Men convicted as boys of killing NBA star’s grandfather say they confessed after threats
Jermal Tolliver doesn’t remember everything that happened on the day NBA star Chris Paul’s grandfather, Nathaniel Jones, was robbed and murdered in 2002, but he remembers most of it.
“We were supposed to go to the mall, but it started raining,” Tolliver told members of the N.C. Innocence Inquiry Commission on Friday.
So instead, he hung out at Christopher Bryant’s house with friends, smoking marijuana, before they got into Jessicah Black’s car to take their friend Jed home before going bowling.
Jed lived on Moravia Street, a few houses down from Jones, and when they entered the neighborhood, they saw the flashing lights of police cars. Tolliver said they parked and walked over to see what was going on, but never got closer than across the street from Jones’ house.
He said he saw a body, covered on the ground in Jones’ yard.
The 61-year-old had been beaten, his hands taped together and his mouth taped shut.
It was Tolliver’s first time seeing a dead body; at 15, he said, he hadn’t gone to funerals or things like that.
Days later, Tolliver’s mother called the police to say her son and his friends hung out in that neighborhood and might have seen or heard something. Police picked him up around 3:30 p.m., Tolliver said, and told him “they’d bring me back in about an hour or so.” His police interview ended around midnight.
He was later convicted with four other teenagers of Jones’ murder.
He, Rayshawn Banner, Christopher Bryant, and Nathaniel Cauthen, three of the others convicted, testified before commissioners Friday, walking into the small hearing room within a few feet of Jones’ family. All four said they weren’t nearby when Jones was killed and don’t know who committed the crime.
Banner, then 14, and Cauthen, his 15-year-old brother, were convicted of first-degree murder and are serving life sentences in prison.
Tolliver, Bryant, and Dorrell Brayboy — all 15 at the time — were convicted of second-degree murder. They were released after serving prison time.
Brayboy was fatally stabbed outside a Winston-Salem Food Lion supermarket last year.
At least five of eight of the commission members must find evidence of innocence for the cases to be sent to a panel of three Superior Court judges. The judges would decide whether or not to exonerate any of the men.
‘Figured I had to say something’
In written statements and interviews presented Wednesday, Winston Salem police detectives Stan Nieves and Sean Flynn said they told Bryant and Tolliver about the death penalty, despite the fact that juveniles cannot receive it.
Nieves said he described lethal injection and life in prison to Bryant, but “not as a threat,” The News & Observer previously reported.
Bryant told commissioners Friday that Nieves said, “Hold out your arm” and then pointed at his lower forearm, saying “that’s the vein.”
He said it scared him and he felt like he had to talk.
“I regret every day that I said what I said,” Bryant said.
Tolliver said police detectives “wouldn’t accept” it when he told them he didn’t commit the crime.
He said detectives asked about Jones’ missing wallet, but he didn’t know anything about it. After a line of questioning, he told police he and his friends had the wallet, went to the mall in a city bus and threw the wallet out the bus window. But later, he told them it was a lie.
“I’m telling them, but they’re not listening. .... I figured I had to say something,” he said. He was in eighth grade at the time, and he said officers never told him he could leave, so eventually he “stopped fighting” and confessed.
A commissioner asked him Friday where he told them he threw the wallet out of the bus, but he said he couldn’t remember.
“It was a bunch of lies,” he said. “I can’t remember exactly what I said.”
Banner and Cauthen also told commissioners they were threatened with the death penalty in their original police interviews. Banner said after a detective played a recording of Cauthen saying Banner had hit Jones first, he immediately started lying that he was there and a part of the crime too.
Cauthen said he felt he was in danger during interrogation, crying as an officer threatened him with lethal injection and even to shoot him if he didn’t talk. “Any kid would do that,” he told the commissioners, adding that he was just a kid who couldn’t read or write. “Any kid would lie to get out of something.”
He said he asked the police if he could go home, but was told “you can’t go home right now.”
Central Park Five comparison
On Tuesday, Black also said she lied in her 2002 testimony, when she said the boys had talked about robbing someone and that she had driven them to a park near Jones’ home where they waited for him to arrive.
On Thursday, Hayley Cleary, a psychologist and expert in police interrogations, compared the teens’ confessions to those in the Central Park Five case in New York City, in which suspects were convicted after false confessions.
“In both of these cases, investigators questioned the youths separately, sometimes for extended periods of time,” Cleary said. “Each suspect was presented with the notion that some other suspect is implicating them — so you might as well confess.”
The inconsistencies between the statements and the physical evidence — there was no DNA or fingerprint evidence connecting any of the five boys to the crime scene — are “consistent with false confessions,” she said.
Tolliver told commissioners “I just thought if I did what they said, I was going to return to my mom.”
He cuts hair part time now after getting out of prison in 2017, and when a commissioner asked what he would do if he were cleared as innocent, he said he was focused on getting a full-time job.
“Do you know how many times I’ve been turned down for jobs just because of this?” Tolliver replied. “I quit looking.”
This story was originally published March 13, 2020 at 1:31 PM with the headline "Men convicted as boys of killing NBA star’s grandfather say they confessed after threats."
