Original subtitles

When you learn that there's been a fatal shooting in Berkeley,

your first instinct is kind of like, "Well, that's weird."

You kind of automatically assume

there's going to be some sort of crazy story behind it.

These were two longtime friends.

How could something get so out of hand

that it ended up in murder?

You've just killed one of your closest friends.

They're on the ground, clearly dead.

They've got gunshot wounds to their head.

You know, a lot of people would have a panic attack.

We want his side of the story

of why did you do these certain things?

Why did you put the gun underneath him?

What were you trying to display to the police or to the authorities?

And then, a woman in her 20s shows up at a hospital.

She's been walking around with a bullet

in her shoulder for several hours.

You're a witness to a homicide.

What happens if you don't play ball?

In this particular case, unfortunately,

what grandma did is she participated in a coverup.

She tried to let her grandson get away with murder.

I've never seen an instance where somebody dragged their grandma in

to cover up for a homicide before.

Somebody's fingerprints would be on it because the gun was used.

So somebody wiped the fingerprints off.

So there's something wrong. There goes the red flag.

Because we know what we're looking for.

But someone staging the scene does not.

You've just got to think that, if cooler heads had prevailed there,

everybody's life would be so much better.

California is, like, a melting pot.

There's a lot of different kinds of people.

You get a lot of... a little bit of everything out here.

San Francisco Bay area is a really big region.

Other than Los Angeles,

it's probably the biggest part of California.

Berkeley, California, specifically,

it's always kind of been known as... sort of a peaceful area

that has kind of a hippie vibe to it.

Even though there's a million people around,

like, in every direction,

you always kind of had this small town vibe in Berkeley,

where there was this real sense of community.

Even though it's right next to the murder capital

of Northern California, which is Oakland.

Sacory was very athletic.

I taught him how to ride a bike, actually.

He was three,

and I remember doing that with a neighbour's bike.

And then, after that, he assumed it was his bike.

So whenever he came over,

he'll go down to the neighbourhood and take their bike,

and they'll come knock on the door.

"Hey, Tomorrow, Sacory has my bike,"

and I'm chasing him, and he's going so fast.

He loved children. He loved kids.

So, at a young age, he always told my mom

he wanted to have a baby.

Me and Sacory, it was just us.

Like, there's no other siblings, so we were very close.

And growing up, he was, like, a handful.

He was very, like, rambunctious

and very outgoing.

We told each other everything.

He didn't get in too much trouble at school

except for rapping in class a lot...

...making little beats on the desk,

but just teenage stuff.

My brother wanted to be a rapper.

He started getting his self into music...

...and started trying to take that seriously.

This starts with a woman in her 70s calls 911

to report that there's a man there

suffering a gunshot wound,

and that she thinks it might be a suicide.

But right off the bat, she's sort of very evasive,

and it's kind of unclear exactly what's going on.

This call was made around 9:30 on a May evening,

and it's a time of year where it's dark,

but it's not, like, too late at night.

This is, like, a typical

residential neighbourhood in Berkeley.

1,300 square foot house, three bedroom, two bath.

Police arrive on the scene...

...and what they find is

a young man basically laying in a pool of blood

with a pistol sort of tucked underneath him.

And, obviously, from the scene,

the... the implication right there is

that this was the gun that was used to kill him.

One of the first things that they realise

that's a possible red flag is

that there are three shell casings found inside the house,

which is a little unusual in a suicide.

Especially when they find somebody

suffering from a gunshot wound to the head.

Sacory Knight was 22.

He was suffering from a gunshot wound

to his cheek and to his ear,

like, below his left ear, I believe.

And, sometimes, there's an entry wound and an exit wound.

And so, you see two bullet holes.

You think it means two gunshots,

but it could just be the trajectory of the bullet.

So police are still looking at this as like a possible suicide,

especially after finding the gun

underneath his body.

But they do a clean sweep of the house,

and they find two other firearms in two different bedrooms of the home.

And one is in the room of the grandmother

who made the 911 call,

and the other is actually found in the victim's room,

in Sacory's room.

I was at home, and I want to say

it was about 2:00am, and I got a call.

And it was a man on the line,

and he told me that he was the coroner

and that he needed to speak with Tomorrow Gaut.

I said, "This is her."

And he said, "I am sorry to contact you,

but I have your nephew, Sacory Knight."

And I was like, "No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

I'll call back in five minutes." At that time, I hung up.

I called my nephew. No answer. Not like him.

I call my nephew one more time. No answer.

At the time, he was dating a young lady.

I contacted her phone.

No answer. I contact again.

That five minutes went by, and that the coroner called me back.

At this time, I'm very upset.

I'm shooken.

I am screaming at the top of my lungs.

My kids woke up, and they're looking at me,

and I'm on the phone with the coroner.

And I said, "How do you know it is Sacory Knight?

Tell me. Sacory has dark skin." I was like, "Is he handsome?

Does he have facial hair?" "Yes."

"Does he have tattoos?" "Yes."

At that time, Sacory had just got a fresh tattoo.

He had on his arm his grandmother's name.

His grandmother on his father's side is Theresa.

His grandmother on his mother's side is Brenda.

When the coroner told me those tattoos,

I still didn't want to believe it.

Senetria at the time, she just had her daughter.

She just buried her father. So I'm trying to hold it together,

driving down the road 20 minutes to the other side of Sacramento.

I'm knocking on her door. She's not answering.

So, now, my mind is going everywhere. "What's going on?"

Finally, she opens the door,

and I had to deliver the news of her brother's passing,

which the hardest thing I ever had to do.

My reaction when I first found out is just...

like, I was just in disbelief.

Like, I was just confused.

Like, he was just postin' on social media the night before.

It took a while for it to register.

And at this point, we still don't know anything

except that he is dead.

We don't know car accident.

We don't know anything.

Police who are well trained are trained

to treat suicides as homicides,

so that they're alert to anything

that might suggest

that this, in fact, is a homicide.

When police arrived, they find... the decedent, Sacory,

and realised he's been shot twice in the head,

and the gun is under his body.

That would raise immediate suspicions,

because, although we do have suicides

that have shot themselves twice,

it's rare.

And the gun would not typically be under a person's body.

It would suggest that they were able to move around.

They determined that the death had actually taken place

30 minutes before the 911 call.

There has to be a reason why there's that delay in reporting.

That has to be covered.

So, now, the only person who can tell you that is the grandma.

One of the big red flags in the beginning is,

why did this woman wait 30, 40 minutes to call 911

after the shooting occurred?

Somebody discovers a body with gunshot wounds,

they're going to rush to the phone, and maybe even under the false hope

that the paramedics are going to be able to save the person, you know?

But to wait 30 minutes? I mean, right off the bat,

there's got to be more to this story.

It certainly looks suspicious.

It looks like she intentionally delayed police

to give her grandson enough time to get away

and to stage the scene.

What it looks like is...

accessory after the fact.

Anything that interferes with the police investigation intentionally

makes you an accessory after the fact.

The first thing I knew was that he got shot.

I didn't know where, I didn't know why,

and I didn't know who he was with.

And then, I think it took about a few hours

for me to start finding things out.

For me to find out that my nephew was murdered

in the home that he was supposed to feel safe,

with people that gave them

the title of grandmother and brother...

is really upsetting.

He was supposed to feel safe where he lay his head,

and that didn't happen.

The detectives asked me if he was depressed,

or if I thought it could have been a suicide,

and I said, "Absolutely not" right away.

It's pretty clear, I think, to detectives right away

that there's a whole lot of people living in this house.

If you have a home where there's a whole lot

of different people living there, and police show up,

and there's one dead person who was a resident

and one woman who made the 911 call,

first of all, it begs the question of where is everybody else,

and what happened here, and where did they all go,

and why were the two of them alone

when he apparently decides to kill himself?

The police are still processing the scene,

and they interview this 73-year-old woman, Linetta,

and they get the first story from her.

What they come to learn is

that Linetta was living there with her grandson, uh...

Devin Carrihill,

and then, Sacory Knight had a bedroom,

and he had a girlfriend,

and she would often stay overnight, stuff like that.

Now, all these people are potential persons of interest or suspects,

or at the very least, potential witnesses

to exactly what happened.

But she's not telling them everything.

And she's claiming, "I was in my room.

I heard a gunshot. I came outside. I found him like this."

In the police mind, they're not getting, like,

a full story that really explains what they've come upon.

They already know the grandmother is not

telling them the whole truth...

and that, for some reason,

she's giving a story that appears to be a cover up.

They have to expand the investigation beyond her.

This is a rapidly developing situation.

Given the fact that there's no one else there,

IF this was a homicide,

then your killer could be making a break for it.

You can't assume anything in a criminal investigation.

Even though there's a gun found

directly underneath Sacory Knight's body,

you still have to make sure

the other two firearms weren't the murder weapon.

And you also have to make sure that the gun

that was found underneath him WAS the weapon that killed him.

And if none of the guns were, then, you have to track it down,

figure out what happened there.

And obviously, police are going to want to know

whose prints are on that gun, whose DNA is on that gun.

Then, they also have to figure out who owned it,

and how it came to be in Sacory's apparent possession.

The pistol had been wiped.

Now, you can wipe a gun to a certain extent

so that it's almost completely clean.

You can also wipe a gun in a way that leaves clear evidence

that the gun has been wiped if you don't do it properly.

But of course, the crucial issue in this instance is

that this is supposed to be a suicide,

and it can't be a suicide,

and then have the gun being wiped afterwards.

All three guns were 40 calibre guns that were found in the house.

At that point, all three of them could technically be

the weapon that was used, and if one of them was,

and it's not the gun directly underneath Sacory's body,

then that would definitely be indicative

of a staged crime scene.

One of the key things I would want to happen quickly

would be the postmortem examination,

because the pathologist will determine

whether one or both of these wounds was fatal.

Plainly, if they are both fatal wounds, this can't be a suicide.

You can actually tell from the shape of the wound...

whether it went in at an angle or not.

The police would have to consider Linetta as a possible suspect.

At this point, they don't know who pulled the trigger,

and she's the only person there.

And you can't just say,

"Oh, she's 73. She couldn't have possibly done it."

You know, as a homicide investigator, you can't do that.

So, the first thing that they have to do is eliminate her as a suspect

and make sure that, as a witness, she's telling them the truth.

If you look at the Bay area, it's sort of this web of freeways,

and they go in every direction,

and there's a million different ways

that you can get out of here in a hurry.

And there's so many places that a person could lie low

if they were trying to evade the police.

And, sometimes, people will even flee the area

because they don't want to be a witness, you know?

Talking to the cops is really stigmatised out here.

Even if it's a suicide,

there's reasons that people would just want to keep a low profile

and get out of Dodge,

even if they weren't directly involved in anything wrong.

As soon as investigators find out that...

the grandmother took over a half hour to call police,

that means that the perpetrator would have had

a 30-minute lead on them,

and that would be enough time to get out of the neighbourhood,

possibly get out of the state.

And it would be difficult to track them down.

So I think what you're seeing here is

just sort of the mystery starting to develop

and police really ramping up the need

to track down everybody who might have been in the house.

The only thing that's clear at this point is

it's not entirely clear.

It's been about three hours since the initial 911 call

when the bombshell drops,

which is a woman in her 20s shows up

about 30 miles away at a hospital,

telling the nurses there

that she was shot in Berkeley.

To have two shootings in Berkeley happen on the same day before?

Yeah, that has happened before.

But when you have someone show up at a hospital

that's about an hour's drive east,

and they've got a gunshot wound,

and they tell you that they got it in the same city

where you've had a shooting death

during the same time frame,

obviously, that completely opens the door here.

Now, the flood gates are open,

and they've got to see if these two things are connected.

You're going to go to the hospital

and interview her right away,

because you don't know how life-threatening her injury is.

Now, Berkeley detectives are on their way out to Antioch

to go interview this woman

named Taishae Powell, who's in her 20s,

who was suffering a gunshot wound to her shoulder.

And it turns out that she's

Sacory Knight's girlfriend.

And on the list of violent cities in the East Bay,

Antioch is near the top.

The nurses and doctors out there know gunshot wounds,

and you can tell if someone's been shot recently

or if they've been shot, like, several hours ago.

And that's one of the first things

that these people are able to notice is

this is not, like, a particularly fresh gunshot wound,

that she's been walking around with maybe a bullet

in her shoulder for several hours.

So why wouldn't somebody just come right over

and get medical treatment?

What's going on there? There's obviously a story there.

I ended up finding out

that he was with his girlfriend at the time of it happening.

And I found out that she was also shot,

and she was also kidnapped.

After staging the crime scene,

Devin gets into a car with Taishae and they go off to Richmond,

which is one or two cities over from Berkeley.

And he gives her very specific instructions

to get rid of the clothes.

And if the cops find out about this,

this is what you're going to tell them.

From the police perspective,

this is a murder, followed by a kidnapping,

followed by a cover-up...

...because if you shoot somebody in the shoulder,

and then, you tell them that they've got to come with you

and help destroy evidence and stuff like that,

you're doing that under duress, you know?

It's hard to say that the person was a willing participant

when they're still suffering from a gunshot wound,

and you're giving them these instructions.

And you can almost hear the gears clicking.

You're a witness to a homicide.

What happens if you don't play ball?

This is Sacory's girlfriend.

And what happens to her if she gives any kind of indication

that she's going to cooperate with the police at that point?

And Taishae acts completely

like somebody who's in shock.

And then, he just kind of disappears off into the night.

After driving around with him

for at least an hour, probably more...

now, she's free,

and she kind of has this first chance to kind of take

her temperature and... and kind of try and relax a little bit.

But she's still got a gunshot wound.

So she ends up in Bay Point where she's got some friends,

and they actually have to convince her

that gunshot wounds without treatment,

I don't know, probably not a good idea to just leave that as it is.

But by the time she gets to the hospital,

I think sort of the fear and the shock have

kind of evaporated a little bit,

and maybe some of the anger of...

watching her boyfriend get murdered in front of her sets in,

and she's ready to tell the police what she knows.

The police are fortunate in this case

that there was a surviving victim.

When the girlfriend began to talk...

all attention turned toward Devin.

It turns out that Taishae is a lot more forthcoming.

And what Taishae tells police is a real-life nightmare

that has played out over the course

of the previous night and the following morning.

When police went to talk with Taishae,

she says that there had been an altercation at the house

and she got caught in the shooting.

And a man named Devin had had

an altercation with her boyfriend, who was the person who was...

...on the floor from two gunshot wounds.

Once Devin is the main suspect,

it is a race against time for the police to catch him,

because this is a person

who allegedly killed a friend in cold blood,

staged it to look like a suicide,

and then, forced the killer's girlfriend,

who was wounded as well, to drive him around.

What Taishae tells police is

it all started with, basically, a nice little get-together.

They're all roommates, living together, hanging out,

and they decide, like, let's have a barbecue outside.

And somewhere along the line,

Taishae is in the kitchen.

She spilled some water, leaves it on the kitchen floor,

and Devin Carrihill's grandmother, Linetta,

slips and falls and bangs her head.

And, you know, I think anybody in that situation,

they're going to be a little pissed off

that their grandma had hit their head.

Obviously, Devin gets upset,

but it just snowballs into this big fight.

And he's, like, yelling and screaming at everybody.

He's blaming Taishae. Obviously, Sacory is gonna come

to his girlfriend's defence at that point,

and then, it just becomes, like, these two young men

who are headbutting and... and...

and having this, you know, big argument right there in the kitchen.

Taishae tells police she's getting ready to apologise,

and she thinks, you know, probably rightfully,

like, "We should get out of here and just let the temperature cool down.

But first, I'm going to go apologise

for leaving the water there and not cleaning it up."

And she's getting ready to do that.

She... But first, she's microwaving some food in her room

cos the barbecue is off now.

And then, gunshots rang out.

And she's so concerned

with her boyfriend's safety and...

and trying to make sure he's OK,

and then, looking down the hallway of the room

and realising, to her horror,

that he's on the ground with gunshot wounds,

that she doesn't even know right away

that she's been shot in the shoulder.

Then, she starts to kind of feel the blood trickling down

and the pain kind of setting,

and she realises that she's been hit, too.

And from there, just pandemonium unfolds.

Somebody gets shot in the head right in front of you.

You've just killed one of your closest friends.

There on the ground. They're clearly dead.

They've got gunshot wounds to their head.

You know, a lot of people would have a panic attack.

And that's, by all accounts, what Devin does.

He starts screaming. He starts pacing around the house.

He just kind of starts going into freak-out mode,

and it's like you've done something terrible that you can't undo.

Apparently, his first instinct is to cover it up.

So he starts kind of coaching everybody, like,

"Tell them it was a suicide." You know

"you have to do this and do that."

And then, they're just going into this kind of haphazard,

badly thought out,

"you got to cover up the crime scene" thing.

He's the one who then takes the gun

and just slips it underneath, uh... Sacory's body.

And then, you just start to see the gears turn

and how he's constructing

this suicide theory in... in real time.

He takes off all the clothes that he was wearing,

you know, puts them into a bag or something, and puts on new clothes.

And actually, despite his panicking,

and despite sort of the intensity of the situation,

it sounds like he displays a pretty good knowledge

of what the police are going to look for,

because they're absolutely going to want to test the clothes.

Another thing is that he apparently wipes his fingerprints

and tries to wipe his own DNA off the gun,

so he's thinking ahead of, like,

"The cops can't find my DNA or my prints on this thing.

They can only find his."

And so he's... he's trying to think like a homicide investigator

and sort of stay one step ahead of the police.

And of course, the last step of that is simply to try and disappear

and not let the cops find you,

and then have a story ready for when they do.

There would be an immediate rush to find the suspect.

This would be a person considered armed and dangerous,

and the investigators are already several steps behind

because the suspect's already fled.

That's the challenging part of these staged crimes.

The police are going to go look in another direction...

...and by the time the staging is suspected,

too much time has gone away.

Seems like, at this point, that the cops kind of have

a pretty clear picture of what happened here.

And, obviously, the next thing they have to do is

talk to Devin Carrihill and track him down.

Because now he's become a murder fugitive,

they don't know for a fact that he doesn't have another gun.

Police eventually track him down to this apartment in Oakland,

where they're able to safely arrest him

and bring him into custody.

And then, now, the big question is, "Is he going to talk?"

"Is he going to give his version of events,

and they get sort of the final piece of the story here?"

Because everybody's story kind of leaves a little bit of ambiguity

as to what exactly was going on when the shots were fired.

Linetta was in her bedroom because she hit her head.

Taishae was microwaving food,

and everybody heard yelling, and they heard signs of an argument,

but they don't exactly know what went down.

The other thing the police do is

they go back to Linetta.

And she says just enough

to get herself arrested for accessory.

It turns out Devin IS willing to speak with investigators,

which you don't always see.

But what he tells them is what the police described

as multiple versions of sort of

the crucial moments before the gunfire,

where one of the things that he stuck to was that...

they began fighting and struggling over the gun,

and then, it kind of accidentally goes off during this whole fight.

Now, that doesn't necessarily account

for three bullets being fired,

because usually one gunshot gets fired accidentally.

Everybody kind of jumps back, and that's what you'd expect, right?

So the police don't buy his story.

At that point, Devin's arrested for murder, gun possession,

and he's also arrested on suspicion of kidnapping

because of that whole ordeal

that he puts Sacory's girlfriend through

following the fatal gunshots.

When Devin finally admits to the shooting

and the staging of the scene,

police have to get corroborating evidence to back it up

because, at any time, he could say,

"I was coerced into this,"

or "No, I didn't mean any of that. I...

I was just playing with you." I mean...

there are any number of ways he could retract his confession.

I was told that it was, like, over...

the grandmother falling in a wet spot.

I was just shocked...

because they had been friends for years.

So I just didn't understand

how it just turned like that so quick.

One of the saddest things about it, man,

is that Sacory and Devin have been friends for years.

They're all living together,

and they're basically like family friends

who have all apparently been cool for a really long time.

There's no reason for deadly violence

to come from this situation.

Staging a suicide

and blaming their death on the victim,

even after the fact,

it does make the crime seem more egregious.

It shows that the perpetrator knew

they did something wrong

and wanted to get away and get away now.

Murder is basically defined

as the killing of a human being with malice aforethought.

You have to directly kill somebody in sort of the ways

that anybody would imagine a murder going down,

or you have to act so dangerously

that the danger to human life is obvious.

You know, like driving down Main Street at 80 miles an hour

or shooting a gun out just haphazardly around,

not caring, like, who it hits.

Voluntary manslaughter is a little bit more complicated

under the law compared to murder.

Manslaughter, at least in California,

can be boiled down to two things, which is:

the unlawful killing of someone in the heat of passion.

And that has a specific definition

that requires something

that would be, like, universally accepted as enough

to just, like, rile somebody up so much

that it lessens the severity of what they did legally a little bit.

Or what they call "imperfect self-defence,"

which is like if someone's, like, beating the hell out of you

and you shoot them, you might be able

to make an argument that that was imperfect self-defence

because, you know, it's obviously not fair

that you'd bring a gun to a fistfight.

But if you were really getting your ass handed to you,

then, maybe, there's an argument to be made

that it's something slightly less than murder.

If they're charging him with first-degree murder,

they have to show a premeditated intent.

I think that would be very difficult,

given the behaviour at the scene

and the various stories that they've been told.

There was no premeditation.

They couldn't prove that he had the intent to kill Sacory

because, uh... a couple of things.

One is...

it is confirmed that the two got in a fight,

which led to a shooting.

That day, he didn't wake up and say,

"I think I'm going to kill Sacory."

He didn't say,

"I'm going to kill him" when they first started arguing.

But he ended up killing him

when the argument turned violent.

So you couldn't disprove

that he may have acted in self-defence,

or thought he was acting in self-defence.

And if his story is self-defence

or is sudden provocation,

without any other evidence pointing to such things

as lying in wait or premeditation,

you can't prove that he had the intent to murder before he murdered.

When his attorney's offering voluntary manslaughter,

and they accept it.

I think they're conceding that... they probably would have a hard time

making a first-degree murder charge stick.

This part of California,

you're not going to see more murder cases anywhere else.

The courts are really just oversaturated

with felonies in this part of the Bay area.

What happened in Devin's case is what happens in a lot of cases.

It's sat exactly where it was for years.

And that whole time, he's sitting in the jail

just waiting for some sort of resolution or anything.

If this had gone to trial, and if he had tried to argue,

"Hey, this was a suicide,"

then the prosecutors would have ALL this evidence

to show that not only was it NOT a suicide,

but if you argue something else like self-defence,

or that the gun went off during a struggle,

the cover-up then becomes proof of consciousness of guilt.

Like, if you don't know that you did something wrong,

you wouldn't drive somebody who's bleeding out from a gunshot wound

around the Bay area, and then, burn your clothes,

and then, do all this other stuff.

Nobody would go to all that trouble and bring in all these people

and make their own grandmother part of the cover-up,

unless they knew that they did something wrong.

So, in court, it becomes, like, a very big weapon

for the prosecutors can yield in...

in order to prove a murder if they need to.

In this case, as I recall, doesn't even go past

the preliminary hearing where a judge will look at the evidence

and say, "Hey, there is enough, there's not enough."

Doesn't even get that far.

After four years.

It just resolves kind of quietly

to where he pleads guilty

or no contest to voluntary manslaughter.

And he's sentenced to 11 years in state prison

with the time that he's already served already on the books.

I assumed that we were going to get justice.

I assumed that my family...

was going to be able to live their life,

knowing that this guy was going to be behind bars forever.

Unfortunately, that did not happen.

I definitely feel like it was an injustice because...

...not only was a life taken,

but another person was injured and kidnapped.

And I just feel like...

it just wasn't taken seriously

as it should have been.

I don't think that they feel that Sacory Knight matters.

It was just on the news,

and then, it slowly went away.

They didn't take the time to truly put this guy behind bars.

It's not fair.

I could see how the family of the deceased...

may see it as his life was only worth 11 years.

And people who commit

far less serious crimes than taking a life

get far more serious sentences.

And, unfortunately, it's the charge that they were able to prove.

And he did get the maximum.

And I'm certain that the judge would have given him more

if he had the opportunity to.

Devin will be home...

...before my niece is ten, and she's four.

She was a baby when Sacory died.

He held her like it was his child

because he wanted to be a father.

And that's the only image I will ever be able to remember of him

having his own child is his niece.

An 11-year term is a...

a significant interruption of someone's life...

...in terms of their family, in terms of their relationship.

It may not be as much as the victim's family wants.

It's something.

And, sometimes, the justice system can't go all the way.

There's a couple things that I think about

when I look back on this.

One of them is how any of us could find ourselves

in this nightmarish situation where...

we're basically being kidnapped by your loved one's murderer

in the blink of an eye.

Where, one second, you're microwaving food,

the next few minutes go by, and then,

you're stuck in a car with a responsible person,

and you don't know exactly how the night's going to go.

You know, are you going

to end up in a ditch somewhere,

or are you going to even be able to get out of this situation?

And the other thing,

just from a newspaper reporter perspective, is...

I've never seen an instance where somebody dragged their grandma

into, like, the cover up for a homicide before.

You know, a woman in her 70s...

...who I don't think was fully committed

to covering it up.

But she also didn't want to get her grandson in trouble.

But just by saying just enough,

she now has, like, accessory to murder on her arrest record.

I'm just sad that my nephew laid

on that ground for...

...30 minutes...

with the grandmother...

...waiting to call for help.

In the end, Linetta ends up not getting charged.

But just taking someone into custody for a crime

that has the word "murder" on the end of it,

it's a pretty big deal, and you've got

to sit in a holding tank and think about, you know,

what are the next few years of my life going to look like here?

And what do I want to do?

It's really sad to think about

how a barbecue between lifelong friends

could devolve into something like this,

where one young man's lost his life.

You know, the other people who were there witnessed

this horrible thing happen,

and they're probably irrevocably scarred by that.

And then, you know, you have somebody

who had just graduated high school a couple of years ago.

And when you're that young, 22, 23,

you have sort of the whole world right there at your fingertips,

and you have all these different options.

And now, he's got his whole entire 20s to spend in...

in state prison.

You know, you have a family

that is never going to get over the loss of their loved one

and who I'm sure probably doesn't think

that 11 years is very fair to,

you know, compensate for the loss of a human life.

I just hope that people remember my brother,

remember him for being funny.

He was very funny, funnier than me,

and I'm pretty funny.

And he was just, like...

he put everybody in a good mood.

Like, he was always cracking a joke.

Um... Good with kids, good with his nephews and nieces.

And we just miss him. Yeah.

He was a son.

He was a brother.

He was an uncle.

He was a friend.

He was a coworker.

He was a classmate.

He was somebody.

And to be taken away from this Earth...

...it's just... it's just hurtful.

This is the loss of a loved one.

And the legal system is designed

to punish wrongdoing,

not to heal grief.

No legal system is attempting to provide closure.

Closure is about emotions.

They're really attempting to offer justice...

in some form.

Sometimes, it's imperfect justice, but something will happen.

There will be some accountability.

We've all been in situations where we get pissed off

at the people closest to us.

And you've just got to think that, if cooler heads had prevailed there,

everybody's life would be so much better.

I try to remember my nephew's life,

how happy he was,

how great he was,

what kind of man he wanted to be.

It's unfortunate that his nephews will never get to see that,

the man that he was trying to be.

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