 Jon-Adrian "JJ" Velazquez (Photo: Frederick Douglass Project for Justice) At around 1:30 p.m., on January 27, 1998, Albert Ward was shot to death during a robbery of an illegal gambling parlor in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City.
Ward, who was 59 years old, was a retired officer from the New York Police Department. He owned the numbers business, a bar, and several other properties in the neighborhood.
Witnesses told police that a man who called himself “Tee” had shown up about an hour before the shooting, asking to play the numbers. Robert Jones, an employee, told the man that they didn’t take bets from people they didn’t know. Tee told him that a person downstairs sent him up and that he often played the numbers on the east side. He also said he lived at the St. Nicholas Houses, a public-housing neighborhood just a few blocks north. Jones agreed to let him play. The man wrote down his information on a betting slip and handed it to Jones, who told him he had filled it out wrong and then threw the piece of paper into a trash can. Jones filled out a new slip and gave it to the man, who left.
About an hour later, the man returned. This time, he was met at the door by Richard Jones, Robert’s uncle. Richard Jones hesitated before letting the man in, but Robert said it was OK.
About a minute later, there was another knock at the door. Richard Jones opened the door and asked this man what he wanted. Tee then put a gun to Richard Jones’s head and ordered him to open the door. The second man entered the business and told everyone to get on the floor and hand over their money.
Tee went into the backroom where Lorenzo Woodford and Augustus Brown were playing the poker machines. The other man began tying people up with duct tape.
Albert Ward took a wad of money out of his shirt pocket and told Robert Jones to push it underneath his body. Ward then got up and placed a gun at the back of the second man’s neck. The two began struggling, and Ward’s gun went off. Tee shouted “Who’s got the gun?” The second man pointed at Ward and said, “Shoot him.” Tee fired, killing Ward. Then, he and the other man ran out of the store.
The police began interviewing the employees and customers in the numbers spot at the time of the shooting. They also canvassed hospitals in New York and beyond for a possible victim of a gunshot wound, because the crime-scene technicians didn’t recover the slug fired from Ward’s weapon. (It was never found.)
By 5 p.m., the police had broadcast a description of the two men. Tee, the shooter, was described as “male Black, light complexion, 20-25 years, 5’7”- 5’9”, 150-155 lbs., beard, mustaches and goatee, braids, wearing yellow or orange bubble jacket.” Separately, Robert Jones worked with a police sketch artist, and by 11 p.m., a composite sketch of the shooter had been distributed to the media.
The day after the murder, police arrested Robert Copney on a possession charge. Copney looked at the sketch and said he recognized the man as “Mustafa,” whom he knew from the area, including the St. Nicholas Houses.
The police arrested Derry Daniels on January 28, after Phillip Jones, Robert’s brother, identified him as the second man after reviewing nearly a dozen photo books of mugshots. Daniels had an extensive criminal record, including charges for robbery and assault. He was charged with second-degree murder, attempted second-degree murder, two counts of robbery, and one count of burglary.
The search for the gunman continued.
On January 29, police interviewed Archie Phillips, after arresting him for several drug offenses. Phillips said that he had heard people saying that a man named Mustafa shot a guy at a numbers spot. Phillips said that Mustafa sold crack in the area around the numbers place and lived over at the St. Nicholas Houses. His description of Mustafa closely matched the composite sketch.
The police also received two anonymous tips. The first said that a man named V.G. had ordered a hit on Ward. V.G. was a Black man with braids. The second tip said that a man named “Shaq” was involved in the shooting. There is no indication the police followed either of these potential leads.
Mustafa became a primary target of the investigation into Ward’s murder, and the police continued to interview the witnesses.
Robert Jones had told the police on the day of the shooting that the shooter was a light-skinned Black man with a light beard, a mustache and braids.
Phillip Jones gave a slightly different description than his brother. He said the shooter was a light-skinned Black man with red hair, 30-35 years old, wearing a wool hat and a light-colored jacket.
Dorothy Canady, who was 86 years old, was hanging out at the numbers parlor when the robbers entered. She also said the shooter was a light-skinned Black man but was clean-shaven. In her second interview with police, Canady said there were three robbers, not two.
Richard Jones told the police he could identify the shooter, but the police report on his interview gave no description.
On January 30, police interviewed Woodford. He had been at Ward’s bar and then gone to the numbers spot to collect his winnings. Woodford gave this description: “Male black, 5’ 8” – 5’10”, light skinned, he might have had braids, a light mustache, brown eyes. Mostly I remember his eyes and his gun. I may have seen him before by Drew Hamilton Projects and his hair was in corn rows. 20-25 years old, 180-190 pounds.”
Brown said he and Woodford were playing video poker when they heard scuffling in the main room. He said a dark-skinned Black man pointed a gun and herded them in with the others. Later, he described the gunman as light-skinned and said he had “jet black curly hair.”
Many of the witnesses looked at mugshots sorted with the police department’s mugshot archiving and retrieval system, which allowed officers to present photos based on race, age, neighborhood, or other criteria. On January 28, while looking through photos, Robert Jones told the police that the gunman might be “half Black/half Hispanic. He viewed potential suspects based on that criterion but said their skin was too dark. He was then shown photos of White/Hispanic men and looked at more than 500 photos without selecting anyone.
On January 30, Brown returned to the police station to look at more photos pulled from the archiving system. He looked at around 1,800 photos before selecting a photo of 22-year-old Jon-Adrian “JJ” Velazquez as the gunman. Brown said Velazquez’s eyes looked different than the description he gave of the gunman’s eyes. In addition, Velazquez’s mugshot profile described him as “White/Hispanic,” and he bore no resemblance to the composite sketch. His photo was in the system based on a drug-possession charge a year earlier.
The next day, Canady looked at a photo array that included Velazquez. She selected two other individuals.
After learning that the police were looking for him, Velazquez went to the 28th Precinct on February 2. He was placed in a lineup. Six witnesses viewed the lineup. Phillip Jones, Robert Jones, and Brown selected Velazquez. Canady and a witness named Joe Scott did not. Woodford, who viewed the lineup while wearing a ski mask, did not select Velazquez but would later tell an officer that he recognized Velazquez but was too afraid to say so.
Velazquez was arrested on February 2, and charged with first-degree murder, along with separate charges for robbery and burglary.
On February 13, Canady told an assistant district attorney that she realized that she recognized Velazquez in the lineup. At a pre-trial hearing, the state would argue that Canady “required two weeks of reflection” prior to her identification.
Daniels pled guilty to second-degree robbery on September 30, 1999, and was sentenced to 12 years in prison. At his allocution, Daniels said his role was to duct-tape the victims. Velazquez served as the gunman, Daniels said. Despite the plea and allocution, Daniels did not testify at Velazquez’s trial, which began in late February 2000 in New York County Supreme Court in Manhattan, presided over by Justice Jeffrey Atlas.
Brown identified Velazquez as the gunman. He testified that he was a reluctant witness. He said that detectives questioned him for hours and told him that if he did not cooperate, he was “going down.”
Brown testified that he had initially described the shooter as “light-skinned,” but on cross-examination acknowledged that his first statement to police said the shooter was a light-skinned “male Black.”
Brown also testified that the gunman held the gun in his right hand. Velazquez was left-handed.
In her testimony, Canady described the shooter as “Spanish.” She later said during cross-examination that she initially described the gunman as a Black man. In addition, Canady was unable to make a courtroom identification. Asked to point out the shooter, she selected juror number six.
Robert Jones identified Velazquez and testified that the shooter was light-skinned and “Puerto Rican,” which he also acknowledged was different from the description he had given police. Jones had worked with the police artist, and he testified that the sketch was complete, including the section on the sketch that described the suspect as a “Black male.”
By the time he testified, Phillip Jones was in prison on a drug-possession charge. Under a cooperation agreement, prosecutors agreed to write a letter to the parole board after trial that Jones had testified for the state.
Phillip Jones testified that he had “no doubt” that Velazquez was the gunman and that the gunman had “long braided hair.” At the time of his arrest, Velazquez had close-cropped hair. Jones also testified that he was certain that Ward’s gun never went off. His brother, Robert, testified it did, and there was physical evidence showing Ward’s gun had been discharged.
Woodford testified as the state’s final eyewitness and identified Velazquez. He said that on the day of the shooting, he had followed Brown into the numbers joint to buy heroin. Woodford had testified before the grand jury that he could not identify the gunman. At trial he confirmed that his initial description of the shooter was of a “light-skinned black male with two to two and a half inch braids.” Woodford testified that Velazquez looked “a lot” different at trial than he had on January 27, 1998.
Detective Joseph LiTrenta testified about the investigation, the interviews with witnesses, and the viewing of the mugshots. Asked if he had threatened Brown, LiTrenta said: “I had a conversation with him. How he took it, I don't know.”
LiTrenta also said that after selecting Velazquez from the mugshots, Brown had said he recognized Velazquez from a few years earlier, when he had seen Velazquez around 95th Street and Amsterdam Avenue. (This was not mentioned in the police reports of the initial interviews with Brown.)
Velazquez presented an alibi defense and testified that he was not involved in the robbery or murder. He said that from 11:44 a.m. to 12:58 p.m., he was in the Bronx at the home of his girlfriend, Iris Cepero, having an extended phone conversation with his mother, Maria Velazquez. Phone records confirmed a 74-minute call between their numbers.
Velazquez said he remembered the call because the next day was his late father’s birthday, and he and his mother were planning to visit his grave at the cemetery. He said the call took so long because he was trying to iron out a disagreement between his mother and Cepero.
Maria Velazquez and Cepero testified about the call. Cepero also testified that Velazquez was with her until around 3:30 p.m., when she left the apartment.
On cross-examination, Cepero was asked about a statement she allegedly made months later to LiTrenta and another detective, in which she said that she was asleep from 8 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. Cepero testified that based on the advice of her attorney she had not answered any of the detectives’ questions. The state then presented rebuttal testimony from the detectives, who said Cepero answered their questions.
The detective who took Robert Jones’s first statement testified for the defense that Jones never described the gunman as “Puerto Rican.”
Velazquez’s attorney also introduced into evidence a photograph taken two weeks before the shooting, which showed Velazquez with close-cropped hair that was significantly shorter than his hair in the mugshot. It would have been impossible, the attorney would argue, for Velazquez to have grown braids in such a short time.
On March 7, 2000, the jury acquitted Velazquez of first-degree murder but convicted him of second-degree murder, attempted murder, three counts of first-degree robbery, and one count of attempted robbery. Justice Atlas sentenced him to 25 years to life in prison.
Velazquez appealed his conviction, arguing that there had been insufficient evidence against him and that Justice Atlas had erred in allowing the state to present the alibi rebuttal evidence. The First Department of the New York County Supreme Court’s Appellate Division affirmed the conviction on December 16, 2004.
In 2006, Velazquez filed a pro se petition for a writ of habeas corpus in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. A judge denied the petition a year later.
In August 2004, while Velazquez’s first appeal in state court was still being heard, an investigator with his attorneys at the Center for Appellate Litigation interviewed Brown at a prison in Upstate New York. Brown said that he had been coerced by the police to falsely identify Velazquez and that what he did was wrong. The center then lost contact with Brown.
In March 2005, an investigator located Brown at the Rikers Island jail complex. Again, Brown repeated his account of the pressure applied by the police. He said he selected Velazquez’s picture after hours of looking at mugshots, and he just wanted to get out of there. Brown said he embellished his identification with the suggestion that he possibly knew Velazquez. An attorney from the center attempted to get Brown to sign an affidavit, but by then he had been released and could not be found.
Brown later gave a similar statement in 2010 to an investigator working with Velazquez’s new attorneys at Gottlieb & Gordon but still would not sign an affidavit.
In April 2010, Phillip Jones recanted his trial testimony. In an affidavit, he wrote: “I picked out this man because I thought the man looked like the shooter but I was not sure. I told the police this was the guy and I was sure, but this was not the truth. I felt pressured because the police were threatening to arrest me and my brother Robert for stealing money that Albert dropped on the floor after being shot. I was arrested sometime after Albert Ward was killed and two (2) detectives came to visit me upstate in Groveland Prison. The detectives told me they got the right guy and would help me get parole. I decided to testify at the trial because I felt pressured by the police. When I saw the deft. in court, I looked in his eyes and knew I had picked out the wrong guy, and the guy on trial I had never seen before.”
Woodford recanted in 2010. He told an investigator with Velazquez’s legal team that when he made his identification, he was high on heroin and cocaine and angry because the shooter had pointed a gun in his face and stolen his money.
Robert Jones told an investigator in May and June 2010 that when he first viewed the lineup, he didn’t see any braids on Velazquez’s hair. He said the police told him that Velazquez must have cut his hair.
Robert Jones said he was sure of his identification until the trial, when he saw Velazquez’s twin brother in the hallway. He said he thought to himself, “Maybe I have the wrong guy.” He said that if Velazquez’s brother had been in the lineup, he would have picked him.
While in prison, Velazquez met David Lemus, another inmate. Through Lemus, Velazquez was introduced to Daniel Slepian, a producer with Dateline NBC, who was investigating Lemus’s case. Lemus was exonerated in 2007. A Dateline episode on Velazquez’s case, entitled “Conviction,” aired in 2012.
Velazquez would tell the New York Times, “Dave passed a blessing to me in Dan, so I vowed to pass the torch forward as much as I could.” Slepian would later refer to Velazquez as a “one-man innocence project,” whose advice and support helped play a role in the exonerations of Johnny Hincapie, Eric Glisson, and Richard Rosario, who were released even as Velazquez remained in prison. The relationship between Slepian and Velazquez, which deepened as they investigated his case, formed the heart of an NBC News podcast, Letters from Sing Sing, released in 2023. Slepian’s book, The Sing Sing Files, published in 2024, explores the connections between Velazquez and these other men as they sought to overturn their convictions and gain their freedom.
On October 5, 2011, Velazquez’s attorneys submitted a request asking the Conviction Integrity Unit (CIU) of the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office to reinvestigate his case. After the attorneys filed the submission, they received a call from a potential witness who said that [Mustafa] had confessed his involvement in Ward’s murder. The CIU, under the direction of then District Attorney Cyrus Vance, and Velazquez’s attorneys had broad disagreements about how and where to interview this witness. On April 2, 2013, the CIU said it would not agree to vacate Velazquez’s conviction.
The CIU said there were significant questions about the reliability of the recantations of Richard Jones and Woodford. Brown’s recantation had inconsistencies, it noted, and he had not signed an affidavit. In addition, the CIU’s investigation found that Mustafa was not in New York at the time of the murder.
Velazquez then moved for a new trial under New York’s post-conviction relief statute. The filing contained many of the issues previously raised by Velazquez, but also included a statement from Daniels’s brother that Daniels and Velazquez did not know each other. In addition, the motion said Velazquez’s trial attorney had been ineffective for failing to properly investigate alternate suspects to the crime.
Justice Abraham Clott denied the motion, and the New York County Supreme Court’s Appellate Division affirmed the conviction on September 8, 2016, writing that the recantations were inconsistent and did not provide “compelling evidence” of innocence.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo granted Velazquez executive clemency in 2021, and he was released from prison on September 9, 2021. After his release, Velazquez continued to fight for his exoneration as well as advocate for other wrongfully convicted persons. In addition, he played himself in Sing Sing, a 2023 movie about men in prison finding purpose in a theatre production.
In 2014, the district attorney’s office had submitted several pieces of physical evidence to the city’s Office of Chief Medical Examiner (OCME). This included the duct tape used to bind the victims and the discarded betting slip. OCME determined there was sufficient DNA for testing on the slip and that it was a mixture of at least two contributors. Although the testing produced a genetic profile, the OCME did not compare the information against Velazquez’s DNA.
In January 2020, Velazquez’s attorneys received a court order that required OCME to release its analysis and data. That information was sent to Cybergenetics, which compared the information against a DNA sample provided by Velazquez. Cybergenetics said on July 2, 2020, that its analysis excluded Velazquez as a contributor to the genetic material.
In 2021, Alvin Bragg was elected as Manhattan’s new district attorney. He revamped and renamed Vance’s CIU as the Post-Conviction Justice Unit.
A year later, the unit opened a new investigation into the case, which included DNA testing on the discarded betting slip. On April 10, 2023, the medical examiner’s office said that its testing had confirmed the independent laboratory’s analysis, writing: “Jon-Adrian Velazquez is excluded as a contributor to all samples where comparisons could be made.”
On September 23, 2024, Velazquez’s attorneys again moved for a new trial based on the DNA evidence. In addition, the motion included a report by Dr. Jennifer Dysart, an associate professor of psychology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and an expert on eyewitness identification.
Dysart’s report said several factors decreased the reliability of the eyewitness identifications, including the stress of the robbery, the witnesses’ unfamiliarity with the perpetrator, and cross-race identification. In addition, she said the procedures used by the police department might have also contributed to a misidentification. The fillers in some of the lineups did not match witness descriptions, Dysart wrote, and the tactic of having witnesses look through hundreds of mugshots was prone to error. She wrote, “The research literature on mugshot searching suggests that witnesses often make multiple selections from mugshot searches” regardless of whether the actual perpetrator is present.
On September 24, 2024, the state, which had worked collaboratively with Velazquez’s attorneys, joined in his motion for relief, asking the court to vacate the conviction and dismiss the charges because a retrial would be unjust and “nearly impossible” to prove. “The People believe that a reasonable probability of a more favorable outcome exists in this case not only because of the new DNA analysis, but also because that analysis could have affected the jury's consideration of other trial evidence,” the response said.
On September 30, 2024, Justice Clott granted the motions to vacate the convictions and dismiss the charges.
Bragg said in a statement, “JJ Velazquez has lived in the shadow of his conviction for more than 25 years, and I hope that today brings with it a new chapter for him.”
Outside the courthouse, Velazquez said: “This isn’t a celebration. This is an indictment of the system.” He wore a baseball cap that said, “End of an error.”
– Ken Otterbourg
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