Phone Sleuthing Clears Convicted Man

After spending half of his life behind bars for allegedly shooting dead a Dixwell Deli customer, Vernon Horn walked out of court a free man — rescued by newly discovered evidence about a cell phone call he never could have made.

Horn won his freedom and walked out of the Church Street courthouse on Wednesday, after Superior Court Judge Patrick Clifford ordered him freed.

It would have never happened if not for some sleuthing by a team from the federal public defenders office, who scoured cell tower data, as well as phone records recovered from the home of a retired New Haven police detective who never entered them into evidence.

“What took place against me by this criminal justice system is a tragedy, a crime against humanity, and an assault against justice and the United States Constitution. I hope this never happens to anyone else,” Horn, now 37, was quoted as saying in a release. ​“Nineteen years of my life were stolen from me, my daughter went without her father. I hope this does not go in vain, but rather the folks who are a part of this system will learn from this mistake to better the system.”

Horn was just 17 years old when he was wrongly accused of participating in a botched robbery of the Dixwell Deli in 1999, in which a customer was murdered and the cashier shot. After a jury found him guilty at trial, along with two co-defendants, Horn was sentenced to 70 years in prison.

He was released on an appeal in 2014. He married, had a daughter. Then the state Supreme Court voted unanimously to return him to prison.

With no more state remedies, Horn filed a federal habeus petition. The petition came before U.S. District Court Judge Jeffrey Meyer, who sits in New Haven. Meyer assigned the case to the Connecticut Federal Defender Office — meaning unlike many other convicts with similar petitions, Horn would get serious representation.

Indeed, the defender’s office team discovered that previous lawyers had failed to notice compelling cellphone evidence that proved Horn should never have been convicted. And it went further, obtaining the files of retired Assistant Chief Petisia Adger, who had been a detective assigned to the case.

With new evidence, they deconstructed the theory that originally put Horn behind bars. Their arguments convinced the state’s attorney’s office to conduct a conviction integrity review, after which New Haven State’s Attorney Pat Griffin filed the motion to vacate the robbery and murder convictions. Horn’s lawyer then moved to dismiss the charges, and Griffin did not object.

Not On The Call

In the reinvestigation, Horn’s new lawyers found proof that prosecutors had misread evidence at trial and that its two cooperating witnesses had lied on the stand. An office investigator also obtained nearly 140 pages of phone records from Adger’s files that were never logged into police evidence or shared with defense lawyers. The file undercuts the state’s main piece of evidence, further clearing Horn’s name.

Back in 2000, Steve Brown, the admitted killer whose fingerprints were found on a cigar box at the deli, cooperated with the state. Facing life in prison, he received a sentence of just 10 years after offering evidence against Horn.

Brown, a 16-year-old drug dealer from Bridgeport, said that one of the other masked robbers was Horn.

Horn lived two blocks away and frequented the store. He’d been arrested by police three weeks earlier and was seen outside the deli around 4 a.m., right after the robbery. Cops suspected an inside job by those familiar with the store, but the cashier who took a bullet said he would have recognized Horn’s voice, even through a mask.

Brown told law enforcement what they wanted to hear, saying he had met Horn at the White Eagle Club in Bridgeport — a predominantly Polish club, the defense’s investigators said. (Brown and Horn are both black.) Brown also referred to Horn and another defendant by nicknames that nobody else used, and he sometimes mixed them at trial.

Aside from Brown’s slippery testimony, prosecutors had only one piece of physical evidence tying Horn to the murder: a cell phone.

At trial, they argued that Horn nabbed an Omnipoint cell phone from the crime scene, stolen from a store clerk who’d been dozing in the back office. They said Horn later used it to make two calls from New Haven the day after the crimes were committed.

Horn’s defense attorney conceded the point, telling the jury in closing arguments that it was a ​“fact” his client had used the phone.

Nearly two decades later, however, the lawyers turned up a one-page sheet that had been introduced at trial showing that all the calls originated from cell towers in Bridgeport, not New Haven. In response to a subpoena, T‑Mobile provided more specific information about the sector where the calls had originated. An FBI agent later confirmed their finding that all the calls were from Bridgeport.

An investigator hired by the defense also obtained previously undisclosed records that conflicted with the state’s narrative.

Late last year, the federal defenders noticed New Haven detectives had applied for two search warrants for landline phone records in February 1999, but ​“for reasons that are not clear,” the defense said, the search warrants weren’t put on the court’s docket until September 2014, after Horn had been released for the first time. The federal defenders asked the police for the files, but the records unit said they couldn’t find anything. An investigator then went to Adger’s home and located the file.

From 137 pages of landline, cellular and pay-phone records, which had been marked up by police with handwritten notes in the margins, yellow highlighting and color-coded Post-It Notes, the investigator pieced together evidence that the two calls likely came from Brown and his buddies.

In the two days after the murder, cops identified five phone calls from the stolen phone, which they’d hoped to trace back to the killers.

Six weeks into the investigation, Brown’s good friend and fellow drug dealer, Willie Sadler, admitted to cops that he’d been on the other end of the first call. Just 40 minutes after the robbery, Sadler said, Brown rang him from the stolen phone, right when cops were questioning Horn.

That prompted Brown, at trial, to fess up to making the first three calls. But he repeatedly denied making the last two, saying he could not recall whether he ​“gave the phone back to [Horn] or what happened.”

The Person You Are Trying To Reach

Instead, prosecutors pinned the phone on Horn, saying there had been a handoff in Bridgeport before the fourth call.

The fourth call had gone to Crystal Sykes, a nursing aide, at her West Haven landline. At trial, prosecutors argued that Horn lent the phone to Marcus Pearson, a drug-dealing friend, to call up Sykes, one of his buyers.

Pearson and Sykes both said initially that they didn’t remember the four-minute call, but later agreed they’d both spoken to each other. Two other witnesses, Pearson’s mom and Horn’s cousin, said they didn’t see the stolen cell phone at the house.

In 2006, in a statement to an investigator, Pearson recanted his testimony, saying he was ​“scared of going to jail and losing [his] children.” He said, in 2011, that a cop had threatened to pin the murder on him. ​“Well, if [Horn] didn’t let you use the cell phone, then you got it from the crime scene,” Pearson recalled the detective saying.

New evidence suggests that Brown actually let Sadler make the call to Sykes’s house from Bridgeport. Sadler often called the West Haven landline, because Sykes was dating his best friend. At the time, Nextel cell phones didn’t get good reception in West Haven, so Sadler’s friend buzzed him on a pager two minutes before the call from the stolen phone, likely signaling to try the landline.

During the two-week investigation, police found evidence that, from his own mobile phone, Sadler had called the pager number seven times and the West Haven landline ten times. Horn and Pearson’s call logs, on the other hand, showed they never called the Bridgeport pager or the West Haven landline from their own phones. But the detectives never turned that information over to defense attorneys.

The fifth call was also to Sadler. Only in 2011 did Brown finally admit that he’d lied, saying he ​“obviously” made that call, not Horn.

The state’s attorney emphasized Pearson’s call in closing statements to the jury. ​“A day after [the robbery] — not a month later, not a week later, not two days later — a day after … Mr. Horn has that stolen cell phone,” the prosecutor said.

Six years later, one of the jurors still remembered that the phone record had been enough to put Horn away. ​“The cell phone was pretty convincing,” the juror told an investigator.

“I Hope The Truth Come Out”

For the last two decades, Horn maintained his innocence. ​“I never touched that phone; I never had made a call on that phone,” Horn told the judge at his sentencing in 2000. ​“I’m being falsely accused. I hope the truth come out.”

Horn, who’d been orphaned after his mother died from AIDS, was represented by a state public defender that all sides now agree wasn’t up to the job. The defense attorney met with Horn only once for ​“not too long.” He didn’t interview any of the witnesses nor examine the investigative materials. During the trial, he asked the judge for ​“an opportunity to take a look” at the state’s exhibits as they were being premarked, because he hadn’t seen them yet.

In 2014, a Superior Court judge later agreed that the defense’s investigation was ​“very incomplete, almost nonexistent.” After hearing eight days of witness testimony, Judge Robert E. Young set aside Horn’s convictions and let him go. Horn married and had a baby daughter.

But the evidence of an incompetent defense didn’t sway the Connecticut Supreme Court that Horn’s constitutional right to a fair trial had been violated. In 2016, after the state appealed his release, the justices reinstated his convictions and sent Horn back to prison to resume his 70-year sentence.

“It is a grave injustice that Vernon Horn was incarcerated for 17 years for crimes he did not commit,” the Connecticut Federal Defender Office said in a statement. ​“We are delighted by the State’s Attorney’s willingness to listen and act quickly when presented with compelling evidence of Mr. Horn’s innocence. It has been our privilege to work with Mr. Horn and be inspired by his relentless pursuit to clear his name.”

Terence Ward, David Keenan, Kelly Barrett and Jennifer Mellon of the Federal Defender Office handled the case with the help of Quinnipiac Law Professor Sarah Russell and Yale law students Alison Gifford, Amit Jain and Christopher Desir

Yale Law students who worked on Mr. Horn’s case have created this fundraising page to help support Mr. Horn as he transitions home and attempts to rebuild his life.