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Detroit cop pressured key witness in gas station murder, acquitted man says in lawsuit

Detroit – A man who was released from prison in 2022 after murder charges against him were dropped has filed a lawsuit in federal court alleging that a Detroit police homicide investigator suppressed a witness's testimony, which he says led to his wrongful conviction.

Kelvin Nolen spent six years in prison after being convicted of first-degree murder in connection with the shooting death of Detroit gas station employee Mohamed Zokari on November 4, 2014. The victim had stepped out from behind the bulletproof glass of the Clark gas station on East Seven Mile to fill up a cooler and was shot 10 times in the back.

The shooting was not recorded by the surveillance cameras, but the sound of the gunshots and the killer's voice were recorded. A man wearing a black hoodie with his face covered could also be seen entering the station.

Nolen, who did odd jobs at the gas station, became a suspect during the lengthy investigation. In April 2015, five months after the murder, police interviewed the suspect's estranged sister, Kenyatta Jones-Hunt. She listened to the audio recordings and watched the video footage. According to police, Jones-Hunt said Nolen was the man in the hoodie and identified the voice on the video as her brother.

That claim is challenged in the lawsuit, filed last week in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan. The suit alleges that after interviewing Jones-Hunt, Detroit police homicide detective Steven Ford omitted valuable information from his report, including her reluctance to name her brother as the killer, and then lied to her to convince her that Nolen was guilty.

Detroit Corporation General Counsel Conrad Mallett Jr. declined to comment Friday, saying the legal department does not discuss ongoing litigation. Nolen's attorney, Trevor Garrison, did not return a call seeking comment.

“After viewing the video, Jones-Hunt told Ford that the perpetrator was not her brother,” the lawsuit states. “In fact, she believed the person in the video may have been an acquaintance … who matched the description of the perpetrator.” Ford omitted from his police reports that Jones-Hunt had identified someone other than her brother as a possible perpetrator.

“Ford continued to provide Jones-Hunt with false information to convince her that Nolen had shot Zokari,” the lawsuit states. “For example, Ford told Jones-Hunt that Nolen's phone records placed him 'at the gas station' at the time of the murder. In fact, the phone records placed him elsewhere.”

Jones-Hunt spent several hours reviewing the footage with Ford and speculating about whether Nolen might be the shooter, the lawsuit says.

“Ford then drafted a statement signed by Jones-Hunt stating that the perpetrator was her brother,” the lawsuit states. “Based on this 'identification' and the false information provided by Ford, Nolen was charged with first-degree murder.”

What happened in the process?

Nolen went on trial for first-degree murder in February 2016. During her testimony in Wayne County District Court, Jones-Hunt said she was not sure her brother was the killer. She said she could not identify Nolen as the shooter based on individual elements, although after reviewing audio and video footage, she came to the overall conclusion that her brother was guilty.

“I wouldn't say I could identify it – it was just, you know, my belief,” Jones-Hunt testified.

Nolen denied shooting Zokari in his testimony, insisting he spent the night with his girlfriend at her Warren home and left just hours before the murder to sell marijuana to a friend.

On February 22, 2016, a jury convicted Nolen of first-degree murder, theft, illegal possession of a weapon, and use of a firearm in the commission of a crime. He was sentenced to life in prison.

Six months after Nolen's conviction, Jones-Hunt recanted her brother's identity and signed an affidavit in which she told Detroit police officers that she had shown them the gas station surveillance footage and said she was unsure who the killer was because the image and audio were unclear.

“I am of the opinion that the person in the video and pictures shown to me is unrecognizable and unknown to me and therefore cannot be my brother Kelvin Nolen,” the affidavit states.

How he was released from prison

Nolen appealed, but the Michigan Court of Appeals upheld the conviction in November 2017, ruling that the voice recognition was valid despite Jones-Hunt's revocation.

In 2022, a woman named Dekenera Leggett came forward and said she knew Nolen well because she had visited the gas station on her way to work. The man wearing the hoodie in the surveillance video, Leggett said, was not Nolen.

The Wayne County District Attorney's Conviction Integrity Unit re-examined the case, and on December 19, 2022, the CIU and the University of Michigan Innocence Clinic filed a motion to grant Nolen a new trial.

The motion states that the prosecution “agrees with Mr. Nolen that, given the admitted uncertainty surrounding the original identification that was the primary evidence of guilt, the opinions of respected experts, and the testimony of a newly discovered witness, there are strong reasons to believe that the outcome may have been different had this information been known at the time of the original trial.”

The case was dismissed and Nolen was released from prison on December 30, 2022. The following year, he received $338,502 from the state for the time he served.

The lawsuit, filed Tuesday, seeks more than $75,000 in damages for allegedly violating Nolen's civil rights.

Nolen, the lawsuit states, has suffered “severe emotional distress from the time of his arrest to the present day because he is charged with murder, faces a life sentence without the possibility of parole, and was wrongfully convicted of crimes the defendant knew he did not commit.”

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