On September 29, 1990, at approximately 4 a.m., 25-year-old Joseph Healy, an assistant football coach at Hofstra University, was shot and killed near the campus in an Arby’s parking lot.
The evening before, Healy and two friends, David Shepard and Tim Mahoney, had gone out for drinks. They visited a few bars that night and at about 3 a.m., at the last bar, they met Stephanie Scheele and Kristen Baecker, who were both Hofstra students. Scheele and Baecker were too intoxicated to drive and decided to walk back to campus. Healy, Shepard and Mahoney joined them.
They stopped at a pizza parlor to get food, but it was closed. They continued on to an Arby’s restaurant at the corner of Duncan Road and Hempstead Turnpike in East Meadows, New York. The restaurant doors were locked, but the drive-through window was open and customers were being served. They walked up, placed an order, got their food and sat down on the curb outside to eat.
While they were at Arby’s, Cynthia Louissaint, who lived nearby, was walking with her friend Mark Jones down Duncan Road to a pay phone. Louissaint and Jones saw a gray car pull up on Duncan Road behind the Arby’s. Louissaint saw Black men inside. She got a clear view
of the driver, just a few feet away from her. She later said the face of the man in the passenger seat was obscured, though she saw his hair sticking out from his baseball cap and could see his clothing. No one was in the back seat.
Louissaint and Jones continued walking to the pay phone, passing Healy and the others. Not long after, the two Black men that Louissaint saw approached Healy’s group. The first man shouted, “You have three seconds to get up!”
Scheele later admitted she was so intoxicated that she needed help to stand up. A second man stood to the right of the first man. Louissaint would later tell police that as she and Jones were walking back from the pay phone, she saw the second man from the car standing near some bushes. She said that based on his clothing and hair, he was the man in the passenger seat.
Almost immediately, the second man yelled “Just do it!” or “Just do him!” The gunman then shot Healy. Both men immediately ran toward the gray car and drove away.
The entire incident lasted from 10 to 30 seconds, according to the witnesses.
Detective Richard Wells of the Nassau County Police Department (NCPD) arrived at
the scene of the crime within hours and was assigned to lead the investigation. There, he interviewed Scheele, Baecker, Maloney, Shepard, and Jones. The next day, he located and interviewed Louissaint.
Investigators used Louissaint’s and Baecker’s descriptions of the two men to create composite police sketches. The only description Scheele could give police was that the second man was Black and five feet 10 inches tall.
The shooting went unsolved for months as the police offered a $15,000 reward and the murder was covered extensively by the media. Detective Wells later said he stuck 5,000 posters, including the composite sketches to “every telephone pole from Montauk to Parsippany, New Jersey.” The police theorized from the outset that the murder was an aborted robbery attempt committed by two men.
On February 15, 1991, five months after the Healy murder, police in Freeport, New York, which was less than 10 miles from the Arby’s, arrested 20-year-old Christopher Ellis along with his two friends, 20-year-old Gary Lawrence and 19-year-old David Liles. They were accused of trying to rob a local drug dealer. Police took them to the Freeport police station at about 1:30 a.m.
Shortly before 5 a.m., Ellis signed a statement admitting his involvement in the Freeport attempted robbery. He was handcuffed to a bench in an interrogation room. About 6 a.m., a detective came in and began questioning Ellis about Healy’s murder. Ellis said he only knew about the shooting from the media reports and was not involved.
Detectives refused to believe him and questioned Ellis for the next 12 hours, keeping him cuffed to the bench all the while. He was not allowed to sleep or have anything to eat or drink.
The detectives falsely told him that he had been identified as the gunman’s accomplice from a composite sketch, and that Liles and Lawrence had implicated him. They told him he was already going to prison for the attempted robbery. He was promised that the police would talk to the prosecutors and judge if he confessed and that he would not get much prison time if he would just admit he drove the getaway car.
After 18 hours in custody, Ellis agreed to give a statement. A detective wrote out the statement, and according to Ellis, supplied the details related to the murder. The statement said that Ellis, Lawrence and Liles were driving a stolen blue Mitsubishi Conquest near the Hofstra campus looking for someone to rob. Finding no one, they went to Campus Pizza, which was near the Arby’s, to get something to eat. This was the same pizza parlor that Healy’s group had first gone to but found closed.
The statement said that as Ellis, Liles and Lawrence left Campus Pizza, they saw Healy and the others standing at a phone booth near the Arby’s and decided to rob them. The statement said that Ellis drove to a side road near the Arby’s and stopped so Lawrence and Liles could get out. The statement said Ellis heard arguing and then a gunshot. Liles and Lawrence then ran back to the car, and they fled.
Ellis signed a second additional statement saying that when he heard the argument, he got out and went toward Arby’s, where he saw Liles and a “tall white male struggling” before the gun went off.
Almost immediately after he signed the statement, Ellis recanted and denied that any of it was true.
Police then obtained statements from Liles and Lawrence, which both men later said were false. Lawrence asserted an officer had kicked him while he was handcuffed to a chair.
Liles’s statement said that he got a stolen, light blue, four-door Mazda and drove Lawrence and Ellis by the Arby’s. He said they pulled onto a side street, got out of the car carrying guns, and all three pointed their guns at the group and shouted, “Give us the money!” According to Liles’s statement, Ellis was the gunman. The statement said Healy got up from the curb to confront them, and Ellis fired a single shot at him. All three ran to the car and drove to Manhattan, New York, where they got rid of the car.
Lawrence’s statement said that Ellis drove the group in a dark blue, two-door Mazda to the Arby’s, where they were going to get something to eat. They saw Healy’s group sitting on a divider and decided to rob them. Ellis stayed in the car as the getaway driver. Lawrence’s statement claimed that Liles was the shooter – that Liles went up to the group and asked, “What are you doing here?” In response, Healy stood up and responded, “Who are you talking to?”
According to the statement, Liles then pulled out his gun, Healy tried to knock it out of his hands, and the gun went off. Lawrence and Liles then ran back to the car. Ellis drove the car with the gun to Manhattan, where they disposed of it.
The statements were not only inconsistent, but contradicted known facts. For example, Louissaint said the robbers were in a gray Chevrolet. The witnesses said the gunman said they had three seconds to stand up—words that were not included in any of the statements from Ellis, Liles or Lawrence.
Witnesses said there were only two men in the car, not three. And the statements did not agree on the identity of the gunman. Ellis’s and Lawrence’s statements said Liles was the shooter. Liles’s statement said Ellis was the gunman.
Detective Wells met with Scheele and Baecker and showed them a photographic lineup that included photos of Ellis, Liles and Lawrence. Neither identified any of them as being involved in the crime.
The detective then asked them to come to the police station and view a live lineup. Shepard and Mahoney joined them. Liles, Lawrence and Ellis were in a lineup with five Black college students.
Shepard, Baecker and Mahoney identified Liles as the gunman. Mahoney said he thought Lawrence was the second man at the scene, but wasn’t 100 percent positive because he had been drinking, the night was foggy, and the crime happened very quickly. Shepard, Baecker and Mahoney did not identify Ellis.
Scheele did not identify Ellis by sight. However, she asked that he be made to step forward and say, “Just do it.” After he did so, she identified him as the second man by the sound of his voice. No one else in the lineup was asked to step forward and utter the phrase.
All three men were charged with second-degree murder, attempted robbery, criminal possession of a weapon and possession of stolen property. They were also charged with the separate crime of attempted robbery of the drug dealer.
A pretrial hearing on a motion to suppress their statements was held in January 1992. At the hearing, the prosecution and Detective Wells revealed for the first time that Louissaint had been shown photographs of Ellis. Wells testified and the prosecution stated that she did not make an identification.
The prosecutor asked, “Now, when you showed these photographs to Ms. Louissaint…did she exclude anybody?”
“No, sir, she did not,” Wells replied.
The prosecutor told the judge that no eyewitness had excluded any of the defendants during the photo and live lineups.
All three men went to trial separately for the charges relating to both the murder and the attempted robbery of the drug dealer. Ellis went to trial first, on November 16, 1992, in Nassau County Supreme Court.
The prosecution’s case relied primarily on Scheele’s identification of Ellis and his confession. Ellis testified and admitted he was involved in the attempted robbery of the drug dealer, but denied any involvement in Healy’s murder. He said his confession was coerced and that he had attended a birthday party for his brother the night of the murder.
Several witnesses corroborated Ellis’s alibi. One witness testified that Ellis was at the party through 4 a.m., past the time of the shooting. Another witness said Ellis was still there
until 6 or 7 a.m., helping to clean up.
And a third witness, Joseph Hamilton, testified that he saw Ellis at the party right before leaving to drop off a friend. He said that on his drive, he passed by the Arby’s and saw that police tape from Healy’s murder had already gone up. The defense contended that his testimony made it clear Ellis could not possibly have left, committed the crime, and returned to the party.
On December 7, 1992, a jury convicted Ellis of all the charges. He was sentenced to 31 ½ years to life in prison.
Lawrence and Liles were convicted in separate trials in March and April 1993. Liles was sentenced to 30 years to life in prison. Lawrence was sentenced to 32 ½ years to life in prison.
Their appeals were unsuccessful.
In 2016, the law firm of Emery Celli Brinckerhoff Abady Ward & Maazel began representing Ellis. During the firm’s re-investigation, Louissant was interviewed. She said that she had excluded Ellis as being involved and that she had told the police that Ellis was not involved.
The firm retained Dr. Brian Cutler, an expert in eyewitness identification, false confessions and wrongful convictions. Dr. Cutler concluded that Ellis’s interrogation and confession contained many elements present in false confession cases, including the deprivation of sleep, food and drink and the 18 hours of interrogation. Dr. Cutler declared, “At least six important risk factors for false confession are present in this case, including personal risk factors (Mr. Ellis’s age, sleep deprivation, food deprivation, pain/discomfort) and situational risk factors (isolation, length of interrogation, and the use of false evidence ploys). High-pressure interrogation tactics and confession contamination are also likely factors in this case. These factors significantly increase the risk of eliciting a false confession…in this case.”
Dr. Cutler also concluded that the accuracy of Scheele’s identification was highly unlikely. He said, “She saw the perpetrators for just a few seconds, she had been drinking, it was a highly stressful event, and the perpetrators were of a different race than her. Social science studies
demonstrate that these factors, particularly in combination with one another, undermine the
reliability of her identification.”
In October 2019, Ellis filed a motion seeking to vacate his conviction based on the report of Dr. Cutler as well as the discovery that the prosecution had failed to disclose Louissant’s exclusion of Ellis.
In the months that followed, Ellis’s legal team collaborated with the Nassau County District Attorney’s Office Conviction Integrity Bureau (CIB). This CIB investigation uncovered evidence that the police had never disclosed to the prosecution. This evidence, which had been compiled by Detective Wells, pointed to several possible alternate suspects.
The information included a statement from Mark Jones, who had been walking with Louissant to the pay phone just before the shooting. Jones told Wells about James Lewis, Jones’s friend of 15 years. According to Jones, Lewis confessed that “he [and] another person, his ‘homeboy,’ were involved in the Arby’s stick up. Lewis said his homeboy shot the white guy who was with the two white girls because the guy would not give up the money.”
On October 1, 2020, the prosecution offered to allow Ellis and Liles to be resentenced to 25 years to life, which would make them immediately eligible for a parole hearing, and to not challenge a request for parole. In return, the prosecution asked that Ellis and Liles not challenge their convictions. Lawrence was not extended the same offer because he had been released on parole in 2015.
Ellis and Liles rejected that offer, and an amended post-conviction motion was filed by attorney Ilann Maazel on October 20, 2020, incorporating the evidence that had been withheld about alternate suspects.
On July 21, 2021, Nassau County Supreme Court Justice Patricia Harrington granted Ellis’s motion and vacated his convictions in the Healy murder case. Ellis had not challenged his convictions in the attempted robbery of the drug dealer.
The judge noted that the prosecution had conceded that the evidence had not been disclosed but contended that Ellis was entitled to a hearing on his motion, not a new trial.
She noted that “in reviewing the voluminous documentation and potential leads contained in [Detective Wells’s] notes, and weighing that against the evidence presented at trial, this Court concludes that had Detective Wells's notes been turned over to the defense in a timely manner, there is a reasonable probability that the outcome would have been different.”
On August 9, 2021, Ellis was released pending a possible retrial. In March 2022, Justice Harrington denied a defense motion to dismiss the charges entirely.
Subsequently, Maazel filed a motion on behalf of Lawrence seeking to vacate his conviction based on the undisclosed evidence. “The defense could have pursued leads from four [undisclosed] murder confessions [of] at least 11 suspects,” Maazel said in the motion. “This was a gold mine of information. The [Nassau County Police Department] kept it to themselves.”
On January 19, 2023, acting Nassau County Supreme Court Justice Howard Sturim granted the motion and vacated Lawrence’s conviction.
In January 2025, Ellis went to trial a second time. On January 24, 2025, a jury acquitted Ellis.
At that time, Lawrence was still awaiting a retrial.
Liles, who did not challenge his convictions in the case, was released on parole in February 2021.
- Maurice Possley
Posting Date: 04-22-2025
Last Update Date: 04-22-2025
