is that.
I mean, you're ultimate, we know why you're doing it.
I mean I can't give you a better answer than
there is a family that is hurting because their son
(05:48):
is dead and I want my brother committed suicide. Trying
to get the pain issue. I understand all that we've
got thirty two thousand miles of track in twenty gates
dates and three Canadian provinces, and trying to fight somebody
to go through some sort of records and see if
there was a train that came through to specific time. Uh,
you know, it's is a task. You know. I'll keep
(06:08):
trying to get the information for you, so I'm not
in like a huge rush. And this doesn't have to
be like on the top of the Inboxmail me in
a couple of weeks. Then we'll see where we're at.
Dead Right now, We're just it's can't do you guys
(06:29):
try to establish time of death? You know, unlike television,
we do not do that because it's not very scientific.
The chief Medical Examiner for St. Louis County, Dr Mary Case,
had told us that they don't try to find a
time of death. She said that it wasn't scientific enough,
and that when a body is outside on a cold night,
(06:49):
all bets are off. Now we we try to look
at a parameter that that might be helpful. The body
temperature of tells is that he's been out there a
long time, a number of hours. If he was Lansing
at nine o'clock and he's found whatever time in the morning,
you know, the temperature will drop a degree, a degree
(07:12):
and a half. If you're in in temperate conditions like
in the house after you die, it don't drop that
when you're outside then twenty three degrees. All vents are off.
Most of his clothing, you know, he didn't. He was
not like clothes. So all we can say is he's
been dead a number of hours. It's not a recent death.
(07:33):
We figured someone had to know how to determine at
least an approximate time of death using the ambient temperature
as a variable, so we started researching. We found that
starting in the mid nineteenth century, investigators began using ambient
temperature at the time of discovery as well as the
temperature of a body to estimate a deceased person's time
(07:53):
of death. Eventually, two methods were devised that one could
plug variables into the first one is called the Glaser
equation and the other is henzis aenomogram. While these methods
can be helpful in generating estimates, they can fail and
especially cold or hot conditions. My name is Cardie Burton
and I'm a medical legal test investigator. Carly works in Newark,
(08:17):
New Jersey, and is sent out to investigate the scenes
of people's deaths. We reached out to her because in
she published a research paper titled Improving Methods to Estimate
time of Death from body temperature. Come of death is
something that's crucial, especially in homicide cases, and it's an
important factor when I'm when solving any unnatural deaths. Um
(08:42):
body temperature, ambient centaures play a huge part. Nothing has
been reliably used consistently because there's so many outside factors,
including body weight, closing objects, that's the de seed that
may be touching. There's so many different methods and everyone
says that there's no single method that can reliably to us.
(09:03):
So I want to see if I could come up
with something that could become the best new method. Carly
went on to explain just how she created an improved
equation for figuring out time of death. So what I
did was I collect the data by a penny c.
So on the scene I would set over nine seven
(09:23):
going to equal wide, and that was going to get
me the temperature of the conject proportional to the difference
between the initial temperature and anti adcempture. There's a in
there where she seen volume in the third power and
third area affect equal in the second power. I used
the power of third. I want to use, as she did,
(09:47):
math a lot of math. The gist of her work
is this, using a large data set of body and
ambient temperatures in which the time of death was known.
She first modified the glade to equation to include ambient
temperature more effectively, and then used an artificial intelligence system
called Eureka to generate a new superior equation. Since she
(10:11):
could run the equation and compare the answers given to
the known times of death, she was able to check
her rate of error. Eureka sam closest to the actual
time of desk. It didn't matter even if the body
temperature was ken degrees. Sara night, the error was very low.
We asked Carly if after publishing her paper she knew
(10:31):
of any other investigators who were using her adjusted glaser
equation and their work, and she said yes. My name
is Christian Torres. I am currently the chief investigator for
Bergen County, New Jersey. I pretty much investigate vests for
the Medical Examiner's Office over the years, you know, I
(10:51):
have investigated about sevent cases. So I'm of forensic scientists.
I'm always looking for the scientific aspect of the investigations.
I always try to estimate a time of death to
help the doctors. But body temperatures are pretty funny, you know,
Like there it's really hard to get like an exact
(11:14):
time of death with body temperatures. But after the equation
it we were pretty much able to get a closer time,
you know, and they were pretty close. Aside from just
body temperature, another factor to look at an assessing time
of death is rigor mortis, which is a contracting of
the muscles and the body for a period of time
(11:37):
after death, starting in the head and face and moving
steadily downward towards the feet and then back up again
as the condition subsides. So rigor mortis um normally appears
after two hours, and the fully rigid state happens in
between eight to twelve hours. If you did both like
the temperature equation and kind of compared that to the
rigor mortist, you could be pretty confident you knew a
(11:59):
rough time of death. Yeah, um, I personally would. I
don't know how other investigators doctors steel, but I could
say out of mind, I would be. So if I
could throw you a few data points, is it possible
for you to try to, like come up with how
many hours this person was dead? For me, I used
your I used your adjusted equation, but I'm also stupid. Um,
(12:23):
So I was wondering if I could throw you a
couple of numbers and maybe you could punch him in
and see what you think. Carly was interested in Dania's case,
and in the end we sent her the full medical
examiners report to look over. We're going to talk again
in a week after she crunched the numbers and assess
the relevant facts of the case to give us her opinion.
An Episode three, the pathologist and the chief medical examiner,
(12:47):
who together came to the conclusion that Danie died by suicide.
Both told us that the work St. Louis County detectives
did investigating the scene was very important for their findings.
But Melissa and her family members who had been present,
told us that the lead detective of Timothy Anderer was disrespectful.
They asserted he was seen laughing by multiple people. They
showed us the business card that they all say he
(13:08):
gave them another person's card, they believed on purpose, and
despite allegedly telling them that morning that he believed Danye
died by suicide, in May of a full seven months
after Danye's death, he still hadn't closed the case and
made available his final report, which would detail his investigation,
showing specifically what work he did, who he spoke with,
(13:30):
and outlining the results of the DNA testing on the
sheet done by the crime lab. All of this made
melissen or family skeptical that Detective Anderer ever did much
investigating into Danie's death, and frankly, they thought he just
didn't care. Police bias, whether politically motivated or racially motivated,
is obviously a huge topic in America right now. What
(13:53):
you may not know is that in a group of
interested attorneys started what they called the Plane View Project,
there was an effort to look at eight u S
jurisdictions and to document the public Internet postings of police
officers that would tend to make the public feel, let's say,
less than confident that those particular officers would do their
job with much integrity. We spoke with project lead Emily
(14:15):
Baker White about what she found. I went to Harvard
for law school, and after graduation, I got a year
long fellowship to work at the Capital HADIAS units at
the Federal Defender in Philadelphia, and so I was assigned
to a slate of capital cases death penalty cases where
our client had received a death sentence and we were
challenging the validity of the conviction for one reason or
(14:37):
another in needs of these cases. In one of the cases,
I found that several of the police officers who may
have had contact with our client had public Facebook pages
and we're posting troubling material that could impact the case.
One of them, the one that sort of really stuck
out to me, was a picture of a police dog
(14:58):
who was bearing his teeth um easier to run after something.
He was being restrained by an officer and swass here
and there was a caption over that image that said,
I hope you run. He likes fast food, And that
image was troubling to me also because it was a meme.
It made me wonder where the officer had gotten it
and whether there might be more content like that out there.
(15:21):
And after that, I began the plane View Project, which
aimed to answer the question that that I had sort
of asked after my work at the Federal Defender, how
much more of this is they're out there? And how
many officers are engaged in this kind of conduct online.
Though a lot of reporting on the plane View Project
focused on racist content posted by police officers online, Emily
(15:45):
wanted to make it clear that the criteria for inclusion
in her work went well beyond racism. Up front, as
a sort of reminder, the standards we used to decide
whether opposed should be included in the database is the
same across jurisdiction. Yes, is one question, is it possible
that this post, this meme, comment, etcetera. Could affect civilian
(16:07):
trust in potic thing. One of the jurisdictions the Plane
View Project decided to look at was the city of St. Louis.
This is not St. Louis County which is where Melissa
and Donye were living and where Detective Andrew works. But
it should be understood that both the St. Louis City
Police Department and the St. Louis County Police Department basically
pull officers from the same pool of people. Just like
(16:30):
how Officer Darren Wilson, the white police officer who shot
Mike Brown Jr. Did not live in Ferguson, many officers
who work for St. Louis City p D Do not
live within the St. Louis City itself, So there is
no reason to believe that the findings of the Plane
View project are any more confined to the borders of St.
Louis City than the officers themselves. How did St. Louis
(16:51):
seem to compare to the other seven jurisdictions of the
officers that we found and verified? In St. Louis, a
slightly lower incident of officers were included in the database
than in other large cities. However, I don't want to
say that because Saint Willis officers posted less of this content. Overall,
(17:13):
this is not the scientific fact, but in my anecdotal experience,
I tended to find more St. Louis officers posting only
behind privacy settings only to their friends than in other jurisdictions.
And I don't know why that is, but it may
be because they received more training or were used to
(17:33):
more oversight. Given how St. Louis has been in the
national spotlight for so long about these issues, we asked
Emily if there were any themes that jumped out for St. Louis.
So most of the content in the database, with with
my caveat from before that not all of it does,
falls into into one of three sort of buckets of content.
(17:54):
And the first bucket is his statements, means, etcetera that
appear to endorsed or glorify violence. One type of violence
that we see encouraged or were supported is putty successive force.
The second big bucket of material is material that appears
to discriminating against a certain group of people, see that
(18:16):
people of color or people of minority face. We saw
a lot of very abominable material in the database, and
we saw that across jurisdictions. The third trend, which often
overlaps as a second trend but not always, was the
use of what I would refer to as do humanizing
language about other people, whether those people are protesters, people
(18:36):
of color, people affiliated with Black Lives Matter, etcetera. And
we saw a lot of officers referring to groups of
people as animals, savages, sub human, etcetera. UM, and we
flagged back too. Anecdotally, I remember a few officers in
smilists whose profiles I personally looked at and and really
(18:56):
saw a sort of concentrated effort to to do positive
community relations work and positive community relationship within the black
community specifically. I think after the beginning of Black Lives
Matter and fergus inter Reality real relationships between the police
and the community, and I definitely think that that work
is happening within the police department. I just also think, unfortunately,
(19:18):
there are comment being being made by other officers that
are getting in a way of that. We told Emily
that we were working on a story about the son
of a prominent Ferguson activist who had died and whose
family didn't believe the police did a very thorough investigation
of his death. She told us about some of the
content her projected log that might be relevant to our work.
(19:39):
There are a number of popular police means that suggests
that police will not or do not want to respond
to the emergencies of people who have been critical of
the police. There are means that show a person responding
to a nine one one call who says, oh, I
see three weeks ago you said suck the police, so
(20:01):
we'll be unable to respond to your emergency today. There's
another meme that shows a cup laughing having a good
time with a buddy, and the caption over that is, yeah,
you said the police, so I'm going to finish my
coffee before I come rescue You're dying homeboy or something
like that. And that set of images and and that
(20:24):
theme within some of the memes and the comments that
we saw very very much troubled me as a as
a former Avias attorney, but I imagine is very troubling
to you and this mother, because some officers seem to
suggest that they will do their work less well or
not at all if and when their work requires them
(20:48):
to protect people who have been critical of them, and
that's obviously unacceptable. I would look deeper if I were you,
into those into that set of memes and that thread
of conversation because of how relevant it could be to
the case you're working on. Detective Andrewer did not have
a Facebook page that we could find. However, we found
(21:10):
that his wife, Amy Ander, had a Pinterest page. She
was also a St. Louis County Police officer who works
as an instructor training cadets at the Police Academy. Officer
Amy Andrewer's page has many boards for posts on things
like recipes, fitness, and gift ideas. One of the boards
she created was called work stuff, and this contained a
(21:31):
lot of the type of material that Emily talked about
documenting for the plane View project. Some of the stuff
she posted was sort of obvious, like mug shots of say,
unique looking individuals. Other things were harmless memes that even
poked fun at police themselves, like one of a police
helicopter that was captioned holy shit pigs can fly. Ironically enough,
(21:51):
she even has the exact memes that Emily found troubling,
the one she described with the SWAT member holding back
the police dog with the caption about past food, and
the one with the laughing cops captioned they said fuck
the police, So I said, fuck your nine one one call.
I'll get to your dying homeboy. When I finished my coffee,
we brought Amy Ander's Pinterest page to Melissa's attention. After
(22:14):
looking it over and scanning through the list of her followers,
Melissa got back to us with an email and said
that she had actually found the Detective Andrewer, the lead
investigator and her son's death, also had a Pinterest page.
An examination of Detective Andrewer's posts reveals several racial jokes,
including a meme that shows a variety of Asian people
enlist their actual nationalities, but then jokes that every non
(22:37):
Asian person just sees them as Chinese, as well as
a screen grab from a soccer match in which Nigeria
is playing Germany and the three letter abbreviations for each
country spell out the N word. Taken in context with
the fact that Andrewer was caught on his own body
camera admitting to brutalizing black protesters and seemingly bragging about it. Again,
(23:00):
what is Melissa and the rest of Danye's family supposed
to think it was? It was screenshot this document, right,
m hm, So if he takes it down, it doesn't matter. Um,
that's how he really feels. So my thought, why would
(23:20):
he even care about how a young black man ends
up dead? Like? Why put forth any effort and finding
out what will be happen. I'm seeing that he wouldn't
give a damn because he looks at us as diggers,
(23:41):
you know. Um, and I'm just being black. But he
showed he showed his character when he said what he
said about the protesters when we were out there in Berkeley.
I know I'm going proe and or and I'm just saying,
what do't it? Thank you? Look, we get it. Police
(24:07):
or people. They like to crack jokes, and they like
to have a laugh about their work day. Who doesn't.
It's a stress reliever. But to be in the role
the police are, in their salaries, paid for by a
trusting public, granted special privileges and powers to use violence,
and tasked with respecting the rights of individuals as they
go about their job and forcing the law. It is,
(24:29):
if nothing else, disheartening to know that what they find
funny is the notion of violating all of that public trust,
of having a thirst for harming civilians or intentionally not
doing their jobs. Would you go to a dentist who
thought it was funny to pull healthy teeth from your head,
or to a doctor who laughed about doing as little
for you as possible. Probably not, And sure memes people
(24:53):
post on their social media pages aren't exactly a complete
description of their attitudes and opinions. But what we find
humor is a window into our thinking. It shows what
we think is at least kind of true. I spent
all my time tracking hate groups, right, not so much
speaking with activists. We also talked about this issue with
Heidi Barrick, who was then tracking hate groups for the
(25:16):
Southern Poverty Law Center. Today she is chief strategist for
the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, which she co founded.
In the summer of she told us that she had
followed closely the story about police officers posting racist content
on their Facebook profiles. I can't tell you that every
(25:36):
time there's a lynching, there is usually an outcry from
people in the black community that weird things are being
done to them. And I don't believe that that many
folks feeling that way about like lack of police investigation,
lack of taking the crimes seriously. I don't think that
can all be a mistake. And the amounts of times
(25:58):
that we've seen law enforcement office or sort of decried
Black lives matter makes me wonder too about BIOSes there,
and you layer on top of it, you know, all
this craft that we're finding on social media, and I
don't think it's crazy to think then an activist wouldn't
get the same service from law enforcement and someone else.
(26:18):
I mean, the history of law enforcement in this country
is just not really good when it comes to people
of color or people who challenge the police. We also
know from the Department of Justice's investigation into Ferguson that
that police department also was filled with a bunch of racists.
And there have been some other investigations coming out of
the d J, you know, obviously prior to Trump, that
(26:40):
show sort of systematic racial problems. In terms of the
sentiments of police officers. Reading the Department of Justice report
on the Ferguson Police Department, we were more than disheartened,
were horrified. Yes, it's a look at one municipality, one
department and doesn't necessarily speak to all lease everywhere, agreed,
(27:02):
but it shows what's possible, what's been documented, what's been
proven to have occurred. The report is full of statements
like officers expected and demanded compliance even when they lacked
legal authority. One of the report's primary conclusions reads Ferguson's
law enforcement practices are shaped by the city's focus on
(27:23):
revenue rather than by public safety needs. This emphasis on
revenue has compromised the institutional character of Ferguson's police department,
contributing to a pattern of unconstitutional policing, and has also
shaped its municipal court, leading to procedures that raise do
process concerns and inflict unnecessary harm on members of the
(27:44):
Ferguson community. It then goes on to list a host
of specific examples, So if you're skeptical, I'd say just
read it. The idea of that was often late at
the feat. For example of Black Lives Matter activists, see
your exaggerating problems with the police and biases and police forces.
I think it's pretty much big pitt to West. Now,
(28:06):
maybe not by the cops themselves, but the evidence shows
that these things are happening all over the country. Officers
in North County police departments like Ferguson frequently don't live there.
These various departments are pulling from the same basic crop
of people. So just as we cannot say that the
specific misdeeds of Ferguson's police department are being repeated across
(28:27):
the greater St. Louis area. We also have to be
careful about suggesting that attitudes and behaviors in one department
are necessarily confined to it. For example, when protesters took
to the streets of St. Louis to demand former officer
Jason Stockley beheld accountable for the killing of Anthony Lamar Smith,
(28:47):
several police officers ended up beating the crap out of
wait for it, a black undercover cop named Luther Hall.
They took an oath to serve and protect the people
of St. Louis, but to night for city police officers
are off the job after they were indicted on federal
felony charges September seventeen, two thousand seventeen. For a third
(29:09):
night protests erupted in St. Louis after the acquittal of
former police officer Jason Stockley and the shooting depth of
Anthony Lamar Smith. Four city officers have been charged with
using excessive force and beating up an undercover city police
officer who's also a twenty two year veteran of the
force that was assigned that same night to cover the protests.
(29:31):
A federal investigation was able to find that these officers
had been sending each other text messages about how excited
they were to get to beat up protesters. According to
the indictment, text messages show that Boone, Hayes, and Myers
expressed disdain for the Stockley protesters and excitement about using
unjustified force against them. In one exchange, Boone wrote quote,
(29:55):
it's gonna get ignorant tonight, but it's gonna be a
lot of fun beating the expletive out of these expletives
once the sun goes down and nobody can tell us apart.
The case against the officers who beat Luther Hall ended
in early with two mistrial counts and not guilty verdicts
on the remaining counts, and just like Anderer being promoted
(30:18):
to detective immediately after the excessive fource incident involving State
Representative Bruce Franks Jr. One of the officers named in
the indictment for the beating of Luther Hall, was promoted
to sergeant three months after the event. The plain View
Project database contained over four hundred Facebook posts from current
(30:38):
and former officers in the St. Louis City Police Department.
In the end, two of those officers whose posts were
flagged by the Project. Ronald Hasty and Thomas Mobrey would
find themselves fired for what we're determined to be their
anti Muslim, anti Black Lives Matter, and pro Confederacy posts.
(30:59):
We tried contacting Detective Andrew for comment at his office
and via his cell phone. One week when we were
in St. Louis, we decided to just stop by his house.
We figured we could knock on his door, introduce ourselves,
and with a smile on our faces, ask if he
was willing to talk to us. After all, it's not
a crime to knock on doors. Jehovah's witnesses do it
(31:20):
all the time. Heck, detectives do it all the time.
It's gonna be on the left and there's a cop car.
There's a cop car, all right, So what do we
say here? It's uh, listen, I hope we're not bothering you.
Were journalists. We're working on a story about the death
of Donye Jones and doing a story in Dania Jones. Um.
(31:45):
We tried getting in touch with you to the office,
couldn't And then we were in town this weekend and
we're just hoping we could catch you in person to
just you know, sit down for a few minutes and
get your side of uh the investigation, and you know,
things he saw and what led you to your determinations.
(32:06):
We didn't want to walk up with a tape recorder
in our hands. So the gist of what happened is
that we knocked on Detective Andrewer's door. When he answered,
we told him who we were and that we were
working on a story about Donya Jones. Andrewer was immediately
upset that we were there. We tried to explain that
we wanted to give him an opportunity to schedule a
(32:26):
time to talk, even on background, if he wanted to,
and then we gave him our contact information and he
then asked us to get off his property, so we left. First.
What I took from what you gave me, which was
most important, was the body temperature was seventy six degrees
sarrenheight at seven fifty seven am, and the ambient temperature
(32:48):
was forty five point five degrees farrenheight at seven three am.
And I also noted that the rhythm mortis was fixed
in the jaw but breakable in the extremities. So just
looking at the time frame, someone who was last known
to be alive and found was an eight hour and
thirty minutes range. So looking at the again mortist first
(33:11):
where the mortist begins in the muffles of the face
on the neck, and it appears after two hours, and
it's in a fully fixed form in an eight to
twelve hour mark. So right there, knowing that it's fixed
only in the jaw but not in the rest of
the extremities, we know that we're in a two to
eight hour time trains. Then I'd chugged in the numbers
(33:32):
to be adjusted Glacier equation and I got two point
ninety six hours. When I plugged it into Eureka, I
got three point forty two hours. So with Eureka, that
would show that it's three hours and twenty five minutes
ago from money. The temperature was taken, so that approximated
to be around four thirty in the morning. And this
(33:53):
could be a little bit tricky well, because the body
did drop twenty two point five degrees there and night. However,
it was cold outside he was outside, and the cold
anti appempature I can speed up the temperature rate of dropping.
So I found using the equasions and the rigor Mortis.
That's that it probably was about was three and a
half that our time things when he was found. Okay, awesome.
(34:17):
So so you're putting out roughly about four yes, And
like I said, it's hard because it was thy five
five degrees out, so the cold temperature really messes with
the rate. But going off of my whole entire thesism,
what I found to be true and things like that,
that would be my best estiment. We thought it was
(34:39):
only fair to present this information to the chief Medical
Examiner for comment. Your investigator noted that Rigor Mortis and
his extremities was had begun but was breakable. And then
I actually spoke to an out of state medical investigator
who wrote their master's thesis on determining time of death
(35:00):
based on ambient temperature, body mass, and temperature of body
at time of discovery, and she generated an equation that
through a computer system called Eureka that plugs in the
important variables and comes up with what she has found
through testing to be a fairly reliable method, and that
puts his time of death roughly at four thirty in
(35:22):
the morning. If you're saying that that it goes back
in two hours, I would very much doubt that even
based on even based on the riga mortis. The rigor
mortis at the time that he was examined at ten
amim has described as moderately developed technically. According to the
report at about seven thirty am, the on site investigator said,
the rigor mortis was in the jaw and breakable in
(35:44):
the limbs. But anyway, these are not rigid parameters that
we can use to establish a time of death. You
can certainly do that if you like, but we're not
going to be doing that. If I if I say, well,
this is the time of death, I need to be
will to support that, to go into court and say
that if I am called upon to do that. This
(36:05):
person that you're talking to about the songs trying to
come up with this methodology that she uses. You know,
that is not something that is established in the scientific
literature that we can say, well, here, based upon this
is how long this person has been dead. Do you
use this now in your work? Um? I cannot. Some
(36:27):
cases where I'm working, our case load is so heavy
that it's not something I can use on a daily basis.
But if I ever meet you, right doctor, doctor asks
me to I would be willing to and I believe
it would show accurately. So could you say that now
after she developed that new adjusted Glacier equation, that it's
(36:48):
something you use in your work. I do use it
to estimate some time of death. It is pretty accurate.
We're not trying to suggest that doctor cases wrong not
to seek an estimated time of death in her cases.
For our own purposes, though, we wanted to have a
reliable estimate of when Danye died, and we think Carly's
(37:11):
estimate is worth taking seriously, especially as it lines up
with the rigor mortis and Donye's limbs. And that means
considering the possibility that he didn't die until roughly four
thirty in the morning. Remember, he was last seen by
his uncle walking out the back door around nine PM.
And something we haven't pointed out yet is this Donye's
(37:33):
phone did not have cell service at this time. In fact,
he had two cell phones, one in Android and the
other an iPhone. Apparently the Android was newer it was
the device he primarily used, but at the time of
his death, neither device had service. He used them on
WiFi only and relied on apps to send out texts
(37:55):
and to talk, so that nine p m. Text message
to his sister Militia that said sorry Sis. It had
to have been sent before he left the range of
the WiFi router in his house. Taking all of this together,
we know that Donna left with his overnight bag a
little after nine pm, but maybe didn't take his last
(38:16):
breath for what looks like another seven hours. And based
on the fact that Melissa thinks Donya was going out
to meet a girl and Derek was the last person
to really hang out with Danyae in the house and
he claims that while they watched basketball, danye was in
good spirits. We cannot help but wonder if the mystery
person or people that Dania went out with that night
(38:39):
might be able to shed light and how he ended
up dead by morning. But who is this person or
people and why haven't they come forward? Even if Danyae
did die by suicide, why wouldn't this person or people
reach out to Melissa and tell her what they know
of Dnya's last hours alive? Well, what's a hazard? Suspicions?
(39:03):
That's next time and after the uprising, After the uprising
is directed, produced, investigated, written, and reported by myself, Rainovschelski,
and John Duffy. John Duffy was also the editor. Dave
Cassidy was producer, sound engineering, design and mixed by Josh Condon.
Executive producers were Matt McDonough and Tina x Eros for
(39:26):
Now This, Brett Kushner for Group nine Media, and Jess
Borov was executive in charge of production. Jonathan Hartwig and
Bradley Rayford were consulting producers. Eliza Craig was assistant producer
and did additional reporting. Malory Keenoy was a writer's assistant.
Kristin McVicker and Taya Wilson were production assistants, and Haley
Klesmer was a post production assistant. Fact checking by Alison Humes.
Theme song and other music by Zachary Walter, legal by
(39:48):
Keith Sclar and Peter Yazy. Special thanks to Ann Frado,
Danny Gonzalez, Barbara Copple, Alex Lester, Bethan Mcalouzo, Emily Maronoff,
Ruth Vaka, and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.
After the Uprising is a production of Double asterisk I,
Heart Media and Now This in association with True Stories.
You can find us on Twitter and Facebook. If you
have useful information about the death of Danye Jones or
(40:10):
anything we've covered, please leave a message on our tip
line at three four seven six seven four seven four
zero one.
Content warning. This podcast discusses violence, murder, suicide, civil unrest,
aggressive policing, racism, and lynching. If you or anyone you
know is considering suicide or self harm, or just need
to talk about problems, please call the National Suicide Prevention
Lifeline at two seven three eight two five five, or
(00:25):
text the Crisis text line at seven four one seven
four one. Previously and after the uprising, I call now
one one and all I remember screaming, is my baby?
All signs right on the bad point that this was
a suicide. They feel like we don't appreciate law enforcement here. Therefore,
(00:47):
it has in the first effect of certain cops not
being as ill as you when it comes to straight
up and down police work. I just know that the
one detective Debt, the one with the black eye, did
not give us his business card, gave us a card
for h the airport police. But at the same time
investigation of speaking with the police anyone else who's also
(01:10):
been to the scene. I guess it's just it can
kind of become sort of a self reinforcing circle. And
I will say this, do you know how many suicides
do we have a year? I'm sure it's a lot,
and when we have them, there is a certain amount
of investigation, but it is not much more than this.
(01:39):
What you're looking at is the aftermath of the grand
jury deciding not to indict Officer Wilson. A young man
found hanging from a tree in October. His mom believes
someone murdered son targeting him. Don Ye became an activist
(02:05):
in the wake of the shooting death of Michael Brown
by a white police officer. But that's why Melissa mckinnis
wants St. Louis County police to dig deeper to her
son's death. He was not suicidal. This is after the uprising,
the death of Donye Dion Jones. People are asking, like,
(02:32):
if you were promotionally, we wouldn't hear it because we
live on track, Like it's who as you jumped the
bank mark, you're you're standing on train track. During our
first long phone call with Melissa, we asked how a
struggle could have happened in her backyard without anyone in
the house having heard it. Her answer was that there
(02:55):
are freight train tracks right behind their home, and when
a train passed, it would be so loud that it
would shake the house. When we visited for the first time.
Her husband, Derek, said the same thing as he walked
us into the backyard, where it took a minute and
(03:16):
a bit of work to track down which line ran
past their home, but we eventually found that it is
the Hannibal subline operated by b NSF. Hello, Mr Williams. Yes,
this is Andy Williams. He works as a media rep
for b NSF. And let's just say he was certainly
(03:37):
curious as to why I was so curious. I talked
to you a couple of months ago and sent you
some emails about trying to find whether or not you kids. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
But I do have a question. What differences when a
train went by. Basically, this person died in the backyard, correct,
and the train tracks are he died by heus? Sure, No,
(03:59):
I don't. I don't mind telling you at all. He
died by hanging, and the family is suspicious that he
was murdered. And since these trains run behind the house,
it makes a lot of noise. So if there was
a period where there was a struggle, a train going
by could have covered up the sound of the hung him. Well,
(04:21):
the train was going by, and they didn't hear it.
Here's the struggle that that is a possibility. Correct. Have
you been back there when a train goes by. I
have been to the house, but not when a train
goes by. They said they allot them go by in
the night, and they said that it it basically shakes
the house, and that it's very, very loud within the house.
And what did the police saying? The police have ruled
(04:44):
a suicide. And you know, we're digging into all the
details there. Now there's some back and forth stuff like
there's d n A that's on the bedsheet of a
second individual that never got tested. There's a lot of
you know, little caveats to the pace, which makes it interesting.
And so they're they're basically saying, not only could this
(05:05):
train have covered it up the sound, but these people
who are involved may have known sort of a rough
time frame when these trains went by. Well, the trains
don't operate on a set schedule, so there's no way
to predict when a train is gonna come through. Okay,
and so what's your I mean, why are you investigating it?
(05:26):
The mask is nobody has time to be looking into this,
so I've got to have some good reason other than
some guys interested in You know, I'm trying to figure
out what why you're so persistent in what it is that.
I mean, you're ultimate, we know why you're doing it.
I mean I can't give you a better answer than
there is a family that is hurting because their son
(05:48):
is dead and I want my brother committed suicide. Trying
to get the pain issue. I understand all that we've
got thirty two thousand miles of track in twenty gates
dates and three Canadian provinces, and trying to fight somebody
to go through some sort of records and see if
there was a train that came through to specific time. Uh,
you know, it's is a task. You know. I'll keep
(06:08):
trying to get the information for you, so I'm not
in like a huge rush. And this doesn't have to
be like on the top of the Inboxmail me in
a couple of weeks. Then we'll see where we're at.
Dead Right now, We're just it's can't do you guys
(06:29):
try to establish time of death? You know, unlike television,
we do not do that because it's not very scientific.
The chief Medical Examiner for St. Louis County, Dr Mary Case,
had told us that they don't try to find a
time of death. She said that it wasn't scientific enough,
and that when a body is outside on a cold night,
(06:49):
all bets are off. Now we we try to look
at a parameter that that might be helpful. The body
temperature of tells is that he's been out there a
long time, a number of hours. If he was Lansing
at nine o'clock and he's found whatever time in the morning,
you know, the temperature will drop a degree, a degree
(07:12):
and a half. If you're in in temperate conditions like
in the house after you die, it don't drop that
when you're outside then twenty three degrees. All vents are off.
Most of his clothing, you know, he didn't. He was
not like clothes. So all we can say is he's
been dead a number of hours. It's not a recent death.
(07:33):
We figured someone had to know how to determine at
least an approximate time of death using the ambient temperature
as a variable, so we started researching. We found that
starting in the mid nineteenth century, investigators began using ambient
temperature at the time of discovery as well as the
temperature of a body to estimate a deceased person's time
(07:53):
of death. Eventually, two methods were devised that one could
plug variables into the first one is called the Glaser
equation and the other is henzis aenomogram. While these methods
can be helpful in generating estimates, they can fail and
especially cold or hot conditions. My name is Cardie Burton
and I'm a medical legal test investigator. Carly works in Newark,
(08:17):
New Jersey, and is sent out to investigate the scenes
of people's deaths. We reached out to her because in
she published a research paper titled Improving Methods to Estimate
time of Death from body temperature. Come of death is
something that's crucial, especially in homicide cases, and it's an
important factor when I'm when solving any unnatural deaths. Um
(08:42):
body temperature, ambient centaures play a huge part. Nothing has
been reliably used consistently because there's so many outside factors,
including body weight, closing objects, that's the de seed that
may be touching. There's so many different methods and everyone
says that there's no single method that can reliably to us.
(09:03):
So I want to see if I could come up
with something that could become the best new method. Carly
went on to explain just how she created an improved
equation for figuring out time of death. So what I
did was I collect the data by a penny c.
So on the scene I would set over nine seven
(09:23):
going to equal wide, and that was going to get
me the temperature of the conject proportional to the difference
between the initial temperature and anti adcempture. There's a in
there where she seen volume in the third power and
third area affect equal in the second power. I used
the power of third. I want to use, as she did,
(09:47):
math a lot of math. The gist of her work
is this, using a large data set of body and
ambient temperatures in which the time of death was known.
She first modified the glade to equation to include ambient
temperature more effectively, and then used an artificial intelligence system
called Eureka to generate a new superior equation. Since she
(10:11):
could run the equation and compare the answers given to
the known times of death, she was able to check
her rate of error. Eureka sam closest to the actual
time of desk. It didn't matter even if the body
temperature was ken degrees. Sara night, the error was very low.
We asked Carly if after publishing her paper she knew
(10:31):
of any other investigators who were using her adjusted glaser
equation and their work, and she said yes. My name
is Christian Torres. I am currently the chief investigator for
Bergen County, New Jersey. I pretty much investigate vests for
the Medical Examiner's Office over the years, you know, I
(10:51):
have investigated about sevent cases. So I'm of forensic scientists.
I'm always looking for the scientific aspect of the investigations.
I always try to estimate a time of death to
help the doctors. But body temperatures are pretty funny, you know,
Like there it's really hard to get like an exact
(11:14):
time of death with body temperatures. But after the equation
it we were pretty much able to get a closer time,
you know, and they were pretty close. Aside from just
body temperature, another factor to look at an assessing time
of death is rigor mortis, which is a contracting of
the muscles and the body for a period of time
(11:37):
after death, starting in the head and face and moving
steadily downward towards the feet and then back up again
as the condition subsides. So rigor mortis um normally appears
after two hours, and the fully rigid state happens in
between eight to twelve hours. If you did both like
the temperature equation and kind of compared that to the
rigor mortist, you could be pretty confident you knew a
(11:59):
rough time of death. Yeah, um, I personally would. I
don't know how other investigators doctors steel, but I could
say out of mind, I would be. So if I
could throw you a few data points, is it possible
for you to try to, like come up with how
many hours this person was dead? For me, I used
your I used your adjusted equation, but I'm also stupid. Um,
(12:23):
So I was wondering if I could throw you a
couple of numbers and maybe you could punch him in
and see what you think. Carly was interested in Dania's case,
and in the end we sent her the full medical
examiners report to look over. We're going to talk again
in a week after she crunched the numbers and assess
the relevant facts of the case to give us her opinion.
An Episode three, the pathologist and the chief medical examiner,
(12:47):
who together came to the conclusion that Danie died by suicide.
Both told us that the work St. Louis County detectives
did investigating the scene was very important for their findings.
But Melissa and her family members who had been present,
told us that the lead detective of Timothy Anderer was disrespectful.
They asserted he was seen laughing by multiple people. They
showed us the business card that they all say he
(13:08):
gave them another person's card, they believed on purpose, and
despite allegedly telling them that morning that he believed Danye
died by suicide, in May of a full seven months
after Danye's death, he still hadn't closed the case and
made available his final report, which would detail his investigation,
showing specifically what work he did, who he spoke with,
(13:30):
and outlining the results of the DNA testing on the
sheet done by the crime lab. All of this made
melissen or family skeptical that Detective Anderer ever did much
investigating into Danie's death, and frankly, they thought he just
didn't care. Police bias, whether politically motivated or racially motivated,
is obviously a huge topic in America right now. What
(13:53):
you may not know is that in a group of
interested attorneys started what they called the Plane View Project,
there was an effort to look at eight u S
jurisdictions and to document the public Internet postings of police
officers that would tend to make the public feel, let's say,
less than confident that those particular officers would do their
job with much integrity. We spoke with project lead Emily
(14:15):
Baker White about what she found. I went to Harvard
for law school, and after graduation, I got a year
long fellowship to work at the Capital HADIAS units at
the Federal Defender in Philadelphia, and so I was assigned
to a slate of capital cases death penalty cases where
our client had received a death sentence and we were
challenging the validity of the conviction for one reason or
(14:37):
another in needs of these cases. In one of the cases,
I found that several of the police officers who may
have had contact with our client had public Facebook pages
and we're posting troubling material that could impact the case.
One of them, the one that sort of really stuck
out to me, was a picture of a police dog
(14:58):
who was bearing his teeth um easier to run after something.
He was being restrained by an officer and swass here
and there was a caption over that image that said,
I hope you run. He likes fast food, And that
image was troubling to me also because it was a meme.
It made me wonder where the officer had gotten it
and whether there might be more content like that out there.
(15:21):
And after that, I began the plane View Project, which
aimed to answer the question that that I had sort
of asked after my work at the Federal Defender, how
much more of this is they're out there? And how
many officers are engaged in this kind of conduct online.
Though a lot of reporting on the plane View Project
focused on racist content posted by police officers online, Emily
(15:45):
wanted to make it clear that the criteria for inclusion
in her work went well beyond racism. Up front, as
a sort of reminder, the standards we used to decide
whether opposed should be included in the database is the
same across jurisdiction. Yes, is one question, is it possible
that this post, this meme, comment, etcetera. Could affect civilian
(16:07):
trust in potic thing. One of the jurisdictions the Plane
View Project decided to look at was the city of St. Louis.
This is not St. Louis County which is where Melissa
and Donye were living and where Detective Andrew works. But
it should be understood that both the St. Louis City
Police Department and the St. Louis County Police Department basically
pull officers from the same pool of people. Just like
(16:30):
how Officer Darren Wilson, the white police officer who shot
Mike Brown Jr. Did not live in Ferguson, many officers
who work for St. Louis City p D Do not
live within the St. Louis City itself, So there is
no reason to believe that the findings of the Plane
View project are any more confined to the borders of St.
Louis City than the officers themselves. How did St. Louis
(16:51):
seem to compare to the other seven jurisdictions of the
officers that we found and verified? In St. Louis, a
slightly lower incident of officers were included in the database
than in other large cities. However, I don't want to
say that because Saint Willis officers posted less of this content. Overall,
(17:13):
this is not the scientific fact, but in my anecdotal experience,
I tended to find more St. Louis officers posting only
behind privacy settings only to their friends than in other jurisdictions.
And I don't know why that is, but it may
be because they received more training or were used to
(17:33):
more oversight. Given how St. Louis has been in the
national spotlight for so long about these issues, we asked
Emily if there were any themes that jumped out for St. Louis.
So most of the content in the database, with with
my caveat from before that not all of it does,
falls into into one of three sort of buckets of content.
(17:54):
And the first bucket is his statements, means, etcetera that
appear to endorsed or glorify violence. One type of violence
that we see encouraged or were supported is putty successive force.
The second big bucket of material is material that appears
to discriminating against a certain group of people, see that
(18:16):
people of color or people of minority face. We saw
a lot of very abominable material in the database, and
we saw that across jurisdictions. The third trend, which often
overlaps as a second trend but not always, was the
use of what I would refer to as do humanizing
language about other people, whether those people are protesters, people
(18:36):
of color, people affiliated with Black Lives Matter, etcetera. And
we saw a lot of officers referring to groups of
people as animals, savages, sub human, etcetera. UM, and we
flagged back too. Anecdotally, I remember a few officers in
smilists whose profiles I personally looked at and and really
(18:56):
saw a sort of concentrated effort to to do positive
community relations work and positive community relationship within the black
community specifically. I think after the beginning of Black Lives
Matter and fergus inter Reality real relationships between the police
and the community, and I definitely think that that work
is happening within the police department. I just also think, unfortunately,
(19:18):
there are comment being being made by other officers that
are getting in a way of that. We told Emily
that we were working on a story about the son
of a prominent Ferguson activist who had died and whose
family didn't believe the police did a very thorough investigation
of his death. She told us about some of the
content her projected log that might be relevant to our work.
(19:39):
There are a number of popular police means that suggests
that police will not or do not want to respond
to the emergencies of people who have been critical of
the police. There are means that show a person responding
to a nine one one call who says, oh, I
see three weeks ago you said suck the police, so
(20:01):
we'll be unable to respond to your emergency today. There's
another meme that shows a cup laughing having a good
time with a buddy, and the caption over that is, yeah,
you said the police, so I'm going to finish my
coffee before I come rescue You're dying homeboy or something
like that. And that set of images and and that
(20:24):
theme within some of the memes and the comments that
we saw very very much troubled me as a as
a former Avias attorney, but I imagine is very troubling
to you and this mother, because some officers seem to
suggest that they will do their work less well or
not at all if and when their work requires them
(20:48):
to protect people who have been critical of them, and
that's obviously unacceptable. I would look deeper if I were you,
into those into that set of memes and that thread
of conversation because of how relevant it could be to
the case you're working on. Detective Andrewer did not have
a Facebook page that we could find. However, we found
(21:10):
that his wife, Amy Ander, had a Pinterest page. She
was also a St. Louis County Police officer who works
as an instructor training cadets at the Police Academy. Officer
Amy Andrewer's page has many boards for posts on things
like recipes, fitness, and gift ideas. One of the boards
she created was called work stuff, and this contained a
(21:31):
lot of the type of material that Emily talked about
documenting for the plane View project. Some of the stuff
she posted was sort of obvious, like mug shots of say,
unique looking individuals. Other things were harmless memes that even
poked fun at police themselves, like one of a police
helicopter that was captioned holy shit pigs can fly. Ironically enough,
(21:51):
she even has the exact memes that Emily found troubling,
the one she described with the SWAT member holding back
the police dog with the caption about past food, and
the one with the laughing cops captioned they said fuck
the police, So I said, fuck your nine one one call.
I'll get to your dying homeboy. When I finished my coffee,
we brought Amy Ander's Pinterest page to Melissa's attention. After
(22:14):
looking it over and scanning through the list of her followers,
Melissa got back to us with an email and said
that she had actually found the Detective Andrewer, the lead
investigator and her son's death, also had a Pinterest page.
An examination of Detective Andrewer's posts reveals several racial jokes,
including a meme that shows a variety of Asian people
enlist their actual nationalities, but then jokes that every non
(22:37):
Asian person just sees them as Chinese, as well as
a screen grab from a soccer match in which Nigeria
is playing Germany and the three letter abbreviations for each
country spell out the N word. Taken in context with
the fact that Andrewer was caught on his own body
camera admitting to brutalizing black protesters and seemingly bragging about it. Again,
(23:00):
what is Melissa and the rest of Danye's family supposed
to think it was? It was screenshot this document, right,
m hm, So if he takes it down, it doesn't matter. Um,
that's how he really feels. So my thought, why would
(23:20):
he even care about how a young black man ends
up dead? Like? Why put forth any effort and finding
out what will be happen. I'm seeing that he wouldn't
give a damn because he looks at us as diggers,
(23:41):
you know. Um, and I'm just being black. But he
showed he showed his character when he said what he
said about the protesters when we were out there in Berkeley.
I know I'm going proe and or and I'm just saying,
what do't it? Thank you? Look, we get it. Police
(24:07):
or people. They like to crack jokes, and they like
to have a laugh about their work day. Who doesn't.
It's a stress reliever. But to be in the role
the police are, in their salaries, paid for by a
trusting public, granted special privileges and powers to use violence,
and tasked with respecting the rights of individuals as they
go about their job and forcing the law. It is,
(24:29):
if nothing else, disheartening to know that what they find
funny is the notion of violating all of that public trust,
of having a thirst for harming civilians or intentionally not
doing their jobs. Would you go to a dentist who
thought it was funny to pull healthy teeth from your head,
or to a doctor who laughed about doing as little
for you as possible. Probably not, And sure memes people
(24:53):
post on their social media pages aren't exactly a complete
description of their attitudes and opinions. But what we find
humor is a window into our thinking. It shows what
we think is at least kind of true. I spent
all my time tracking hate groups, right, not so much
speaking with activists. We also talked about this issue with
Heidi Barrick, who was then tracking hate groups for the
(25:16):
Southern Poverty Law Center. Today she is chief strategist for
the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, which she co founded.
In the summer of she told us that she had
followed closely the story about police officers posting racist content
on their Facebook profiles. I can't tell you that every
(25:36):
time there's a lynching, there is usually an outcry from
people in the black community that weird things are being
done to them. And I don't believe that that many
folks feeling that way about like lack of police investigation,
lack of taking the crimes seriously. I don't think that
can all be a mistake. And the amounts of times
(25:58):
that we've seen law enforcement office or sort of decried
Black lives matter makes me wonder too about BIOSes there,
and you layer on top of it, you know, all
this craft that we're finding on social media, and I
don't think it's crazy to think then an activist wouldn't
get the same service from law enforcement and someone else.
(26:18):
I mean, the history of law enforcement in this country
is just not really good when it comes to people
of color or people who challenge the police. We also
know from the Department of Justice's investigation into Ferguson that
that police department also was filled with a bunch of racists.
And there have been some other investigations coming out of
the d J, you know, obviously prior to Trump, that
(26:40):
show sort of systematic racial problems. In terms of the
sentiments of police officers. Reading the Department of Justice report
on the Ferguson Police Department, we were more than disheartened,
were horrified. Yes, it's a look at one municipality, one
department and doesn't necessarily speak to all lease everywhere, agreed,
(27:02):
but it shows what's possible, what's been documented, what's been
proven to have occurred. The report is full of statements
like officers expected and demanded compliance even when they lacked
legal authority. One of the report's primary conclusions reads Ferguson's
law enforcement practices are shaped by the city's focus on
(27:23):
revenue rather than by public safety needs. This emphasis on
revenue has compromised the institutional character of Ferguson's police department,
contributing to a pattern of unconstitutional policing, and has also
shaped its municipal court, leading to procedures that raise do
process concerns and inflict unnecessary harm on members of the
(27:44):
Ferguson community. It then goes on to list a host
of specific examples, So if you're skeptical, I'd say just
read it. The idea of that was often late at
the feat. For example of Black Lives Matter activists, see
your exaggerating problems with the police and biases and police forces.
I think it's pretty much big pitt to West. Now,
(28:06):
maybe not by the cops themselves, but the evidence shows
that these things are happening all over the country. Officers
in North County police departments like Ferguson frequently don't live there.
These various departments are pulling from the same basic crop
of people. So just as we cannot say that the
specific misdeeds of Ferguson's police department are being repeated across
(28:27):
the greater St. Louis area. We also have to be
careful about suggesting that attitudes and behaviors in one department
are necessarily confined to it. For example, when protesters took
to the streets of St. Louis to demand former officer
Jason Stockley beheld accountable for the killing of Anthony Lamar Smith,
(28:47):
several police officers ended up beating the crap out of
wait for it, a black undercover cop named Luther Hall.
They took an oath to serve and protect the people
of St. Louis, but to night for city police officers
are off the job after they were indicted on federal
felony charges September seventeen, two thousand seventeen. For a third
(29:09):
night protests erupted in St. Louis after the acquittal of
former police officer Jason Stockley and the shooting depth of
Anthony Lamar Smith. Four city officers have been charged with
using excessive force and beating up an undercover city police
officer who's also a twenty two year veteran of the
force that was assigned that same night to cover the protests.
(29:31):
A federal investigation was able to find that these officers
had been sending each other text messages about how excited
they were to get to beat up protesters. According to
the indictment, text messages show that Boone, Hayes, and Myers
expressed disdain for the Stockley protesters and excitement about using
unjustified force against them. In one exchange, Boone wrote quote,
(29:55):
it's gonna get ignorant tonight, but it's gonna be a
lot of fun beating the expletive out of these expletives
once the sun goes down and nobody can tell us apart.
The case against the officers who beat Luther Hall ended
in early with two mistrial counts and not guilty verdicts
on the remaining counts, and just like Anderer being promoted
(30:18):
to detective immediately after the excessive fource incident involving State
Representative Bruce Franks Jr. One of the officers named in
the indictment for the beating of Luther Hall, was promoted
to sergeant three months after the event. The plain View
Project database contained over four hundred Facebook posts from current
(30:38):
and former officers in the St. Louis City Police Department.
In the end, two of those officers whose posts were
flagged by the Project. Ronald Hasty and Thomas Mobrey would
find themselves fired for what we're determined to be their
anti Muslim, anti Black Lives Matter, and pro Confederacy posts.
(30:59):
We tried contacting Detective Andrew for comment at his office
and via his cell phone. One week when we were
in St. Louis, we decided to just stop by his house.
We figured we could knock on his door, introduce ourselves,
and with a smile on our faces, ask if he
was willing to talk to us. After all, it's not
a crime to knock on doors. Jehovah's witnesses do it
(31:20):
all the time. Heck, detectives do it all the time.
It's gonna be on the left and there's a cop car.
There's a cop car, all right, So what do we
say here? It's uh, listen, I hope we're not bothering you.
Were journalists. We're working on a story about the death
of Donye Jones and doing a story in Dania Jones. Um.
(31:45):
We tried getting in touch with you to the office,
couldn't And then we were in town this weekend and
we're just hoping we could catch you in person to
just you know, sit down for a few minutes and
get your side of uh the investigation, and you know,
things he saw and what led you to your determinations.
(32:06):
We didn't want to walk up with a tape recorder
in our hands. So the gist of what happened is
that we knocked on Detective Andrewer's door. When he answered,
we told him who we were and that we were
working on a story about Donya Jones. Andrewer was immediately
upset that we were there. We tried to explain that
we wanted to give him an opportunity to schedule a
(32:26):
time to talk, even on background, if he wanted to,
and then we gave him our contact information and he
then asked us to get off his property, so we left. First.
What I took from what you gave me, which was
most important, was the body temperature was seventy six degrees
sarrenheight at seven fifty seven am, and the ambient temperature
(32:48):
was forty five point five degrees farrenheight at seven three am.
And I also noted that the rhythm mortis was fixed
in the jaw but breakable in the extremities. So just
looking at the time frame, someone who was last known
to be alive and found was an eight hour and
thirty minutes range. So looking at the again mortist first
(33:11):
where the mortist begins in the muffles of the face
on the neck, and it appears after two hours, and
it's in a fully fixed form in an eight to
twelve hour mark. So right there, knowing that it's fixed
only in the jaw but not in the rest of
the extremities, we know that we're in a two to
eight hour time trains. Then I'd chugged in the numbers
(33:32):
to be adjusted Glacier equation and I got two point
ninety six hours. When I plugged it into Eureka, I
got three point forty two hours. So with Eureka, that
would show that it's three hours and twenty five minutes
ago from money. The temperature was taken, so that approximated
to be around four thirty in the morning. And this
(33:53):
could be a little bit tricky well, because the body
did drop twenty two point five degrees there and night. However,
it was cold outside he was outside, and the cold
anti appempature I can speed up the temperature rate of dropping.
So I found using the equasions and the rigor Mortis.
That's that it probably was about was three and a
half that our time things when he was found. Okay, awesome.
(34:17):
So so you're putting out roughly about four yes, And
like I said, it's hard because it was thy five
five degrees out, so the cold temperature really messes with
the rate. But going off of my whole entire thesism,
what I found to be true and things like that,
that would be my best estiment. We thought it was
(34:39):
only fair to present this information to the chief Medical
Examiner for comment. Your investigator noted that Rigor Mortis and
his extremities was had begun but was breakable. And then
I actually spoke to an out of state medical investigator
who wrote their master's thesis on determining time of death
(35:00):
based on ambient temperature, body mass, and temperature of body
at time of discovery, and she generated an equation that
through a computer system called Eureka that plugs in the
important variables and comes up with what she has found
through testing to be a fairly reliable method, and that
puts his time of death roughly at four thirty in
(35:22):
the morning. If you're saying that that it goes back
in two hours, I would very much doubt that even
based on even based on the riga mortis. The rigor
mortis at the time that he was examined at ten
amim has described as moderately developed technically. According to the
report at about seven thirty am, the on site investigator said,
the rigor mortis was in the jaw and breakable in
(35:44):
the limbs. But anyway, these are not rigid parameters that
we can use to establish a time of death. You
can certainly do that if you like, but we're not
going to be doing that. If I if I say, well,
this is the time of death, I need to be
will to support that, to go into court and say
that if I am called upon to do that. This
(36:05):
person that you're talking to about the songs trying to
come up with this methodology that she uses. You know,
that is not something that is established in the scientific
literature that we can say, well, here, based upon this
is how long this person has been dead. Do you
use this now in your work? Um? I cannot. Some
(36:27):
cases where I'm working, our case load is so heavy
that it's not something I can use on a daily basis.
But if I ever meet you, right doctor, doctor asks
me to I would be willing to and I believe
it would show accurately. So could you say that now
after she developed that new adjusted Glacier equation, that it's
(36:48):
something you use in your work. I do use it
to estimate some time of death. It is pretty accurate.
We're not trying to suggest that doctor cases wrong not
to seek an estimated time of death in her cases.
For our own purposes, though, we wanted to have a
reliable estimate of when Danye died, and we think Carly's
(37:11):
estimate is worth taking seriously, especially as it lines up
with the rigor mortis and Donye's limbs. And that means
considering the possibility that he didn't die until roughly four
thirty in the morning. Remember, he was last seen by
his uncle walking out the back door around nine PM.
And something we haven't pointed out yet is this Donye's
(37:33):
phone did not have cell service at this time. In fact,
he had two cell phones, one in Android and the
other an iPhone. Apparently the Android was newer it was
the device he primarily used, but at the time of
his death, neither device had service. He used them on
WiFi only and relied on apps to send out texts
(37:55):
and to talk, so that nine p m. Text message
to his sister Militia that said sorry Sis. It had
to have been sent before he left the range of
the WiFi router in his house. Taking all of this together,
we know that Donna left with his overnight bag a
little after nine pm, but maybe didn't take his last
(38:16):
breath for what looks like another seven hours. And based
on the fact that Melissa thinks Donya was going out
to meet a girl and Derek was the last person
to really hang out with Danyae in the house and
he claims that while they watched basketball, danye was in
good spirits. We cannot help but wonder if the mystery
person or people that Dania went out with that night
(38:39):
might be able to shed light and how he ended
up dead by morning. But who is this person or
people and why haven't they come forward? Even if Danyae
did die by suicide, why wouldn't this person or people
reach out to Melissa and tell her what they know
of Dnya's last hours alive? Well, what's a hazard? Suspicions?
(39:03):
That's next time and after the uprising, After the uprising
is directed, produced, investigated, written, and reported by myself, Rainovschelski,
and John Duffy. John Duffy was also the editor. Dave
Cassidy was producer, sound engineering, design and mixed by Josh Condon.
Executive producers were Matt McDonough and Tina x Eros for
(39:26):
Now This, Brett Kushner for Group nine Media, and Jess
Borov was executive in charge of production. Jonathan Hartwig and
Bradley Rayford were consulting producers. Eliza Craig was assistant producer
and did additional reporting. Malory Keenoy was a writer's assistant.
Kristin McVicker and Taya Wilson were production assistants, and Haley
Klesmer was a post production assistant. Fact checking by Alison Humes.
Theme song and other music by Zachary Walter, legal by
(39:48):
Keith Sclar and Peter Yazy. Special thanks to Ann Frado,
Danny Gonzalez, Barbara Copple, Alex Lester, Bethan Mcalouzo, Emily Maronoff,
Ruth Vaka, and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.
After the Uprising is a production of Double asterisk I,
Heart Media and Now This in association with True Stories.
You can find us on Twitter and Facebook. If you
have useful information about the death of Danye Jones or
(40:10):
anything we've covered, please leave a message on our tip
line at three four seven six seven four seven four
zero one.
Hosts And Creators
Ray Nowosielski
Maria Chappelle-Nadal
John Duffy
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