Father
of young man cleared in armed robbery wants police to apologize
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Julien
Rosaly’s father does not accept that Baltimore police did the best
investigation they could with the information they had. He wants them to
apologize for arresting his son and friend and charging him with robbing a
couple at gunpoint in South Baltimore.
But
police and prosecutors will mostly likely not say they’re sorry, despite
dropping all charges against the two men on Friday after reviewing a videotape
that shows Rosaly eating in a restaurant at the time of the attack.
A
police spokesman has defended the arrests as done with legal probable cause.
The spokesman for the Baltimore State’s Attorney’s Office called the arrests
“appropriate given the information police had at the time.”
Justice
System Lawyers Prosecution Guilford (Baltimore, Maryland) But Rosaly and his
friend, Nicholes Maultsby, and now Rosaly’s father, says police arrested them
too fast, before they searched the men’s rowhouse and found nothing — no gun,
no rings worth $22,300, no wallet, no cell phones, and before they checked
Rosaly’s alibi.
“I’m
a little upset about what when down,” the father, Anthony Rosaly, told me on
Monday when he called from Brooklyn, N.Y. “It’s hard for us to deal with it. The
ruined my son’s life and his friend’s. He called me from jail, ‘Daddy, you have
got to get me out of here. It’s wasn’t me. I told them where I was. They didn’t
check.’”
Said
the elder Rosaly: “If we didn’t have a videotape, my son would still be locked
up.”
Read
complete story of charges being dropped and of problems with witness
identifications.
Police
target street robberies in weekend initiative.
Victim
describes South Baltimore attack.
Police
responded quickly to the armed robbery call about 1 a.m. on Saturday, March 24,
at Covington and Clement streets in South Baltimore. A couple, both ex-Ravens
cheerleaders, had been held up at gunpoint, forced to the pavement and robbed
of jewelry, money and phones.
The
victims described their attackers and said they rode away on bicycles. A police
officer hearing the call go out over the radio said he had seen two young men
on bikes in the area earler on his shift. He quickly stopped three men on
Leadenhall Street, two neighborhoods away.
Officers
took the victims to the Leadenall and shined a spotlight on each one. From the
back seat of a police car, Lauren Spates, 27, identified Rosaly as the man
holding the gun. She later identified Maultsby from a photo lineup back at the
station.
In
an interview, Spates said she would never forget the face of the man who
ordered her to take off her rings, and that she carefully studied the faces of
both assailants, knowing it would be her identification that would put them
away.
Police
did not check on Rosaly’s alibi – that he was Maria D’s pizza restaurant at the
time of the robbery, until after both men had been charged and ordered held
without bail. And that was after Rosaly’s aunt got the tape and pressed
officials to watch it. The manager of the restaurant also vouched for Rrosaly,
a regular customer.
And
police charged the two men before searching their house on Leadenhall Street,
finding no evidence of the robbery. Police said repeatedly in the days after
that the courts can sort out conflicting claims of identification.
But
to the men who were charged, the investigations falls far short of complete.
The charges were based on a single victim’s identification, with no evidence to
support it and an unchecked alibi that later turned to be proved true. By that
time, the men’s mug shots had flashed across the nightly news and in the
newspapers.
And
a community in South Baltimore breathed easier that police had quickly solved a
vicious attack. Now, police are starting over again and two robbers are on the
loose.
The
previous state’s attorney, Patricia C. Jessamy, often clashed with police and
her office wrote a memo asking the cops to do better jobs investigating armed
street robberies. She was criticized for giving a man a plea deal in a Guilford
robbery in which a resident was attacked on the front steps of her home.
Jessamy
did not want to go to trial based on the woman’s identification of the suspect
from a photo array,and she worried that the police detective had inadvertently
tainted the array by including a photo of a man he knew from a previous crime.
The suspect served a year in jail and was then charged with attacking more
people in the Guilford neighborhood.
But
the recent case in South Baltimore shows what can happen with police act too
fast.
