Jaythan Kendrick

The Crime

On Nov. 30, 1994, at about 3:30 p.m., 70-year-old Josephine Sanchez was attacked and robbed as she walked through the grounds of the Ravenswood Houses in the Long Island City neighborhood of Queens, New York. She was stabbed twice and died.

The Investigation

Ten-year-old Brandon Rogers told police he heard shouting and looked out of a third-floor window. He said a Black man punched Ms. Sanchez, then struggled with her for her black purse, and fled with it. Mr. Rogers said the man was in his 30s and wearing a white jacket, dark blue sweatpants, white sneakers, no socks, and an army camouflage hat. 

He said the attacker fled toward the middle of the housing development where there was a park that had access to exits in all directions. Police found a single blade of a pair of scissors about 150 feet from the attack.

During a canvass of the area, police interviewed 18-year-old Mario Aguilo, a resident of the development. He said he saw Ms. Sanchez lying on the ground, but did not see the attack or the person who attacked her. 

Maria Valle Rivera was visiting family members in the apartment directly below Brandon Rogers. Ms. Rivera said she saw the attack but could not identify the attacker..

More than 6 hours later, around 10 p.m., a New York City police detective saw 36-year-old Jaythan Kendrick standing on a corner of the housing development. He was wearing an off-white jacket, black pants, brown shoes, and a black cap. When the detective waved Mr. Kendrick over, he noticed a red spot on the shoulder of the jacket, which he suspected could be blood. Mr. Kendrick said it was lipstick and subsequent testing would show it was not blood. He agreed to go to the police station for questioning.

He told the police that he had spent the day watching television, hanging out near the park, and talking to an acquaintance before returning home. He said that he came out of his building after the attack and asked an officer what happened. He said the officer told him that a woman had been stabbed to death with scissors.

Mr. Kendrick gave the lead detective, Thomas Deutsch, permission to search his apartment that shared with a female roommate. Mr. Kendrick handed over two pairs of white sneakers, as well as a camouflage army-style hat. Police found a blue purse, but Mr. Kendrick declined to turn it over because it belonged to his estranged wife. (Mr. Kendrick’s wife subsequently confirmed that the purse was hers.)

After the search, Mr. Kendrick returned to the police station. During questioning, police said he made two statements that indicated he was involved in the crime. As he insisted he was innocent, Mr. Kendrick said, “If I was going to kill somebody, I wouldn’t stab them with a scissor.” When Detective Deutsch expressed suspicion that Mr. Kendrick knew what the murder weapon was, Mr. Kendrick explained that he heard it from a police officer at the scene and that Detective Deutsch had mentioned it during the interrogation.

Detective Deutsch denied mentioning that detail. The interrogation was not recorded, so there was no way to determine the truth.

Around 2 a.m., Detective Deutsch asked Mr. Kendrick to explain why his fingerprints were found on items recovered from the scene. Detective Deutsch said that Mr. Kendrick responded by saying that certain items were missing from his apartment, including kitchen knives, a wallet, a hat, and a pair of scissors.

Detective Deutsch said that Mr. Kendrick, a military veteran and former U.S. postal worker who was on disability, said he supported himself with pensions. He said Mr. Kendrick also said he had a $70 to $80-a-day cocaine habit. 

Police held Mr. Kendrick on an outstanding warrant for seventh-degree drug possession. Police brought Brandon Rogers to the station to view a lineup. On the way over, an officer told the youth that the attacker would be in the lineup.

At the lineup, Mr. Kendrick was in position number three. Mr. Rogers had said the attacker was about the same height as his father, who was six feet two inches tall. Mr. Kendrick was five feet seven inches tall. After viewing the lineup, Mr. Rogers asked for each man to walk toward the one-way window. He then indicated that the man in position number six “looks like the guy who stabbed the lady.”

Mr. Rogers would later testify at Kendrick’s trial that he asked Detective Deutsch whether he had identified the correct person and Detective Deutsch said he did not. In response, Rogers said, “It was number three, wasn’t it?” 

Detective Deutsch testified that he only told Mr. Rogers that it did not matter who he chose as long as he picked the person he thought committed the crime. At that, the detective said that Rogers volunteered, “It’s number three.”

On Dec. 4, Mr. Aguilo came to the police station for a second interview. At the time, Mr. Aguilo was 18 years old and on probation for robbery. Initially, police questioned him and then an assistant district attorney arrived to record an interview. During this interview, Mr. Aguilo said that he was leaving his girlfriend’s apartment when he saw a Black man in his 30s, wearing a green camouflage hat, a dirty white waist-length jacket, brown pants, no socks, and black or brown shoes. He said the man, who he knew as “Jay,” was carrying a black or brown purse under his arm.

That same day, Detective Deutsch obtained another search warrant for Mr. Kendrick’s apartment, during which police recovered three purses, one of them black.

On Dec. 6, 1994, Mr. Kendrick was charged with second-degree murder, first-degree robbery, and criminal possession of a weapon.

The Trial

In September 1995, Mr. Kendrick went to trial in Queens County Supreme Court. Mr. Rogers identified Kendrick as the attacker. On the morning before Mr. Rogers testified, detectives went to his apartment building and held Mr. Kendrick’s jacket up at the approximate spot of the attack. Mr. Rogers testified that he looked out his window and that it looked like the jacket worn by the attacker. Mr. Rogers also admitted that he initially identified someone else before he identified Mr. Kendrick. 

Mr. Rogers testified that the black purse recovered from Mr. Kendrick’s apartment looked like the one taken from Ms. Sanchez. He said that the prosecutor had shown him the purse before he testified. Rogers also said the camouflage hat taken from Mr. Kendrick’s apartment looked like the one worn by the attacker.

Mr. Aguilo testified that he was leaving his girlfriend’s apartment in the Ravenswood complex at about 3:30 p.m. when he saw Mr. Kendrick run past holding a purse. He said that Mr. Kendrick was wearing a white jacket and a camouflage hat. But he also said that Mr. Kendrick was wearing brown pants — not dark-blue sweatpants — and brown or black shoes, not white sneakers. Mr. Aguilo claimed he saw Mr. Kendrick run in the opposite direction of where Mr. Rogers said the attacker ran and where the scissor blade was found.

Mr. Aguilo said that as he continued walking, he came across Ms. Sanchez. He said she was “bleeding, with blood around her head.” He said he asked her if she was all right and when she did not respond, he went home.

Mr. Aguilo admitted he was on probation for an attempted robbery and that two weeks before the trial, he had been charged with committing a different robbery with a man named Frank Longo. The prosecution said that no promises had been made other than if Mr. Aguilo were convicted of the robbery, the prosecution would make known his testimony against Mr. Kendrick and would explore the possibility of Mr. Aguilo entering an in-patient long-term drug treatment facility as a condition of any sentence.

Detective Deutsch testified about the second search of Mr. Kendrick’s apartment. Detective Deutsch said that the black purse had been found “between the TV and the wall” in Mr. Kendrick’s bedroom, although the voucher for the inventory for the search said the purse was found on top of the television.

A serologist testified that blood found on the scissor blade at the crime scene was the same blood type as Ms. Sanchez’s blood and that this blood type was found in 12.138% of humans.

The trial then recessed for four days. When it resumed, the prosecution called Jaime Diaz to testify. He was a previously undisclosed witness—there weren’t any police reports of any interviews with him, he had not testified before the grand jury, and he was not on the prosecution’s pretrial witness list. Mr. Diaz said he was on parole for an attempted drug sale and had been released from prison in April 1994. He said that he had been in Mr. Kendrick’s apartment four to six weeks prior to the murder and that although it was dark, he saw a pair of scissors on top of a dining room table. 

The prosecutor showed Mr. Diaz the scissor blade found at the scene, acknowledging that he had already shown it to Diaz, and asked if it looked like the one he saw at Mr. Kendrick’s apartment. Mr Diaz said, “It looks like the scissor.”

During cross-examination, when asked if what he saw in Mr. Kendrick’s apartment was a single scissor blade, Mr. Diaz said, “It’s hard to see. You don’t want me to lie, do you?”

Mr. Kendrick testified and denied committing the crime. He said that he was unable to run — as witnesses said the attacker did — because of a combination of muscular myopathy, asthma, a pinched nerve in his neck, and a disk and nerve injury to his back. 

The jury deliberated for two days and sent out 10 notes, at one point indicating they were unable to reach a verdict. The judge then instructed them to keep deliberating. On Sept. 29, 1995, the jury convicted Mr. Kendrick of second-degree murder and first-degree robbery. He was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison.

His convictions were upheld on appeal. In 2003, a federal petition for a writ of habeas corpus was denied, although U.S. District Judge Jack Weinstein said that if he had been sitting “in direct appellate review” of the convictions, he would have seriously considered granting a new trial because of an unduly suggestive lineup.” The lineup, he said, was “troubling,” and the identification was “fraught with problems.”

The Exoneration

Over the years, Mr. Kendrick wrote dozens of letters to innocence organizations and lawyers seeking help on his case. He maintained his innocence and said that the detectives repeatedly used racial slurs during the interrogation.

In 2016, attorney Thomas Hoffman agreed to take the case along with attorney Jonathan Hiles. In 2017, during their reinvestigation, Mr. Rogers recanted his identification of Mr. Kendrick, saying he never could identify the attacker’s face. He said he saw “mostly colors, such as the perpetrator’s black complexion, white sneakers and white jacket.” He said that he did not recognize anyone in the lineup, but because he had been told the killer was in the lineup, he wanted to be helpful. He said he made his first pick based on skin tone and when he was told he was wrong, he guessed again. At trial, Mr. Rogers said he pointed to the only Black man in the courtroom.

Evidence showed that in addition to being arrested with Frank Longo on robbery charges three weeks before he testified against Mr. Kendrick, Mr. Aguilo and Mr. Longo were also suspects in an additional robbery that took place that same night.

In that case, the victim had been shot in the chest and survived. And a week later — two weeks before Mr. Kendrick’s trial — the victim had identified Mr. Aguilo and Mr. Longo as his attackers. The prosecution had not disclosed any information about the second case to Mr. Kendrick’s defense lawyer.

Mr. Hoffman filed a motion for DNA testing of evidence in the case, at which time Susan Friedman, an attorney with the Innocence Project began consulting on the case. The motion was granted. The testing of scrapings of Ms. Sanchez’s fingernails identified two male DNA profiles and Mr. Kendrick was excluded. The DNA profiles were not suitable for uploading to the FBI DNA database of convicted defendants and unsolved crimes.

Testing of the black purse excluded Ms. Sanchez as the source of DNA on the strap and the interior of the purse. This suggested, according to the report of the DNA testing, that the purse did not belong to Ms. Sanchez.

In October 2017, the Innocence Project and the law firm of Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr LLP joined Mr. Kendrick’s legal team. To support Mr. Rogers’s recantation, they asked a crime-scene reconstruction expert to go to the apartment where Mr. Rogers lived at the time of the crime and take photographs of what he would have witnessed from a distance of more than 100 feet away. The resulting photographs showed it was difficult, if not impossible, to identify the face of an assailant, especially if the assailant was wearing a hat and the attack lasted less than two minutes.

In January 2020, Queens County District Attorney Melinda Katz established a Conviction Integrity Unit (CIU). Mr. Kendrick’s legal team asked his case be re-investigated based on the new evidence. This new evidence also included statements from four witnesses. Donna Williams, who had performed CPR on Ms. Sanchez, said that there was no blood visible when she approached Ms. Sanchez. Only after performing CPR did blood become visible, she said. This contradicted Mr. Aguilo’s testimony that he saw blood around Ms. Sanchez’s head.

Maria Valle Rivera, who was in the apartment below Mr. Rogers, said she heard shouting and looked out to see a man wearing a light-colored jacket fighting with a woman. She could not tell what race the man was because of the distance. She said the man fled in the same direction that Mr. Rogers had described, contradicting Mr. Aguilo’s testimony.

During the CIU re-investigation, two additional witnesses were interviewed. Jose Torres, another resident of the development, said he also responded to the scene and heard a boy — likely Mr. Rogers — shouting from a window. Mr. Torres said the only person who approached Ms. Sanchez was Ms. Williams. This account further contradicted Mr. Aguilo’s testimony.

Jennifer Park, who was Mr. Aguilo’s girlfriend at the time of the crime, told the CIU that she was in class at Middle College High School that day, contradicting Mr. Aguilo’s testimony that they spent the day together. The CIU confirmed her account through school records.

In November 2020, Mr. Kendrick’s legal team and the Queens County District Attorney filed a joint motion seeking to vacate his convictions.

The motion noted that the testing of the purse contradicted Detective Deutsch’s testimony about the purse being wedged behind the TV. The false testimony, the motion said, was “highly prejudicial” and suggested a consciousness of guilt — that Mr. Kendrick purposefully had hidden it.

On Nov. 19, 2020, Justice Joseph Zayas granted the joint motion and vacated the convictions. The prosecution then dismissed the case. Mr. Kendrick was released, more than 25 years after his conviction in 1995. 

Mr. Kendrick died in January 2022. In January 2023, his family filed a federal lawsuit seeking $100 million in damages from the city of New York.