By DON BABWIN
Associated Press Writer
CHICAGO- A boy who sued the city and two detectives after he was wrongly accused of murdering an 11-year-old girl is being portrayed as both a victim of police officers intent on framing him and as a plausible suspect who implicated himself.
Those two versions were laid out in court Tuesday by attorneys representing the boy, now 15, and those defending the two Chicago police detectives and the city.
The 1998 slaying of Ryan Harris made national headlines when the then 8-year-old boy and a 7-year-old friend became the youngest murder suspects in the United States.
Attorney Andre Grant said in his opening statements Tuesday that police “conspired after they received evidence that these children could not have committed this crime.”
The boy “was not framed by these two fine officers or any other officer in the Chicago Police Department,” defense attorney Brian Crowe countered.
Jurors heard how Harris disappeared on July 27, 1998, and was found dead the next day in a South Side lot, sexually molested and beaten. Days later the boys were arrested after, according to police at the time, they told detectives that they killed the girl for the shiny blue bicycle she was riding.
It took almost a month before the boys were cleared after tests showed semen on Harris’ clothing that could not have come from them. DNA tests later led police to charge Floyd Durr, a Chicago man who has been convicted of sexually assaulting other girls. Durr is awaiting trial in Harris’ death.
“Not only are the police looking for an adult male, they know and they believe that the motive for this crime was a sex offense,” Grant said.
He said evidence at the scene strongly suggested that the boys did not have the strength to kill Harris, who was hit in the head with a brick and asphyxiated. Police also based much of their case on a 16-sentence narrative from the younger boy, he said, a boy who had a speech disorder so severe that he couldn’t speak in complete sentences.
The city recently agreed to a $2 million settlement with the younger boy’s family.
Attorneys representing now-retired police Detective James Cassidy and Detective Allen Nathaniel said the officers and the dozens of detectives working the crime simply took the case where it led them.
“Based on what they knew, they did believe that these boys were responsible for Ryan’s death,” defense attorney Eileen Rosen said.
Rosen said the boy often changed his story when talking to police but he also repeatedly implicated himself in the crime.
The trial was expected to last three weeks.