Lost Years Flow Into Courtroom 5A

On one side of the courtroom sat two parents who never got to see their daughter grow up.

On the other side sat a son who hardly got to know his father, but who now hopes he’ll get the chance.

They relived the pain of lost years, and described the personal stakes, as they watched lawyers revisit the facts about the murder of a baby that shocked the city 28 years ago.

They were among the spectators seated in Courtroom 5A of the Church Street courthouse Tuesday on Day 2 of a civil trial. The trial revolved around Adam Carmon, the man convicted for murdering 7‑month-old Danielle Taft and paralyzing Taft’s grandmother, Charlene Troutman, in a 1994 shooting. Carmon, who has maintained for 28 years that he has been wrongfully imprisoned, is making his fourth ​“habeas” petition for a new trial; read more about the first day of proceedings and the case background here.

Tuesday’s testimony focused on details from the site of the shooting, Troutman’s apartment at 810 Orchard St., as well as another suspect whom Carmon’s legal team has suggested committed the murder.

Family members of both Carmon and Danielle Taft watched the proceedings from the courtroom’s back pews.

Adam Carmon’s three relatives who attended court on Tuesday initially settled in pews on the right side of the courtroom, where they had sat the day before. Shortly before 11 a.m., Danielle’s mother, Shirley Troutman, walked through the courtroom doors with a couple of other family members. ​“I’m the baby’s mother,” she said as she entered. The group also sat down on the right, and a court marshal soon asked Carmon’s relatives to relocate across the room.

At breaks, they discussed why they had come, and how the murder and subsequent case has affected their lives.

Discovering A Dad

Najee Carmon-Reynolds, Carmon’s 27-year-old son, appeared along with two of Carmon’s cousins to provide ​“emotional support” and ​“encouragement” for his dad.

“I just want the truth to finally come out,” Carmon-Reynolds said about his father. ​“He’s been fighting for a long time — he just had multiple terrible lawyers… I just want him to come home.” Now, Carmon-Reynolds is hopeful that Carmon’s legal representation is the ​“dream team.” 

Carmon-Reynolds wasn’t born yet when his father was charged with Danielle’s murder. Growing up in his grandmother’s care, he rarely visited his father behind bars, he said. It was only when he entered high school that he started to form a relationship with his dad in bits and pieces, through phone calls and visitations. During those visits, Adam would lecture Najee on staying away from people who could get him into trouble, on staying in school and getting his degree. ​“Don’t sell yourself short,” Carmon said once.

Carmon-Reynolds sees his father as someone who grew up with few economic options, facing a system that turned against him as a Black man.

“Especially being a Black man in the ​’90s in this environment, I can only imagine what he was up against,” Carmon-Reynolds said about his father. ​“It’s not like the legal system doesn’t incarcerate innocent Black men every day.”

Carmon-Reynolds grew up blocks from the Dixwell apartment building at 810 Orchard St. where the murder occurred. He said he grew up with few examples of how to be successful without resorting to crime, until he started playing basketball. The sport ​“saved my life” and taught him discipline as a kid, he said. Today Carmon-Reynolds is a college graduate who mentors kids as a basketball coach at Celentano Magnet School. He wants to break the cycle — to ​“show kids another way to express yourself. You don’t have to sell drugs to be a hustler or an entrepreneur,” he said.

When Carmon-Reynolds thinks about his own 27 years of life, he thinks about the opportunities that his father has missed out on because of his incarceration. ​“He can’t really do the things I can do,” he said. ​“That makes me go hard every day, I have to do this, I have to do this, because I know he don’t have the opportunity right now to do it.

"Reliving A Nightmare"

Over the course of the day, ten of Danielle’s relatives arrived in court, including the baby’s father, Danny Taft, and mother, Shirley Troutman.

They had found out about Carmon’s habeas petition from an Independent article that morning, and rallied to be present. They were outraged that no one had informed them of the case.

“They didn’t even reach out to me,” Troutman said. ​“What about me? What about my daughter?”

Troutman said she remains convinced that Carmon is her daughter’s killer. She said his facial expressions during his first trial are part of what convinced her he was guilty. ​“You ain’t never gonna convince me he didn’t do it,” she said.

She came on Tuesday — and plans to return every day the trial proceeds — because ​“I don’t want him out,” she said.

“My mother’s not walking the streets. Danielle is not walking the streets,” she said. ​“Why should he get to?”

Her family is no stranger to senseless grief. They have lost a few loved ones who died young in recent years, including a cousin, Divonne Coward, who was shot in New Haven. 

“This opened old wounds,” said Taft, Danielle’s father, referring to the court proceedings. ​“It’s like reliving a nightmare.”

Danielle was Shirley Troutman’s first child. Shirley now has four living kids. Her oldest son, named Daniel after Danielle, appeared in the spectator section on Tuesday as well. Another kid, Tempie, is about to graduate from Wilbur Cross High School. When Tempie dresses up for prom and walks the stage to accept her diploma, Troutman said, she’ll think of Danielle. She thinks of Danielle whenever her living children make her proud, whenever they reach life milestones that Danielle won’t experience.

In addition to Danielle, Troutman also spoke about her now-deceased mother, Charlene, whom the shooting paralyzed. ​“I took care of my mother after the shooting,” Shirley said. 

She heard her mother’s voice again in court, via a recording played as part of the proceedings. She didn’t expect to find herself listening to her mother’s voice for the first time in over a decade, when Carmon’s attorneys played a taped police interview about the shooting. In response to a detective’s question, Charlene said she had not known Carmon, that she hadn’t heard of him until seeing him on a television story about the crime. 

As the recording of Charlene Troutman’s police statement played, Shirley bent over and sobbed.

“Hearing my mother’s voice was gut-wrenching,” she said later. ​“I haven’t heard her voice since 2008,” when Charlene died.

Another Suspect

David Keenan, a lead attorney on Carmon’s case, had played that recording while questioning former New Haven Detective Michael Sweeney, who worked on Danielle’s murder case. 

Much of Keenan’s questioning centered around another suspect for the crime, a man named Arthur Brantley.

Through Sweeney’s testimony, Keenan established that Richard Troutman, Shirley Troutman’s brother and Danielle’s uncle, had owed Brantley money in an exchange related to drugs.

Brantley’s fingerprints had been found on an ammunition box near the Orchard Street building, Keenan stated.

When Brantley came to collect the debt from Troutman at 810 Orchard, Troutman refused to pay. A dispute — which turned into a fight — ensued between Brantley and some of Troutman’s friends, one of whom already had a negative relationship with Brantley.

Sweeney testified that police found that Brantley had said, ​“I’ll be back,” after the fight.

According to an alibi witness for Brantley’s higher-up in the drug trade, Anthony Little, Brantley had asked Little for a gun hours before the shooting.

​“Not only does he not get paid, he gets beat up by Richard Troutman’s friends,” Keenan said in his interrogation of Sweeney.

“Yes,” Sweeney responded.

“Mr. Brantley had multiple motives for the crime,” Keenan said.

​“Not really, no,” Sweeney said.

Troutman owed Brantley money, had refused to pay hours before the shooting, he ​“disrespected him,” and his friends ​“beat him up,” Keenan said. ​“So how can you sit there and say Mr. Brantley didn’t have a strong motive?”

Sweeney maintained that Brantley did not necessarily have a motive to kill Troutman. ​“Do I think he would kill someone because of a beef? No,” he testified.

A narrative of Brantley’s interactions with police unfolded in the courtroom by way of Sweeney’s testimony. After the shooting, Brantley initially denied his involvement. He voluntarily took a polygraph test with police, for which he was asked whether he had killed Danielle, whether he’d been involved in the shooting, and whether he knew who shot the bullets. He failed every part of the test.

Subsequently, Brantley gave two statements to the police confessing his involvement in the murder. He then recanted those confessions, stating that he had been under police pressure to confess and that he had feared for his family’s safety.

Carmon’s lawyers are arguing that in the original trial, prosecutors withheld some information from the defense pertaining to Brantley’s confessions: the fact that police had spoken to Brantley’s mother before he first confessed, that the mother urged Brantley to be honest with police, and that Brantley returned to speak with the police —and to confess — voluntarily after that conversation.

The day resurrected painful memories. One of the crime scene, which Keenan displayed to Sweeney, showed Danielle’s empty stroller beside a bloodstain on the rug. 

As Shirley Troutman listened to Carmon’s team’s narrative of her mother’s paralysis and her daughter’s murder, some details of the day’s testimony bothered her.

For one, she disputed Carmon’s lawyers narrative of her family members’ drug dealing and debts, especially regarding her mother. ​“Don’t make it seem like she was running a drug empire,” said Troutman. ​“She was an innocent woman sitting in her living room.”

She also said she did believe that Brantley was involved in the shooting, but that Brantley’s implication did not necessarily exonerate Carmon. She said she believed Brantley and Carmon were ​“in cahoots,” but that Carmon pulled the trigger.

Luquaia Opara, a cousin of Troutman, said she didn’t understand why Brantley hadn’t been arrested himself.

Meanwhile, as Najee Carmon-Reynolds listened to the proceedings, he said he felt ​“overwhelmed.”

At 5 p.m., as the courtroom adjourned for the day, marshals handcuffed Carmon once again, preparing to bring him back to a prison cell.

“I love you,” Carmon-Reynolds told his father, holding his fist to his heart.

Click here to read articles published at the time of Danielle’s murder about the circumstances both in the case and the surrounding neighborhood, as well as an interview with the man who owned the gun stolen to commit the killing. Click here for a story about how the family and neighborhood were faring 20 years after the murder, and here for an account of Danielle’s posthumous 21st birthday birthday.

Previous coverage of Adam Carmon habeas trial:

• Day 1: New Trial Sought In Baby’s Murder