Yeardley:  Hey, Small Town Fam. It’s Yeardley. I want to remind you that if you want access to bonus episodes and regular episodes a day early and ad free, and our community forum and other behind-the-scenes goodies, you got to go to smalltowndicks.com/superfam. And then in the top right-hand corner, hit that little tab that says join. And then listen to the end of today’s episode for a sneak peek at today’s new bonus episode.

 Hey, Small Town Fam. It’s Yeardley. I hope you’re all well. We have such an interesting case for you today, and it comes to us from a prosecutor instead of a detective. This case is heartbreaking in that the suspect, whose name is Jemerson, was only 13 years old when the crime was committed. Jemerson was already well known to law enforcement at that time, and not just for shoplifting magazines or tagging public property, but for some very serious violent offenses. Because of this, when Jemerson becomes the prime suspect in a cold-blooded murder, the court decides to try him as an adult. When we recorded this episode, I remember feeling kind of conflicted about that.

 You’ll hear me pepper our guest, Kristen, with questions as I try to get to the heart of the DA’s reasoning and purge any nagging doubts that I had about that decision. Because even though I firmly believe in rigorous accountability, and the murder in this case was absolutely merciless, 13 seems awfully young. So, I’ll be curious to hear what you all think in the comments, as well as how much you think Jemerson’s actions are a result of nature or nurture. Here is Snakebit.

[music]

Yeardley:  Hi, there. I’m Yeardley.

Dan:  I’m Dan.

Dave:  I’m Dave.

Paul:  And I’m Paul.

Yeardley:  And this is Small Town Dicks.  

Dan:  Dave and I are identical twins-  

Dave:  -And retired detectives from Small Town, USA. 

Paul:  And I’m a veteran cold case investigator who helped catch the Golden State Killer using a revolutionary DNA tool. 

Dan:  Between the three of us, we’ve investigated thousands of crimes, from petty theft to sexual assault, child abuse to murder.

Dave:  Each case we cover is told by the detective who investigated it, offering a rare, personal account of how they solved the crime. 

Paul:  Names, places, and certain details have been changed to protect the privacy of victims and their families.

Dan:  And although we’re aware that some of our listeners may be familiar with these cases, we ask you to please join us in continuing to protect the true identities of those involved-

Dave:  -out of respect for what they’ve been through.

[unison]:  Thank you.

Yeardley: Dan:  I’m Dan.

Dave:  I’m Dave.

Paul:  And I’m Paul.

Yeardley:  And this is Small Town Dicks.

Dan:  Dave and I are identical twins-

Dave:  –And retired detectives from Small Town, USA. 

Paul:  And I’m a veteran cold case investigator who helped catch the Golden State Killer using a revolutionary DNA tool.

Dan:  Between the three of us, we’ve investigated thousands of crimes, from petty theft to sexual assault, child abuse to murder.

[Small Town Dicks theme]

Dave:  Each case we cover is told by the detective who investigated it, offering a rare, personal account of how they solved the crime.

Paul:  Names, places, and certain details have been changed to protect the privacy of victims and their families. 

Dan:  And although we’re aware that some of our listeners may be familiar with these cases, we ask you to please join us in continuing to protect the true identities of those involved-

Dave:  -out of respect for what they’ve been through.

[unison]:  Thank you.

Yeardley:  Today on Small Town Dicks, ta daaa, we have the usual suspects. Ugh, praise be. We have Detective Dan.

Dan:  Hello, team.

Yeardley:  Hello, husband. [laughs] Stunned into silence. We have Detective Dave.

Dave:  Hello, there.

Yeardley:  Hello, you. And we have the one and only Paul Holes.

Paul:  Hi.

[laughter]

Dan:  We get no hey, hey today.

Yeardley:  No hey, hey today.

Paul:  No hey, hey. No. Just hi.

Yeardley:  Just hi. I’ll take it. I don’t mind. Small Town Fam we are super excited today because you know we are honored always to have detectives on this podcast to tell the case that they investigated from their experience and give us the details of what they went through and how all of the dominoes needed to line up perfectly in order for justice to be served. But today, we don’t have a detective. We have a prosecutor. She’s a badass. I am so pleased to welcome to the podcast, Kristen.

Kristen:  Thank you very much. I’m so happy to be here.

Yeardley:  We are thrilled. And so, Kristen, before you tell us how this case came to you, would you give us a little thumbnail biography of your career?

Kristen:  Sure. I ended up in Seattle, Washington, after college and didn’t know what I was going to do. I ended up volunteering at a place called Seattle Rape Relief, and while I was there, I became the legal advocate. I attended a lot of interviews with victims in the sexual assault unit at the King County prosecutor’s office. I found it fascinating, and so I decided to go to law school. I also became a domestic violence victim advocate of King County at the time, this was 1989, and it was the first time they had domestic violence advocates in district court, which was their misdemeanor court. And they had a pilot program. And I got hired to be the first advocate there. And it was conveniently on the way to law school. I’d work as a DV advocate during the day and go to school four nights a week.

 I went to law school to be a prosecutor. I definitely had an end goal in sight, and I already had this in with the prosecutor’s office. And so I sort of assumed that I would end up there at the end, and that’s how I became a King County prosecutor. I went to juvenile court. There were probably 10 of us there. So in juvenile court, we were learning felony cases without a jury, and we would charge people. We would see the case through to the end. If there was going to be what they call an adjudication in juvenile court, we’d do the trial. So I got to work with witnesses and detectives and patrol officers and all that stuff.

 At that time, in the early 90s, the crime rate in King County was pretty high. More and more juveniles were committing crimes with guns.

Yeardley:  Was there a reason for that, that you were able to identify?

Kristen:  I think they were just becoming more accessible. There were just way more homicides being committed by juveniles than usual. And so my direct supervisor established a system where you would have a little thing on your door if you were next up for the next homicide. We each had a little office, actually, with a door, very chic. [Yeardley laughs] And it was a really great group of prosecutors because we did so many really difficult cases together and talking through them and just working together. So we’re pretty bonded.

Yeardley:  That’s great. And it brings us to the case you’re going to talk about today. Kristen, tell us how this case came to you.

Kristen:  All right. This case came to me because I was next up in my office for the next homicide. And this happened in March of, I think it was 1994, when the homicide happened. It was late at night in the central part of Seattle, and a group of teenagers were hanging out a pretty main street there. And this other young girl, who was 14 years old, I’ll call her Anna, she had recently moved out of that part of town. Her parents had actually moved her family to the outskirts of Seattle because they wanted to get away from the gang activity and other bad things that were happening. And Anna snuck out of her bedroom window that night and went down to the central part of Seattle and met up with this group of girls and boys, mostly girls. They didn’t like Anna and they started to surround her and started to beat her. And she ran away from them on the street.

 They caught up with her, and they were standing around her in a circle. She was sitting on the pavement. And one of the other girls, Emily, had a gun with her. It was a .22, which is a very small caliber pistol. And one of the juveniles there was a 13-year-old boy named Jemerson. And for some reason, I think it was really just to show off, he grabbed that gun from Emily and just, out of the blue, shot Anna twice in the back. What was a little bit odd was everybody there was 14 or 15 years old, except for one other person whose name is Williams, and he was 24 years old and hanging out with this group. Not really sure why. Never really did find out why. And after Jemerson shot Anna, he handed the gun to Williams. And Williams took the gun, and facing Anna as she sat bleeding, he said, “Rest in peace, bitch.” And he shot her one more time in the chest.

Yeardley:  My God.

Paul:  So, Kristen, you and I are contemporaries. We started at the exact same time. And so during this time frame, in the early to mid-90s in the Bay area you know we had the crack wars going on, and we had a lot of gang activity. We also had girl groups like this, that were affiliated with gangs, and they would do what sounds like this group was doing to Anna. And it almost sounds like Jemerson at age 13 was like a prospect and Williams was an OG, and maybe there was an assignment, “Prove yourself if you want to get into the local gang.” Does that sound like what was going on here?

Kristen:  Well, it’s so interesting you say that, because when Jemerson was born, all of the Seattle police department detectives said, “That kid doesn’t have a chance to because he’s a Jemerson.” He actually was born in prison, and his father was in prison during the trial, many of his relatives were in prison. It was a well-known family in Seattle of criminal nature.

Yeardley:  What kind of crimes was Jemerson’s family known for?

Kristen:  Mostly drug activity, some violent crime. And, yes, there was major gang stuff going on at the time, and some of these girls were believed to be in the gang. And, in fact, during the trial, the other prosecutor and I had to have gang detectives escort us home after the trial at night sometimes because of the threats that we all were receiving. So, yes, you’re right on there that was definitely going on. And I don’t know if it was a “you got to prove yourself” thing. It may well have been, but at age 13, Jemerson already had so many encounters with law enforcement, and some, we call them adjudications, but some convictions for some pretty serious felonies, as well as a whole bunch of misdemeanors. He just didn’t have any supervision at all. He was running the streets of Seattle, kind of fending for himself is sort of my picture.

Yeardley:  This is Jemerson you’re talking about.

Kristen:  This is Jemerson? Yes.

Paul:  And the girl carrying the gun, Emily, is more of the mule, if you will for the firearm. And then when the gang member wants access to a gun, he doesn’t have it on his body, but then he goes and gets the gun to use it for whatever crime they’re about to have because the female is less likely to be searched or suspected by law enforcement.

Kristen:  Right. Which is also why we actually thought that Williams may have told Emily to carry the gun, because if juveniles are caught with a weapon, it’s different than if adults are, right?

Paul:  Absolutely.

Kristen:  There were some reports that these kids, prior to this homicide, they had been at a separate park down the road. They had been drinking a little bit of some kind of malt beverage, I believe. Somebody said at some point that the gun had been fired at somebody’s feet, that they said, “We want to see you dance.”

Yeardley:  Oh, boy.

Kristen:  This homicide happened late at night, right on the street, and there was an apartment building right next to it. And there were two adult women who overheard the noise and the gunshots, and one of them called 911, and one of them went down to help Anna as she was on the curb.

Yeardley:  Was Anna still alive at this point having been shot three times?

Kristen:  She was still alive. The rest of the kids all took off running. There was one girl. I’ll just never forget her because she was my witness. This one girl named Mandy stayed behind and held Anna and tried to help her. Mandy heard her say, “I can’t breathe.” So we knew she was alive at that point, but she died shortly afterwards. So all the kids separated and took off, but Jemerson and Williams were identified pretty quickly.

Yeardley:  The neighbors who heard the gunshots, did they know Jemerson and Williams?

Kristen:  Well, they described them and this event that had happened at the park earlier, where they had been standing around, somebody had called the police then, and there had been some contact. So they had some names, and they just figured out that this must be the same people. It didn’t take very long to arrest both Jemerson and Williams. And because Jemerson was 13, his case got referred to juvenile court, and it came to me, and this ended up being my very first felony jury trial, which is very unusual for a prosecutor for their first trial to be a murder trial.

Dave:  So, Kristen, is this a situation where I’ve worked plenty of homicides where the district attorney or the deputy DA comes out to the scene in the middle of the night. There’s other cases where we just follow up the following day during daylight hours kind of curious how a call out or a response to a case like this looked like back in the early days of your career.

Kristen:  So, back then, we did not yet have a unit that was that call out type unit during my career there, it was established. It was called the Most Dangerous Offenders Program, or MDOP unit. And so I was not called out to this scene. I got the case probably shortly after Jemerson was arrested, and I don’t remember if that was the next day or how long it took, but it was fairly soon after the homicide.

Dave:  And what would your preference be as a prosecutor? Would you want to be out there that night?

Kristen:  I would absolutely want to be out there that night. And, in fact, I went to the scene later, after it’s all over. Because my job as a prosecutor is to put the jury back at that scene, right. And sometimes the judge. And so I want to see as much as I can of what people saw when they were there. Even if it wasn’t a homicide, I would go to the scene, so I would have a good idea. So I knew what I was talking about when I was trying to walk the jury through what happened and walk my witnesses through where they were when. So, yeah, that’s a really good point. And now, it’s very common practice for their most major prosecutors’ offices I think in the US have those types of call outs where prosecutors will go to the scene for that very reason and to provide some guidance.

 Sometimes the detectives or even the patrolmen may have some questions about certain pieces of evidence. Being right on scene, you can start talking about search warrants and arrest warrants and things like that. That is one thing. This was the best job I ever had. It was that relationship between the prosecutors and the detectives. You know when were colleagues, and we had a lot of respect for each other.

Yeardley:  Kristen, were you familiar with the detective who got assigned to this case?

Kristen:  Yes, this case got assigned to Detective Ramirez. We called him Sleepy Jean.

Yeardley:  [laughs] Why is that?

Kristen:  We had to give him a lot of guidance let’s just say that. We had to prod him a little bit. In this case, I will say it was incredibly difficult because of all these juvenile witnesses, most of whom did not have parents or guardians or sometimes homes, you know a stable lifestyle. So that made it tricky and made our jobs as prosecutors a little bit more difficult. So at the time, the law in Washington state was if you we were a certain age and you committed certain crimes, like the top five felonies, you would automatically be tried in adult court. There was no going to juvenile. There was no, do not pass go, do not collect $200. You’re going straight to adult court. Those are if you’re 16 or 17 years old. So here we have Jemerson, who was 13-year-old. He’s had a lot of contact with law enforcement. He’s not your typical 13-year-old.

 And this was not a decision I made by myself and definitely spoke with my supervisor about it, and we decided we wanted to try to decline Jemerson. That’s what we called it. We had a decline hearing, which meant we’re asking a juvenile judge to decline jurisdiction and send this case to adult court. And the real reason for that is the penalties. The penalties would be much longer if you can be tried in adult court, and juvenile court loses jurisdiction at a certain age, it’s either 18 or 21, kind of depends on the state. And back then, remember this is 1994, we didn’t know what we know now about development of the brain, and that people don’t really have be fully developed until they’re 26 years old. And so there wasn’t a lot of sympathy or other alternatives, frankly, for juveniles who committed serious felonies, other than putting them in the juvenile detention facility or sending them to adult court.

Yeardley:  We’re talking about Jemerson being tried in adult court even though he’s 13 at the time, correct?

Kristen:  Correct.

Yeardley:  And even though when he was born in prison, the consensus was this poor kid doesn’t stand a chance because he has no stable home life. Had he committed other felony crimes?

Kristen:  He had, yes.

Yeardley:  Aha.

Kristen:  As well as some misdemeanors.

Yeardley:  Given the severity of this crime. I mean, cold-blooded murder of Anna would be the reason that Jemerson is being considered for adult court despite his young age.

Kristen:  That’s one of the reasons. There are eight factors that a court is going to look at to determine whether or not a juvenile should be sent to adult court, and that includes the severity of the crime. It also includes the maturity of the individual, their past criminal history, whether or not this is a danger to the public versus a crime against a family member. The sophistication of how the crime was carried out is another one of the factors. So there’s several different Kent factors. And as a prosecutor, I have to have at least one in order to even try to convince a judge that this is someone who should be tried in adult court. And in Jemerson’s case, I think I recall we had four or five of those boxes were checked.

Yeardley:  So that’s what Kent is. It’s basically a list of criteria that help a judge decide if a juvenile can be tried in adult court versus juvenile court.

Kristen:  Exactly.

Yeardley:  Interesting. So you really want to weigh as much as possible before you make that decision.

Paul:  Yeah. It’s basically a greater good test.

Yeardley:  Hmm. That’s tricky.

Kristen:  Yeah. So this is a pretty good case to take and ask a judge to do this. And the other piece was we had an adult co-defendant.

Yeardley:  Ah, right. You had Williams, who shot Anna in the chest.

Kristen:  Exactly. So trying the cases together was also part of the sort of judicial economy, if you will, like it would just be less expensive, and it would make more sense to try them together. You’re going to have the same witnesses and have one trial as opposed to two.

Paul:  We never get to hear from prosecutors on this type of stuff. So I know that hearing is going to be emotional. The defense attorney is going to do whatever he can to keep Jemerson in the juvenile court system so it’s an adjudication at the end. You, as a prosecutor, I’m curious what that fight looks like from your side.

Kristen:  It’s definitely a fight, and it’s a one-day hearing. It doesn’t take very long in juvenile court. It’s just a judge and so it’s not a protracted type of hearing.

Paul:  These juvenile homicides from this timeframe, and this is really to compare and contrast. Oftentimes, I responded out to cases that were drive-bys committed by young teenagers who are randomly shooting into a crowd of rivals, and then somebody ends up catching a bullet and dying as a result. Or we have the convenience store robbery where the clerk resists, and now the juvenile shoots and kills the clerk. Here you have Jemerson, who has a victim surrounded by a crowd and purposefully pulls a gun and uses homicidal violence directed at this basically helpless victim. This is a different type of crime than the other ones I was talking about. This really goes towards the Kent factors. I’m evaluating Jemerson because, of course, it’s like, “He’s only 13 years old.” But take a look at his criminal history and take a look at the crime that he has now been arrested for.

Kristen:  That was the big debate, actually, because this got a huge amount of media attention. So at the point we had that decline hearing, Jemerson had been held in the juvenile detention facility for several weeks. And so I had witnesses from the facility, people who work there, testify about how he acted in the facility. In fact, what I recall is that he was there about a week or less before he was bossing everybody around. He had other juveniles carrying his boxes of stuff around. He had them giving them his food. He was the kingpin down in the juvenile facility. So I had those folks. I had the detectives. It’s not like you’re trying to prove the crime happened.

Paul:  Right.

Kristen:  It’s just really all about the respondent hoping that he will become a defendant in juvenile court. We call them respondents.

Yeardley:  When he moves to adult court, he becomes a defendant.

Kristen:  Correct.

Yeardley:  I see.

Kristen:  As I recall, I also had one of Jemerson’s prior teachers testify. There were a couple of school-based people who testified because Jemerson didn’t always go to school. He was truant a lot. And actually, the defense attorney called a couple of people from his school to talk about their efforts to help Jemerson break this chain of, I think, as Paul has referred to it, as generational violence or criminal activity. So the judge made a decision pretty quickly that Jemerson was going to be declined. So he got sent to adult court. That means he’s going to be tried in adult court. He’s going to be housed in juvenile detention during that trial up and until he’s convicted.

Yeardley:  Kristen, “What was the media’s take on what was happening? Were they advocating for Jemerson to be trialed in adult court or were they hammering you guys with, this is a terrible decision?

Kristen:  I’ve actually looked back at some of the newspaper articles that I kept. We had two competing newspapers in Seattle at the time, and it didn’t seem to me like they were going one way or the other. They were just like, “Holy cow, here’s a 13-year-old.” But it was more along the lines of, this is kind of a trend. In fact, shortly after this, I think there were some 12-year-olds in another part of the state who were tried as adults for murder, for stoning a homeless man to death.

Yeardley:  Jesus. So was the media referring to trying juveniles in adult court as the trend or these crimes being carried out by juveniles were the trend?

Kristen:  I think both that there were more and more of these very serious crimes being committed by juveniles. And then, therefore, we were seeing more juveniles in adult court. So the media was all over the fact that Jemerson was a very tiny little guy. When he sat in the chair, his feet didn’t touch the floor. And of course, they dressed him up and stuff for the trial. I don’t think he’d ever worn a button-down shirt before, but he looked like a little kid. But yeah, what he did was not what a 13-year-old should be doing. So, the case went off to adult court, and it goes to my colleagues in the trial team’s unit. I’m still assigned to juvenile court, so I move on. I go on with the rest of my cases.

[Break 1]

Kristen:  So this was April when Jemerson was declined. And I kind of kept track of the case, as there were two prosecutors assigned to the case in adult court, my colleagues John and Patty. And they were successful in joining Williams and Jemerson together to be tried together as adults. There were several motions about that and a trial date was set for August, because in Washington state, we have one of the shortest, if not the shortest, speedy trial rules. It’s a 60:90 day rule. So if you’re in custody, you have to be tried within 60 days, 90 if you’re out of custody. That’s the defendant’s right.

Yeardley:  Oh, wow.

Kristen:  Only the defendant can waive that. So, it’s very short time. Meanwhile, I’m just going along, doing my thing, and sometime in late June, I got a call from Patty, who asked me if I’d be willing to try the case with her, that John was no longer available. John was somebody who I kind of followed around when I was that legal advocate for rape relief. We knew each other pretty well and John had participated in our agency softball team. At a game he tripped over first base and fell down and broke both his arms.

Yeardley:  Crap. Oh. [chuckles]

Kristen:  Yeah. So he was in chaos. He couldn’t feed himself, but he also couldn’t try the case.

[laughter]

 So this is how it just landed in my lap. I was the only other person who knew the case pretty in and out, and it would be too hard to bring somebody else up to speed. So I, of course, said, “Yes.” But Patty knew full well that I had never done a felony jury trial. We discussed that she would definitely be the lead, that I would not do opening or closing, but that I would have the witnesses and I would help her through the process.

Dave: [4 That’s an honor to be selected to be a part of a big case like that. I imagine that builds some confidence.

Kristen:  Oh, it was huge. It was huge. And it was also very intimidating. Patty was a go getter. She was a really hard worker. She also happened to be a clotheshorse. She had a different outfit for every day of trial and this trial lasted two months long.

Yeardley:  Oh, my God, I love Patty. We’re kindred spirits. [Paul laughs]

Kristen:  Yeah, right. I’m trying to cobble together an outfit for the first week, and I’m sitting next to Patty, who’s all dolled up and something different every day.

Yeardley:  We all have our vices. [Paul laughs]

Kristen:  Yeah.

Yeardley: Let me ask you this. So now you are assistant prosecuting this case, and you have this pretty rapid turnaround in Washington state, 60 or 90 days if the suspect is in custody. But also, your witnesses don’t have stable home lives. Some of them are homeless themselves and living on the street. How do you put this case together as prosecutors?

Kristen:  That’s a great question. Patty and I spent a lot of time together after work in my backyard. We were strategizing about who to call and order of witnesses and what our theme of our case was going to be. And then after work, before the trial started, and even during the trial, there were many nights where we would be driving around the central district in her car, looking for our witnesses, and we didn’t have a police officer with us. We were doing this on our own.

Paul:  Kristen, I’m kind of surprised you didn’t have like a DA investigations unit that would go out and track your witnesses down.

Kristen:  No, we did not, Paul. We had a paralegal who would send out our subpoenas and would line up our witnesses once we got to trial. We’d be able to rely on our paralegal to tell people, when to be in the hallway and ready to go. But no, there were no DA investigators at that point.

Paul:  You know the last four years of my career, I was with my DA’s investigations unit. In fact, I supervise and manage most of the homicide, sexual assault investigators. And that was their job and they’re sworn officers for the most part. So the fact that you and Patty were going out to yourselves, I know how hard it is for the DA’s that are trying a case. Putting on a trial is a massive endeavor, and then to also have to do what I would consider more the investigator’s function. You guys were carrying a heavy load on this.

Kristen:  Yeah, it was a lot.

Yeardley:  Kristen, “How do you subpoena somebody who is homeless?”

Kristen:  That’s a great question. In our county, the sheriffs were responsible for the subpoenas, and they had to track people down. They actually had a whole investigative unit, but their primary job was serving papers and transporting people, and they were good at it.

Yeardley:  It’s literally a piece of paper when you get served as a subpoena. Did these juveniles,– I’m just curious, like, “Did they keep the piece of paper, or do they just acknowledge it and rip it up and throw it in the garbage?”

Kristen:  Patty and I actually did serve a couple of the kids ourselves. I honestly don’t recall how they reacted.

Yeardley:  Interesting, Paul.

Paul:  I had a DA investigator who was a former sheriff’s deputy and then slid over to the DA’s office and his specialty was knowing where the homeless were at. And he knew there are select homeless individuals that kind of track the others. So he would have his little contacts within that transient community and was very good at finding people to serve. And so they are being handed the subpoena and saying, ‘Hey, we will come pick you up.” This is where having assigned DA investigators, so the prosecutors, [chuckles] like Kristen, don’t have to worry about it. They roll up and say, “Okay, it’s time for you to go to court, and we’re going to give your $15 for lunch,” which they’re very happy about. So trying to track the homeless down is a talent and sometimes, no matter what you do, you can’t find them. On one case, Wild Bill Huff, I was the assigned DA investigator, so I’m the one going out, serving the witnesses and having to get them to court and make sure that they’re okay. So I am so empathetic to what Kristen had to do in terms of putting a trial on, as well as tracking these transient witnesses down.

Yeardley:  That’s got to be tough.

Kristen:  Yeah. But again, I love this job, because where else are you going to get to meet these people or see this stuff or learn these things? And that’s the great thing about being a prosecutor, is that variety. You never know what kind of case you’re going to get and then the education that comes with it, like learning about how a firearm works or how the mechanics in a car work or blood spatter evidence or bullet trajectory stuff. Every case brought something with it which was really, really interesting. So in King County, when you get assigned out to trial, so when you reach that 60-day limit and it’s time for trial, there may be three or four different judges available out of the 20 or so who do the criminal cases.

 And so it’s a little bit of definitely a crapshoot about who you’re going to get. And we’re sitting in our offices. We’re looking at the trial. We know who’s in trial. We can see who might be getting ready to be done a trial, because our colleagues are in there. We’ll know which judge might become available. We really lucked out. We got assigned to a judge named Norma Huggins. We called her Huggy Bear [Yeardley chuckles] very affectionately, because she was just such a great, very fair judge, and we knew she would be great with these kids. So we started trial on August 23rd, picking a jury and it took about a week. There was a lot of questions about, “How do you feel about sitting in judgment of a 13-year-old being tried as an adult?”

 There were a lot of people in the jury pool with very strong opinions that Jemerson should not be here in this court, because again, keep in mind, the jury does not know about Jemerson’s past. They only know about the current charge, and they are instructed to presume both defendants innocent. So you’d start with the 12 people in that jury box and start asking them questions. And that’s what I mean. When Patty and I were meeting in my backyard in the summer, it was about what kinds of questions we wanted to ask the jurors. What was our theme?

Paul:  In this case how did you and Patty feel about your jury.

Kristen:  We felt really good about our jury. I remember being surprised that one of the defense attorneys kept at least one or two of the people on the jury that they kept. So we picked the jury, and we had to tell this jury that this case might go on for weeks and weeks, and they had to come. We needed people who could be committed. So in King County, we had trial Monday through Thursday. This is not the kind of case where they’d be sequestered, which means they’d be kept away from their homes and held in a hotel and had to stay together and be under a court bailiff or a court guard, would be a sheriff’s deputy. They could go home at night. But they were told, “You can’t read any media, don’t watch any media” because there was such a huge media presence.

[Break 2]

Kristen:  As I recall, Mandy, the girl who held Anna as she was dying, was our first witness because she was also the most likable of that group, and she was my witness. Patty had told me; this is what I’m going to let you do. You’re going to take this witness, meaning that I was responsible for doing their direct testimony and responding to cross examination. I remember asking Mandy a question about how she felt when she was holding Anna. I think I asked her, “How did you feel when you were holding her?” And her response from the witness stand was, “Why the fuck are you asking me that question? That’s the stupidest question I’ve ever heard.”

Yeardley:  Oh, my God.

Kristen:  [chuckles] From this 14-year old girl. And I was like, “Like a deer in headlights.” And I’m like, “All right, I understand you don’t like the question, but I’m just wondering, did you have any feelings?” She did not want to answer that question.

Yeardley:  And what was the crux of Mandy’s testimony that was so important to your case?

Kristen:  Well, she was the last person to see Anna alive, and it was just that emotional piece. Everything after that, I don’t remember how I even finished up with her or how she got off the stand, but I do remember that we had a break right after that because Patty took me into the women’s bathroom, and she basically reamed me out. I was crying in the bathroom because she was just like, “You did not handle that well, you did not do a good job, and you need to straighten up and fly right.” And I was just terrified. That was the beginning. That was day one of the trial. It got way better after that. It definitely got better, but that was a low point for me during that trial.

Yeardley:  And did Mandy testify beyond that one day?

Kristen:  No. Believe me, we didn’t want to have our witnesses come more than one day. Our goal was on and off. We got to keep it short and sweet, because who knows where they’ll be tomorrow?

Dave:  And you don’t know what they’re going to say in the middle of a trial. These are unpredictable folks.

Kristen:  Yeah. Especially those first couple of weeks when we were trying to get most of those juveniles on the stand. We were going out looking for them and checking in with them, making sure they knew what they were going to say, that they still wanted to testify, that they knew they really didn’t have a choice, that they were under subpoena. During the trial, Jemerson’s family started to try to intimidate some of our witnesses. In fact, one of our witnesses, Emily, was the person who had the gun at the scene. She had been so kind of squirrely, and we really needed her because of that connection to the gun. And she was going to give us the evidence that Jemerson took the gun from her and was the first one to shoot Anna.

 When we finally found her and confirmed her statement and confirmed that she was going to stick to it, we ended up actually putting her up with one of my former law school professors and somebody, I think, who Patty knew as well. This woman lived on an island in Puget Sound, and she agreed to hold on to Emily so that we would make sure that we head her for trial. Because we really needed her, we had no other place to put her. You can’t put a juvenile in a hotel and expect them to be there the next day. We didn’t have detectives to sit with them or any kind of court personnel. And so she wasn’t locked up, but she was definitely,– we knew where she was so that we would have her available when we needed her at trial. She only had to stay out there. I don’t know it was probably three or four nights. It wasn’t like we kept her all the way until we waited for trial. We actually weren’t sure were going to even be able to find her. And as I recall, it was even after opening statements that we finally found her and confirmed that she was going to stick with her statement. And so we decided we needed to stash her somewhere to make sure we could prevail in our case.

Yeardley:  How old was Emily?

Kristen:  I think she was 15.

Dave:  That’s pretty courageous at 15 and staring down some family members. And they don’t care about the trial. [chuckles] They care about Jemerson getting released.

Kristen:  Right. Emily was a tough kid. Of all the kids in that group, Emily was very tough. She had seen a lot of unfortunate things, I’m afraid, she didn’t have a very good upbringing, and that was a consistent theme for most of our witnesses.

Yeardley:  Were any of the jurors threatened by friends of witnesses or friends of Jemerson and Williams?

Kristen:  I don’t believe so, not that I’m aware of. There were just our witnesses who were being threatened during the trial, and Patty and myself. In fact, at one point during the trial, Judge Huggins’ courtroom that we were in was right off the street. And at that time, we did not have any court security. We didn’t have any metal detectors. So at one point, because of the threats, the court security asked us if we would please move to a higher floor. So we did that, we moved up. We also learned after Emily testified, Emily being the girl who had the gun that Jemerson took from her. After she testified, Jemerson’s mom threatened her, and another juvenile beat her up on the street. And they actually got arrested during our trial for witness intimidation and I think felony harassment, which was basically a reasonable threat to kill somebody.

Yeardley:  Kristen, “What was the defense’s strategy with Williams and Jemerson?”

Kristen:  Their defense was they were pointing the finger at each other, because one of the things you have to prove in a homicide case is causation, meaning this defendant caused this death, and because they both had shot her, they were trying to use the defense of, “Well, my bullet didn’t kill her. His bullet did.”

Yeardley:  It was the other guy.

Kristen:  Right.

Yeardley:  Interesting.

Kristen:  We knew that was going to be their defense. And so another really fascinating part of the trial was, we had a mannequin guy on contract. Patty sent me out to this guy’s house in this neighborhood in Seattle to go meet him and to pick out a mannequin that would resemble Anna, our victim. And so I go out to this guy’s house, and I have to go down into this creepy basement with all these naked mannequins of multiple sexes and, colors and sizes and stuff, and I have to pick one out that’s, like, Anna’s skin tone and height and body shape with this guy, who I didn’t know. I remember it was like, “Oh, my God, am I going to be found dead tomorrow?”

Dave:  Right. They make movies about guys like this. [Paul laughs]

Kristen:  So I managed to pick out a mannequin because we had a plan. The detective and the medical examiner got together with a cordless drill and a couple of steel rods, and using the Emily’s report drilled some holes in the mannequin and insert these rods to show the trajectory of the bullet through Anna’s body so that it was clear, because Emily said, “Either one of these bullets, any one of them would have killed her.” So we did that. We used that as demonstrative evidence for the jury. Demonstrative evidence is something that I ended up actually teaching my colleagues about later on in my career about how to use it. It’s evidence that doesn’t necessarily get admitted, but it’s a way to demonstrate to the jury how something happened or where something took place. And so we used that in the trial, and I think it was pretty effective.

[Break 3]

Paul:  So, Kristen, just from a physical evidence standpoint, “Was the gun recovered? Was it compared to the bullets? Were there fingerprints from either Jemerson or Williams found on the gun, etc.?”

Kristen:  The gun was recovered, and both Williams and Jemerson’s fingerprints were on the gun. They tried to explain that away from the previous event at the park where people were fooling around with a gun and shooting at people’s feet and asking them to dance. Part of their defense was they argued to the jury that our juvenile witnesses should not believed. They were a little bit all over the place. Most of those kids were very reluctant to say that either Jemerson or Williams had shot Anna. And there were multiple different stories about why this had happened and who shot first and that kind of thing. There was somebody who heard Williams bragging about it after the fact. So I think we also had that person. So that was helpful.

Yeardley:  Kristen, did Jemerson or Williams ever tell you why they killed Anna?

Kristen:  No. You always want to know. I mean, while we don’t have to prove motive, we want to be able to tell a jury what this case is about. You know, like domestic violence. It’s about power and control or somebody had a gambling debt and they needed money. This is why they did this. This case it was really hard to come up with a motive other than I remember Patty’s opening statement was all about Jemerson wanting to show off and then Williams not wanting to be one upped by a 13-year-old. He was the oldest one in the crowd, and his words, “Rest in peace, bitch.” They didn’t even know Anna. They had never met her. Williams was very cold and I absolutely had no qualms at all about convicting him.

Dave:  Did either Williams or Jemerson take the stand?

Kristen:  Yeah, Jemerson did take the stand, Williams did not.

Dan:  Your side, the prosecution, you guys are questioning Jemerson, I’m curious on how he was on the witness stand and what his demeanor was like during the rest of the trial. Like, I’ve been in trials with suspects where they just can’t be bothered and they’re nodding off. They’re not paying attention. I always look at the jury and how they’re reacting to a defendant who just seems like this is a waste of their time. I’m curious what Jemerson was like in the courtroom.

Kristen:  He was very, very quiet. He did not react much at all. There was one point at the end of the trial where he had some kind of an outburst. The detective said something on the stand, and then Jemerson hit his fists on the table or slammed the table, something like that. It took us all by surprise, and we had to take a recess to sort of get him under control. It was more Williams who was trying to intimidate every single witness that took the stand, and he was given them the stink eye and the glaring at them. And I don’t think that was lost on the jury one bit, frankly, because, as you said, jurors are paying attention just as we are to how jurors are reacting and how defendants are reacting. The jurors are paying attention to the people sitting around the courtroom. There’s a lot of downtime.

Yeardley:  Kristen, “Do you know why Williams didn’t take the stand?”

Kristen:  Williams had a criminal history, and though I think there were some things in there that if he took the stand may have come out, we might have been able to use them. We can’t use prior bad acts or prior convictions unless a defendant takes a stand and says certain things or if the defense opens the door, meaning they are the ones who bring up something first and step in it, basically. And then that might allow the prosecution to talk about things that have previously been ruled that we’re not allowed to talk about.

Dave:  So because a juvenile is adjudicated, not convicted, when Jemerson takes the stand, is there a difference in the eyes of the court on whether or not you can bring up Jemerson’s adjudications in juvenile court? Do they count the same as convictions, is what I’m asking.

Kristen:  No. There’s a lot more rules around juvenile adjudications than adult convictions.

Dave:  Okay.

Kristen:  And then oftentimes a lot of juvenile cases are sealed after the fact, so you can’t use them at all.

Yeardley:  Dave, “What’s an adjudication of a juvenile case? What does that phrase mean?”

Dave:  It’s and Kristen correct me if I’m wrong, but terminology in juvenile court is different than adult court. So a conviction in adult court is actually called an adjudication in juvenile court. They use much softer words in juvenile court when it comes to these things.

Kristen:  That’s exactly right. I was going to use that word softer. They try to make it seem like it’s less than what it is.

Yeardley:  Kristen, “How long did the trial last and how long was the jury out?”

Kristen:  The trial started with jury selection on the 23rd of August, and it ended on October 13th. We rested, and the jury went out, and they came back on the 14th. They were out about 10 hours over those two days.

Yeardley:  It seems as though, given this retelling, you had really a mountain of evidence to convict Jemerson and Williams in this murder. Did the 10 hours feel long? Were you surprised, or was that sort of — for a case like this, that’s this involved with these many witnesses, etc., is that sort of par for the course?

Kristen:  I’m glad it felt like a mountain of evidence to you. It didn’t feel like that at all during the trial because we were so reliant on these juveniles, and it was just gut wrenching, not really being sure what was going to come out of their mouths when they got on the stand frankly. That was a seven-week trial, so, no that 10 hours felt like the sooner they come back, it’s generally the better for the prosecution. And so we were really psyched when we got noticed that the jury had reached a verdict and we had to go back to the courtroom. That felt to us like this was probably going to be pretty good.

Yeardley:  Kristen, I know sometimes juries are given a couple of options on what charges they can consider when trying to reach a verdict on a case. Was that the situation with Jemerson and Williams.

Kristen:  While they were both charged with murder in the first degree, I think they had the option of finding them guilty of a lesser charge, which would have been murder in the second degree, which would have meant less jail time or prison time, but they convicted them as charged with murder in the first degree.

Yeardley:  What was Anna’s family’s reaction?

Kristen:  So, earlier in the trial, in the pretrial part, just before we picked a jury, one of the things you have to do in a trial when there’s a murder victim is you have to have somebody testify about the victim. You can call a family member or a friend to talk about. This was my loved one you have a photo of them in life. You’re allowed to get a little bit of information out about that person. Patty and I went out and met with the family to find out who among them wanted to be that person-

Yeardley:  For Anna.

Kristen:  -for Anna, correct. We met with Anna’s family and as I recall, her father refused to come out and be in the conversation. He stayed in a bedroom and in fact he had a very, very hard time with us. Never came to the trial. But Anna had several sisters and a little brother. So we met with them and her mom. Anna was 14 at the time she died. She had 11-year-old sister. When we told them what we needed to do and told them, they didn’t have any obligation, nobody had to do this. And the 11-year-old raised her hand and said, “I want to do it.” And it was just like so brave for that kid. And meanwhile Patty and I were like, “Yes, because think about the impact on a jury.” I’m getting emotional now just remembering it, but you get an 11-year-old up there to say, “This was my sister,” and she actually shared the bedroom with Anna.

 When Anna snuck out that night, she knew that Anna had snuck out the window and she had come clean with her mom the next day when Anna didn’t come back. And so we were really impressed with this young woman. That was again one of my responsibilities during the pretrial to let the court know who was going to be testifying about it. And when I had to talk about it and the pretrial, I got like I am now, I got a little emotional. And the defense attorney for Williams just went off, “Objection, your honor. We can’t have a prosecutor who’s going to cry in court.” Just like started belittling me. You know, “If she can’t keep her emotions in check, how can the witness keep their emotions in check? This is just a circus, they’ve picked this 11-year-old.” I was just so ticked off. I was just like, “Fuck off.” Like, “You should have been the one out there with that family watching that dad not come out of the bedroom and trying to tell this family, we need somebody to talk about Anna.” So we had a school photo of Anna and her little sister told us about her and she was great.

Yeardley:  Amazing. “What sort of sentence did Jemerson and Williams get?”

Kristen:  I don’t remember what Williams got. I know that Jemerson got 23 years in prison. And actually, Jemerson while he was in prison because he stayed in juvenile detention until he turned 18 and then he got moved to adult prison. He actually had a lot of remorse and he completely turned his life around as a result of this crime. He learned Arabic and like found God. He took advantage of a lot of prison programs. He was paroled at some point. I know that Jemerson is working in the King County juvenile system in running a program to try to keep teenagers from going down the same road he did. And I talk about this to my classes where I teach that I used to think every single defendant was not rehabilitatable, right? Well, sex offenders, definitely not. [Paul laughs] But murderers, like, “How can you possibly come back from that?” And here’s this kid who’s completely broken the mold, and not only from this crime, but from his family and what he grew up with and history. And so it is very impressive.

Yeardley:  Amazing.

Kristen:  Yeah.

Yeardley:  So, you know, when we ask guests to come join us on the podcast, Dan and Dave are the ones who vet the guests for the most part, and our lovely producer Jessica, and people like you and everybody else, like, “Oh, God, what case should I talk about?” And we always say, “Tell us the case you’re most proud of, or the one that sticks with you most, or the one where a stroke of luck helped you connect all the dots. And that’s why it feels significant to you.” What about this case, out of the many that you tried, is most significant to you? Why this one today?

Kristen:  This one clearly was very significant to me because it was my first felony jury trial. And how many times does a prosecutor get to try a murder case as their first case? And I got to co-try it with somebody who taught me a whole lot. By the end of the trial, I had gotten to experience probably about 12 trials’ worth of things. I learned so much during that first trial because it was so difficult. The nature of it, the fact that we had a 13-year-old, we had this huge media presence. I mean, it was unbelievable. And it definitely launched my trajectory in the prosecutor’s office. I never went back to juvenile court after this trial. I stayed downtown. I managed to skip that drug unit that I didn’t want to go to. I ended up becoming an instructor at the National Advocacy Center in South Carolina.

Yeardley:  Amazing. When, for instance, you’re trying this first felony case of your career and you’re being threatened by witnesses, a lot of whom have gang affiliation and could really do some serious harm to you and to Patty, “How do you take that home with you at the end of the day?”

Kristen:  Well, that’s a great question. My former partner and myself, we had just bought our first house in Seattle, and we did not have a family yet. And those few nights where the gang unit had to actually escort me home, it was like, “Oh, wow, this shit’s getting real.”

Yeardley:  Yeah.

Kristen:  This is serious stuff. That trial was definitely it was just so unusual. That’s why I chose it is because it really, I think, set the tone for the rest of my time in the King County Prosecutor’s Office.

Yeardley:  Right. Well, thank you so much for bringing that to us today. It’s fascinating work.

Kristen:  You bet. It’s my pleasure.

Dave:  [chuckles] What a way to kick off your trial history?

Kristen:  Right.

Yeardley:  Yeah.

Kristen:  I’ll tell you, Patty and I are still friends. I see her every time I go back out there. She’s still dressing to the nines and I’m still bringing up the rear on the ragtag outfits.

[laughter]

Yeardley:  I love it.

Dan:  Thank you, Kristen. Appreciate that.

Paul:  Yeah. Thank you, Kristen.

Yeardley:  Now for a sneak peek at today’s new bonus episode.

Paul:  I’m sure Dan and many other cops out there have been, like, out on a call, you come across a suspect on a call, and you run them, and they come back with a warrant for non-compliance for sex offender registry. And oftentimes, those offenders would act completely nonplussed. Like, “What are you talking about non-compliance?” [Yeardley chuckles] I don’t understand. Like, “I told my PO I was moving.” It’s like, “There’s some paperwork that goes with that.” [laughs]

Yeardley:  It’s not just a handshake.

Paul:  You can’t just say, “Hey, by the way, I’m moving next week. [Yeardley laughs] You got to do the follow up and tell them where so we get that often.”

[music]

Yeardley:  To listen today’s bonus episode and access hundreds more, go to smalltowndicks.com/superfam and hit that little join button.

 Small Town Dicks was created by Detectives Dan and Dave. The podcast is produced by Jessica Halstead and me, Yeardley Smith.Our senior editor is Soren Begin and our editors are Christina Bracamontes and Erin Phelps. Our associate producers are the Real Nick Smitty and Erin Gaynor. Gary Scott is our executive producer and Logan Heftel is our production manager. Our books are cooked and cats wrangled by Ben Cornwell.And our social media maven is Monika Scott. It would make our day if you became a member of our Small Town Fam by following us on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube at @smalltowndicks, we love hearing from you.

 Ooh, our groovy theme song was composed by John Forrest. Also, if you’d like to support the making of this podcast, go to smalltowndicks.com/superfam and hit that little join button. There, for a small subscription fee, you’ll find exclusive content you can’t get anywhere else.

 The transcripts of this podcast are thanks to SpeechDocs and they can be found on our website, smalltowndicks.com. Thank you SpeechDocs for this wonderful service. Small Town Dicks is an Audio 99 Production. Small Town Fam, thanks for listening.Nobody is better than you.

[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]