Just after midnight, on the morning of November 1, 2010, two men were shot outside a house in southeast Cleveland, Ohio. Dennis Cole, who was 31 years old, was shot in the chest and back, and Cedric Johnson, who was 39 years old, was shot in the leg.
The shootings occurred at the end of a Halloween party at the apartment of Arden Terry and his girlfriend, Consuela Calloway. About 40 people attended the party.
Officers with the Cleveland Police Department responded to numerous 911 calls about shots being fired. They arrived at the apartment and began interviewing witnesses and the victims at a chaotic crime scene.
A police officer wrote in his report that Cole said that Terry's son shot him, Cole didn't provide a name but described the shooter as a male in his late teens. Terry had three sons at the party, and two fit Cole's rough description: 19-year-old Ricky Williams, and 17-year-old Octavius Williams, known as "Tay" or "Tay-Tay."
Darnell Calloway, Consuela's brother, told the police that he asked Cole who shot him. Cole responded, "Tay Tay," and then said the shooter wasn't wearing a shirt.
Another witness also said that Octavius wasn't wearing a shirt. The police arrested Octavius Williams and performed a test to detect the presence of gunshot residue on his hands. The test came back negative.
Johnson was treated and released. He told the police he could not identify the person who shot him or Cole, who was taken to Metro Hospital. On his arrival, according to medical records, Cole had a blood-alcohol content of .27, more than three times the legal limit in Ohio.
Two detectives visited Cole at the hospital on November 5, 2010, and showed him a photo array that included Octavius Williams. Cole selected Octavius as the person who shot him. Several days earlier, Cole had said that Terry's son-"not the one with the hair"-shot him. Family members said that was a reference to Ricky.
Because of Octavius Williams's age, his case was initially filed in the juvenile division of the Cuyahoga County Court of Common Pleas. At a hearing to transfer the case to the main division, Cole identified Williams, who was sitting at the defense table, as the shooter, but he did not know the shooter's name.
Williams's trial began on June 27, 2011. The police had recovered a .22-caliber revolver and a 9 mm shell from the crime scene, but neither piece of evidence was connected to Williams.
One police officer testified that Cole initially said he knew who shot him but did not say his name.
Another officer testified about the chaotic scene: "Meantime three guys were talking at once," he said. "I got like the lady whose apartment it was, her boyfriend-her boyfriend's son shot him, nicknames, stuff like that ... They said the guy's name that live[d] there, his girlfriend lived there, was Ardy, Ardy's son. I know at some point I learned Tay-Tay. I don't know if it was right then or later."
Cole testified that Williams shot him, and referred to him as "Octavius" at the trial. He said that he had told Darnell Calloway that "Tay-Tay" was responsible.
Cole also testified about his excessive blood-alcohol content and that he experienced hallucinations after he was brought to the hospital.
Cole testified that he did not know the names of Terry's other sons, and that he didn't know which sons were at the party.
A state's witness testified that the lack of gunshot residue did not mean Williams hadn't fired a weapon. He said a person could easily wipe away gunshot residue after a shooting by simply putting their hand into a pocket or washing the hand with water.
Williams's defense was based on mistaken witness identification; Cole was heavily intoxicated, and other witnesses suggested that Ricky Williams was the shooter.
Detective Joel Campbell testified that he had received voicemails from several of Octavius's family members about Ricky's involvement in the shooting. Campbell said he was "never able to contact them concerning that or never developed any evidence in that regard." He also said he never interviewed Ricky. Campbell testified that he told Terry that he wanted to speak with Ricky but never initiated any contact. Campbell also testified that several months after the shooting Johnson identified Ricky Williams from a photo array as the person who shot Cole.
Jessica Terry, Octavius's 15-year-old sister, testified that Octavius was inside with her and other friends and family at the time of the shooting. She said she looked out the window and saw Ricky, Larry Johnson, who was Cedric's brother, and Demarcus Thomas shooting. (Thomas, then 15 years old, was Cole's son, and he tested positive for gunshot residue.) Terry said she ran to the apartment's front room and stayed there with Octavius and the others until the police arrived.
Chafonda English, who was Cole's cousin, testified that she was upstairs with Jessica and others when she heard arguing, then shots. She said she ran to the front of the apartment. Octavius was at the front, she said, and she never saw him leave.
Neither Octavius nor Ricky Williams testified. On July 1, 2011, a jury convicted Octavius Williams of attempted murder, two counts of felonious assault, and one count of illegal possession of a weapon. He was later sentenced to 15 years in prison.
Williams appealed, arguing that the prosecutor had improperly vouched for a witness, that his trial attorney had been ineffective for not objecting to these statements, and that there had been insufficient evidence to sustain his conviction. A three-judge panel from the Eighth Appellate District of Ohio Court of Appeals affirmed the conviction on April 19, 2012
While the appeal was pending, on September 27, 2011, Williams, now represented by Kenneth McElroy, moved for a new trial based on new evidence. The five-page motion included what purported to be a signed, although undated, affidavit from Ricky Williams that said he had shot Cole after Terry and Larry Johnson got into a fight.
"Larry Johnson started shooting towards me and my father's direction [and] shortly after Dennis Cole ran at me and punched me in the eye and I pulled out my gun and shot out of fear for me and my famil[y's] lives because shots were being fired at us first," the affidavit said.
The state quickly filed a response, and then the motion stalled after McElroy's law license was suspended when the courts learned that he had failed to report a felony conviction for forgery to the proper disciplinary authorities. The Supreme Court of Ohio indefinitely suspended McElroy in 2014.
In 2012, Ricky was arrested on a homicide charge. (He pled guilty in 2013 to involuntary manslaughter and related charges and was sentenced to 22 years and 11 months in prison.)
In June 2012, Octavius Williams asked the Wrongful Conviction Project (WCP) at the Ohio Public Defender's Office to review his case. The agency agreed to represent Williams, and then worked with the Conviction Integrity Unit (CIU) of the Cuyahoga County Prosecuting Attorney's Office to re-examine the conviction. Members of the CIU team interviewed Octavius and Ricky Williams, Terry, Cole, Darnell Calloway, and others. According to the WCP, a majority of the CIU's internal panel voted in favor of Octavius's exoneration. The CIU's independent review panel also voted unanimously in favor. Michael O'Malley, the Cuyahoga County Prosecuting Attorney, did not support an exoneration, but he agreed to a separate motion releasing Williams from prison. A judge granted that motion on December 17, 2019.
On January 17, 2020, Williams's attorneys with the Wrongful Conviction Project filed an extensive supplement to his 2011 motion for a new trial.
The supplement said that Ricky Williams had given two additional statements that said he had shot Cole. The first statement was a 2015 affidavit made to Joanna Sanchez with the WCP. The second was a 2017 audio recording of an interview with Ricky Williams, conducted by Sanchez and an assistant prosecutor.
In the audio recording, Ricky said that when he was incarcerated with Darnell Calloway, he admitted shooting Cole, and Calloway told him that he already knew that to be true. Calloway confirmed this conversation in a video call with an assistant prosecutor and said that Ricky told him he had been aiming for Larry Johnson.
In addition to these new statements from Ricky Williams, the supplemental motion included affidavits from several witnesses, including Cedric Johnson, the other shooting victim.
Cedric Johnson said that the shooting happened when he was trying to leave the party with Larry Johnson, Cole, and Calloway. Cole was "so drunk that he could barely stand up," Cedric Johnson said. He said that Larry saw two men arguing with his nieces and shot his gun in the air. A fight broke out. Cedric said he saw Ricky Williams standing behind a fence, then heard several shots coming from that area. Cedric said that he was accidentally shot by Larry. Cedric said that after he was shot, Terry and another man helped him inside, and he saw Octavius at the top of the stairs.
Cedric Johnson said that he drove Cole to the hearing to transfer the Williams case out of the juvenile division. He said he told Cole "to do the right thing and not send the wrong man up." He said Cole responded, "They told me it was Tay."
In her affidavit, English said she was with Octavius when the police came upstairs and arrested him. "I asked the police what they were arresting Octavius for and told them he had been upstairs with us the entire time and that they had the wrong person," she said. "The police would not listen to me. Nobody who was upstairs in the apartment washed their hands between when the shooting occurred and when the police arrived."
In addition to these witness affidavits, the supplemental motion also included a report by Charles Goodsell, a cognitive psychologist at Canisius College in Buffalo, New York. He said that Cole's identification of Octavius included several factors often present in misidentifications. First, Cole was extremely intoxicated. Second, his initial identification was vague, referring to his shooter only as one of Terry's sons. At the pre-trial hearing, Goosell noted, Cole could not remember Octavius's name.
"Thus, there are conflicting reports as to how Mr. Cole came to believe that Octavius was the man who shot him," Goodsell wrote. "Given that memory is constructive and can change over time, it is unclear if Mr. Cole is basing his belief that Octavius shot him on his experience or some other external source."
Based on this new evidence, the supplemental motion said, Octavius Williams would not be convicted if he received a new trial.
"Not a single person at the party beside Dennis identified Octavius as being in the backyard, participating in the fight, or shooting Dennis," the motion said. "Considering Ricky's confessions and the additional evidence that implicates Ricky, it is likely that Dennis made a mistake."
Judge Deena Calabrese held an evidentiary hearing on May 23, 2022. Ricky Williams testified via Zoom but asserted his Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination when asked about his statements and audio recording. Despite pleading the Fifth, Ricky identified his voice in the recording. In addition, Ricky Williams's first confession was discredited, after the woman who purportedly notarized his affidavit said she wouldn't have notarized a hand-written document and that most of her notary work was for customers at the bank where she had worked.
On January 20, 2023, Judge Calabrese denied Williams's motion for a new trial. She said in her ruling that Ricky's fraudulent dealings with the notary public "taints the entire enterprise." She wrote: "As the State remarks, the crux of Defendant's argument is that the jury simply got it wrong ... the Court rejects Defendant's argument that Ricky's purported confession, which the State aptly characterizes as a family convenience, should require disturbing the jury's verdict."
Williams appealed. On February 8, 2024, the Eighth Appellate District of Ohio Court of Appeals reversed Judge Calabrese's ruling and vacated Williams's conviction. The appellate court said, "While we agree with the trial court that the First Written Confession is not credible, we cannot say that it 'tainted the entire enterprise.'"
The ruling said that the later statement and audio recording by Ricky Williams were new evidence of innocence that had been discovered since the trial. "The only evidence presented at trial that contradicts Ricky's Confessions is Cole's identification of Octavius as the person who shot him," the court wrote. "We note again that Cole identified Octavius after he identified the more-encompassing 'Ardy's son' as the shooter."
O'Malley's office sought to appeal the ruling to the Ohio Supreme Court, but the court declined to hear the case. On June 13, 2024, the state dismissed the charges.
- Ken Otterbourg
The shootings occurred at the end of a Halloween party at the apartment of Arden Terry and his girlfriend, Consuela Calloway. About 40 people attended the party.
Officers with the Cleveland Police Department responded to numerous 911 calls about shots being fired. They arrived at the apartment and began interviewing witnesses and the victims at a chaotic crime scene.
A police officer wrote in his report that Cole said that Terry's son shot him, Cole didn't provide a name but described the shooter as a male in his late teens. Terry had three sons at the party, and two fit Cole's rough description: 19-year-old Ricky Williams, and 17-year-old Octavius Williams, known as "Tay" or "Tay-Tay."
Darnell Calloway, Consuela's brother, told the police that he asked Cole who shot him. Cole responded, "Tay Tay," and then said the shooter wasn't wearing a shirt.
Another witness also said that Octavius wasn't wearing a shirt. The police arrested Octavius Williams and performed a test to detect the presence of gunshot residue on his hands. The test came back negative.
Johnson was treated and released. He told the police he could not identify the person who shot him or Cole, who was taken to Metro Hospital. On his arrival, according to medical records, Cole had a blood-alcohol content of .27, more than three times the legal limit in Ohio.
Two detectives visited Cole at the hospital on November 5, 2010, and showed him a photo array that included Octavius Williams. Cole selected Octavius as the person who shot him. Several days earlier, Cole had said that Terry's son-"not the one with the hair"-shot him. Family members said that was a reference to Ricky.
Because of Octavius Williams's age, his case was initially filed in the juvenile division of the Cuyahoga County Court of Common Pleas. At a hearing to transfer the case to the main division, Cole identified Williams, who was sitting at the defense table, as the shooter, but he did not know the shooter's name.
Williams's trial began on June 27, 2011. The police had recovered a .22-caliber revolver and a 9 mm shell from the crime scene, but neither piece of evidence was connected to Williams.
One police officer testified that Cole initially said he knew who shot him but did not say his name.
Another officer testified about the chaotic scene: "Meantime three guys were talking at once," he said. "I got like the lady whose apartment it was, her boyfriend-her boyfriend's son shot him, nicknames, stuff like that ... They said the guy's name that live[d] there, his girlfriend lived there, was Ardy, Ardy's son. I know at some point I learned Tay-Tay. I don't know if it was right then or later."
Cole testified that Williams shot him, and referred to him as "Octavius" at the trial. He said that he had told Darnell Calloway that "Tay-Tay" was responsible.
Cole also testified about his excessive blood-alcohol content and that he experienced hallucinations after he was brought to the hospital.
Cole testified that he did not know the names of Terry's other sons, and that he didn't know which sons were at the party.
A state's witness testified that the lack of gunshot residue did not mean Williams hadn't fired a weapon. He said a person could easily wipe away gunshot residue after a shooting by simply putting their hand into a pocket or washing the hand with water.
Williams's defense was based on mistaken witness identification; Cole was heavily intoxicated, and other witnesses suggested that Ricky Williams was the shooter.
Detective Joel Campbell testified that he had received voicemails from several of Octavius's family members about Ricky's involvement in the shooting. Campbell said he was "never able to contact them concerning that or never developed any evidence in that regard." He also said he never interviewed Ricky. Campbell testified that he told Terry that he wanted to speak with Ricky but never initiated any contact. Campbell also testified that several months after the shooting Johnson identified Ricky Williams from a photo array as the person who shot Cole.
Jessica Terry, Octavius's 15-year-old sister, testified that Octavius was inside with her and other friends and family at the time of the shooting. She said she looked out the window and saw Ricky, Larry Johnson, who was Cedric's brother, and Demarcus Thomas shooting. (Thomas, then 15 years old, was Cole's son, and he tested positive for gunshot residue.) Terry said she ran to the apartment's front room and stayed there with Octavius and the others until the police arrived.
Chafonda English, who was Cole's cousin, testified that she was upstairs with Jessica and others when she heard arguing, then shots. She said she ran to the front of the apartment. Octavius was at the front, she said, and she never saw him leave.
Neither Octavius nor Ricky Williams testified. On July 1, 2011, a jury convicted Octavius Williams of attempted murder, two counts of felonious assault, and one count of illegal possession of a weapon. He was later sentenced to 15 years in prison.
Williams appealed, arguing that the prosecutor had improperly vouched for a witness, that his trial attorney had been ineffective for not objecting to these statements, and that there had been insufficient evidence to sustain his conviction. A three-judge panel from the Eighth Appellate District of Ohio Court of Appeals affirmed the conviction on April 19, 2012
While the appeal was pending, on September 27, 2011, Williams, now represented by Kenneth McElroy, moved for a new trial based on new evidence. The five-page motion included what purported to be a signed, although undated, affidavit from Ricky Williams that said he had shot Cole after Terry and Larry Johnson got into a fight.
"Larry Johnson started shooting towards me and my father's direction [and] shortly after Dennis Cole ran at me and punched me in the eye and I pulled out my gun and shot out of fear for me and my famil[y's] lives because shots were being fired at us first," the affidavit said.
The state quickly filed a response, and then the motion stalled after McElroy's law license was suspended when the courts learned that he had failed to report a felony conviction for forgery to the proper disciplinary authorities. The Supreme Court of Ohio indefinitely suspended McElroy in 2014.
In 2012, Ricky was arrested on a homicide charge. (He pled guilty in 2013 to involuntary manslaughter and related charges and was sentenced to 22 years and 11 months in prison.)
In June 2012, Octavius Williams asked the Wrongful Conviction Project (WCP) at the Ohio Public Defender's Office to review his case. The agency agreed to represent Williams, and then worked with the Conviction Integrity Unit (CIU) of the Cuyahoga County Prosecuting Attorney's Office to re-examine the conviction. Members of the CIU team interviewed Octavius and Ricky Williams, Terry, Cole, Darnell Calloway, and others. According to the WCP, a majority of the CIU's internal panel voted in favor of Octavius's exoneration. The CIU's independent review panel also voted unanimously in favor. Michael O'Malley, the Cuyahoga County Prosecuting Attorney, did not support an exoneration, but he agreed to a separate motion releasing Williams from prison. A judge granted that motion on December 17, 2019.
On January 17, 2020, Williams's attorneys with the Wrongful Conviction Project filed an extensive supplement to his 2011 motion for a new trial.
The supplement said that Ricky Williams had given two additional statements that said he had shot Cole. The first statement was a 2015 affidavit made to Joanna Sanchez with the WCP. The second was a 2017 audio recording of an interview with Ricky Williams, conducted by Sanchez and an assistant prosecutor.
In the audio recording, Ricky said that when he was incarcerated with Darnell Calloway, he admitted shooting Cole, and Calloway told him that he already knew that to be true. Calloway confirmed this conversation in a video call with an assistant prosecutor and said that Ricky told him he had been aiming for Larry Johnson.
In addition to these new statements from Ricky Williams, the supplemental motion included affidavits from several witnesses, including Cedric Johnson, the other shooting victim.
Cedric Johnson said that the shooting happened when he was trying to leave the party with Larry Johnson, Cole, and Calloway. Cole was "so drunk that he could barely stand up," Cedric Johnson said. He said that Larry saw two men arguing with his nieces and shot his gun in the air. A fight broke out. Cedric said he saw Ricky Williams standing behind a fence, then heard several shots coming from that area. Cedric said that he was accidentally shot by Larry. Cedric said that after he was shot, Terry and another man helped him inside, and he saw Octavius at the top of the stairs.
Cedric Johnson said that he drove Cole to the hearing to transfer the Williams case out of the juvenile division. He said he told Cole "to do the right thing and not send the wrong man up." He said Cole responded, "They told me it was Tay."
In her affidavit, English said she was with Octavius when the police came upstairs and arrested him. "I asked the police what they were arresting Octavius for and told them he had been upstairs with us the entire time and that they had the wrong person," she said. "The police would not listen to me. Nobody who was upstairs in the apartment washed their hands between when the shooting occurred and when the police arrived."
In addition to these witness affidavits, the supplemental motion also included a report by Charles Goodsell, a cognitive psychologist at Canisius College in Buffalo, New York. He said that Cole's identification of Octavius included several factors often present in misidentifications. First, Cole was extremely intoxicated. Second, his initial identification was vague, referring to his shooter only as one of Terry's sons. At the pre-trial hearing, Goosell noted, Cole could not remember Octavius's name.
"Thus, there are conflicting reports as to how Mr. Cole came to believe that Octavius was the man who shot him," Goodsell wrote. "Given that memory is constructive and can change over time, it is unclear if Mr. Cole is basing his belief that Octavius shot him on his experience or some other external source."
Based on this new evidence, the supplemental motion said, Octavius Williams would not be convicted if he received a new trial.
"Not a single person at the party beside Dennis identified Octavius as being in the backyard, participating in the fight, or shooting Dennis," the motion said. "Considering Ricky's confessions and the additional evidence that implicates Ricky, it is likely that Dennis made a mistake."
Judge Deena Calabrese held an evidentiary hearing on May 23, 2022. Ricky Williams testified via Zoom but asserted his Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination when asked about his statements and audio recording. Despite pleading the Fifth, Ricky identified his voice in the recording. In addition, Ricky Williams's first confession was discredited, after the woman who purportedly notarized his affidavit said she wouldn't have notarized a hand-written document and that most of her notary work was for customers at the bank where she had worked.
On January 20, 2023, Judge Calabrese denied Williams's motion for a new trial. She said in her ruling that Ricky's fraudulent dealings with the notary public "taints the entire enterprise." She wrote: "As the State remarks, the crux of Defendant's argument is that the jury simply got it wrong ... the Court rejects Defendant's argument that Ricky's purported confession, which the State aptly characterizes as a family convenience, should require disturbing the jury's verdict."
Williams appealed. On February 8, 2024, the Eighth Appellate District of Ohio Court of Appeals reversed Judge Calabrese's ruling and vacated Williams's conviction. The appellate court said, "While we agree with the trial court that the First Written Confession is not credible, we cannot say that it 'tainted the entire enterprise.'"
The ruling said that the later statement and audio recording by Ricky Williams were new evidence of innocence that had been discovered since the trial. "The only evidence presented at trial that contradicts Ricky's Confessions is Cole's identification of Octavius as the person who shot him," the court wrote. "We note again that Cole identified Octavius after he identified the more-encompassing 'Ardy's son' as the shooter."
O'Malley's office sought to appeal the ruling to the Ohio Supreme Court, but the court declined to hear the case. On June 13, 2024, the state dismissed the charges.
- Ken Otterbourg
Posting Date: 06-26-2024
Last Update Date: 06-26-2024
Case Details:
State:
Ohio
County:
Cuyahoga
Most Serious Crime:
Attempted Murder
Additional Convictions:
Assault, Weapon Possession or Sale
Reported Crime Date:
2010
Convicted:
2011
Exonerated:
2024
Sentence:
Term of Years
Race / Ethnicity:
Black
Sex:
Male
Age at the date of reported crime:
17
Contributing Factors:
Mistaken Witness ID, False or Misleading Forensic Evidence
Did DNA evidence contribute to the exoneration?:
No