In 2011, Kalimah Truesdale was at her job as a sales associate at Home Depot when she got a phone call informing her that her brother had just been arrested. Two years earlier, a teen-age boy had been shot to death in their old neighborhood—and now her twenty-five-year-old brother, Steven Odiase, had been charged with the murder. “What really didn’t make any sense was the fact that they said my brother was shooting at a kid,” she said. “I was, like, ‘No way!’ ”
Ballistics evidence showed that there had been two shooters, and Steven and a co-defendant went on trial in the spring of 2013. The other defendant had already confessed to being one of the shooters, but the only evidence against Steven were the words of a single eyewitness, who admitted to being “buzzed” at the time of the murder. Nevertheless, the jury convicted both defendants. When the verdict was announced, Kalimah, who is five years younger than her brother, was so shocked that she fell to the floor of the courtroom and started sobbing.
Afterward, Kalimah decided to try to solve the crime herself. She began canvassing the streets near the murder scene, in the Bronx, trying to find anyone who knew anything, turning on her cell phone to surreptitiously record conversations. Eventually, she discovered a woman who said that she had seen the shooting—and that another man (not Kalimah’s brother) was the second shooter. Steven’s family hired a new attorney, and he filed a motion to set aside the guilty verdict. That effort failed, however, and at the end of 2013 a judge sentenced Steven to twenty-five years to life in prison.
In prison, Steven heard about two attorneys, Jonathan Edelstein and Robert Grossman, who specialize in post-conviction cases. Steven’s family went to see them in Manhattan. They took the case, and, after Kalimah told them about the witness she had found, they sent a private investigator to the Bronx. The witness told the investigator that, after the murder, the police had knocked on her door—and that a detective had later interviewed her. But Kalimah had studied the police reports on her brother’s case and she didn’t remember seeing anything about this witness.
This past March, Grossman was at his desk, working on a motion to try to free Steven, when he saw an old police report on the case that did not look familiar.
“Holy shit!” Grossman said, staring at the document.
“What?” his law partner said.
“Come over. Look at this. Oh, my God! Holy shit.”
Before trial, prosecutors are required to disclose to defense attorneys all evidence that might help the defendant prove his innocence at trial. The lawyers had obtained the original case file of Steven’s trial attorney, and they had also recently received an additional police report from the Bronx District Attorney’s office. Now Grossman realized that he had two versions of the very same police report. One version stated that the officers had spoken to the woman whom Kalimah had found. But the version that had been turned over to Steven’s defense attorney before trial did not include this part. “It was not only withheld; it was whited out,” Edelstein said. “It was deliberately taken off a document, and it was done in a way that the defense attorney would not know. This was not an accident.”
By the start of 2016, a new District Attorney, Darcel Clark, had taken over in the Bronx, and one of her first acts was to start setting up a Conviction Integrity Unit to investigate wrongful convictions. Unlike many similar units across the country, hers is not staffed solely by prosecutors. Rather, she hired two longtime criminal-defense attorneys to work in the office. The unit had been re-investigating Steven’s conviction.
Now Pierre Sussman, an attorney who had joined Edelstein and Grossman on the case, hurried over to the District Attorney’s office to show the lawyers from the Conviction Integrity Unit the two police reports. “I had the documents laid side by side in front of them,” Sussman says. “And I could tell by their reactions that something was going to happen.”
On Monday afternoon, Steven appeared in a courtroom at the Bronx County Hall of Justice. Risa Gerson, a lawyer with the Conviction Integrity Unit, stood up and told the judge that they had “performed an extensive re-investigation” and found that the police report handed over to Steven’s trial attorney “had key information missing, specifically a description of the shooter that would not match either defendant.”
Soon after, the judge, looking down at Steven, said, “He will be released at this time.” Kalimah, watching from the third row, brought her fist to her mouth, as if she could not believe the news. The judge did not undo Steven’s murder conviction—the District Attorney’s office says that its investigation is ongoing—but it’s difficult to imagine that prosecutors will decide to retry him.
Even though her brother is now out of prison, Kalimah wants to keep investigating the mystery of the altered police report. “I still want to know: Who did it? Why did this transpire?”
The prosecutor on the case, Adam Oustatcher, left the District Attorney’s office in 2016, after working there for many years. When he was reached by phone, on Monday, he gave a surprising explanation for the altered report. It was, he said, “normal practice” in the office to redact information about witnesses who could be endangered if their identities were revealed. “The initial DD-5”—the police report—“was given over in redacted form,” he said. “This was done in the office with full approval.” He insisted that he did eventually disclose the redacted information to the trial attorney. “My recollection is I gave the information over. I can’t remember if I e-mailed it or burned it onto a disk,” he said.
Patrice O’Shaughnessy, a spokeswoman for the Bronx District Attorney’s office, disputed this version of events. The Conviction Integrity Unit, which interviewed Steven’s trial attorney, concluded that he never knew about the existence of the additional witness before the trial. O’Shaughnessy acknowledged that the office’s prosecutors will sometimes redact the name of a witness on a police report—but only his or her name. “Yes, you can redact the name, but you can’t redact the other information,” she said. “It isn’t and never was normal practice to take out information like that.”
Kalimah is now living with her brother once again, in the family’s house in a quiet part of the Bronx. Grossman, the lawyer, gives Kalimah much of the credit for his freedom. She was “the one who cracked the case,” he said. “I think it’s amazing—a true testament to her love and persistence.”