The Wrong Man | Chapter 2

THE HUNT BEGINS

A homicide detective promises justice and witnesses are rounded up.

Part 2 of a six-part series. Click here for Chapter 1.

AFTERNOON, JULY 18, 1988

Rochelle and Anthony Yates wrapped up their jobs at the Navy Yard by midafternoon. Life was easier working in the same complex — Rochelle as an administrative secretary, and Anthony, a mechanic. They headed to Southwest Philadelphia, looking forward to picking up their three boys after a sleepover at her mom’s house.

They rolled their Chevy Astro van up Springfield Avenue around 4:15 p.m.

As soon as they rounded the corner, they knew something was wrong. Police cars, blue lights flashing, were parked every which way.

Rochelle stepped out of the car and asked a friend, “What in the world happened?”

The friend, usually all talk, said nothing.

Suddenly, Toney darted through the crowd to his mom. His shirt was soaked in blood.

“Mom! Mom! Marcus and Malcolm got shot!” he cried. “I put my hand in the hole in Marcus’ head to stop the bleeding, but it wouldn’t stop. I couldn’t get it to stop.”

A police officer stepped close.

“Are you Mrs. Yates?”

“Yes,” she said, shaking.

You need to head to the hospital immediately, he said. “Marcus and Malcolm are fighting for their lives.”

Rochelle and Anthony stood frozen, shocked. How could two of their sons be near death?

Just 24 hours earlier, Marcus had wrapped his arms tightly around Rochelle’s legs before he left for the sleepover and said: “I’ll be back. Don’t worry. I’ll be riiiight back, Mom,” giving her a hug and kiss like he did every night.

Rochelle raced through the emergency room doors at Fitzgerald Mercy Hospital.

“You have two of my boys,” she said.

Told they were in separate rooms, she asked, “Which one is worse off?”

“Marcus,” a nurse told her.

In his hospital room, the tubes, wires, and bandages seemed to shrink her youngest son. Monitors rhythmically beeped.

“We kept him alive for you,” a doctor said. “But he’s not going to make it. I’m so sorry.”

To Rochelle, that was the moment the world stopped.

“Can I hold him?” she whispered tearfully.

The nurses unplugged him from life support and Rochelle cradled him like a newborn.

“Mommy’s here now,” she told him, rocking him gently. “Wake up, baby. Wake up. I love you.” He took a deep breath, then … nothing.

She held him closely, stroking his cheek, holding his hand.

“I know what death looks like,” her husband, who had served two tours in Vietnam, told her as he put his arm around her. “Marcus is gone.”

“Don’t you dare say that!” Rochelle said. “He’s just resting. He’s going to come back.”

“We have to go see Malcolm now,” he told her.

“Hold Marcus here for me,” Rochelle told the medical staff. “Don’t let him go.”

They rushed to Malcolm’s side in intensive care. He’d made it through surgery from being shot in his hip and foot. He will survive, the doctors assured them. But one bullet came dangerously close to his spine and he might never walk again.

When she returned to Marcus’ room, his body was gone. It was on its way to the Medical Examiner’s Office, where a forensic pathologist would pick bullet fragments from his brain.

The next time she would see Marcus, he was lying in a white, child-sized coffin, dressed in a suit. His head was so puffy and swollen that he was unrecognizable. She had to turn away.

The Yates Family was home, preparing to bury their boy, when Detective Paul Worrell knocked on the front door. Rochelle Yates guessed he was a cop before he announced himself. He was tall, dressed in a dark suit and tie, with close-cropped hair. He reminded her of Jack Webb, who played Sgt. Joe Friday in Dragnet, the classic police drama.

He told her he was so sorry for her loss, and as lead investigator on the case, he would bring her justice.

Rochelle invited him in and quickly took to him. To her, he would become “kinda like an angel.”

He seemed compassionate, hardworking, and driven. He was on her side.

“We’re going to find these two men if it’s the last thing we do. We’re going to get them. Don’t you worry,” he assured her.

“We’re going to take care of that for you.”

He told her both shooters had fled to New York and were trying to catch a plane to Jamaica, but he would stop them.

That summer, the city was reeling from an unrelenting crack cocaine epidemic and a spike in violence against children.

The week before Marcus was killed, a stray bullet had severed the spinal cord of 6-year-old Ralph Brooks Jr., leaving him paralyzed from the waist down. And the body of 4-year-old Barbara Jean Horn was found stuffed in a cardboard box a few blocks from her home in Northeast Philadelphia.

The heat was on high for homicide detectives.

Worrell had been a Philadelphia police officer for 16 years, a detective since 1985 and in homicide for a year. He and his colleagues worked out of Police Headquarters at Eighth and Race, a curved, concrete, double-barreled building that resembled the shape of handcuffs. It was known universally as the Roundhouse.

The Homicide Division was a grid of metal desks littered with paperwork, stained coffee mugs, dirty ashtrays, and clunky touch-tone desk phones that rang nonstop.

The day of the shooting, around 6:30 p.m., Worrell’s colleagues brought Christopher DuncanSon of candy store owner Ruby Duncan to the Roundhouse. He sat in Room 104 with Detective Charles Brown, a 26-year veteran who had been in homicide for 11 years.

“You’re a suspect in this shooting,” Brown told Duncan.

“There’s a possibility you could be arrested and charged with murder,” Brown said.

Duncan, 23, who had only gone as far as 10th grade, was flustered. But he told Brown in detail what he’d seen leading up to the shooting:

XavierStanfordson Xavier, a drug dealer who pulled up outside the candy store drove up in a brown 1978 Buick with “another guy in the car, but I don’t know the guy. I’ve never seen him before.”

Inside the candy store, Baby DonIke Johnson, aka Donovan “Baby Don” Grant, a drug dealer who spent most days near the store got into an argument with the guy, and the guy slapped the bottle out of Baby Don’s hand and punched him, Duncan said.

“The dude pulled his gun out and Baby Don pulled his gun out, too, and that’s when they started firing.”

Worrell stepped into the room and took over the questioning.

Where were Baby Don and “the dude” standing when they started shooting?

The dude stood closer to the doorway and Baby Don was near the counter, Duncan replied.

“Are you saying that it was just Baby Don and this unknown dude that did all the shooting inside your mom’s store?”

“Yes, sir,” Duncan replied.

“Did you do any shooting and have a gun in your hand?”

“No, sir.”

At a little before 6 a.m. the next day, detectives picked up Gaynor’sMichael Gaynor lived near the candy store girlfriend, Ann Marie Mills, to question her at the Roundhouse.

Mills was petrified.

She had arrived in the United States from Jamaica not much more than a month earlier. She was only 19, and hadn’t finished high school. She landed her first job as a cocktail waitress at a Trump casino in Atlantic City, where she had met Gaynor. They’d only been dating a few weeks.

She’d been in Philadelphia about a week and was at a mall with Gaynor’s sister at the time of the shooting, she told detectives. They had driven Gaynor’s car and parked it on Trinity Street when they returned.

They asked her about Gaynor. “He’s such a nice guy to me. He treats me good,” she told them.

“What do you know about the murder of the little boy who was murdered inside the store?” one of the detectives asked.

“I don’t know what happened,” she said. “But I know Michael. He’s innocent. He’s not guilty.”

They kept pummeling her with questions. She repeated over and over that she knew nothing.

She asked if she could leave. “I just wanted to go. I was so nervous,” she would later say.

If she signed the statement, she could go, they told her.

“I wasn’t a good reader,” she would later say. “I couldn’t read proper English.”

“I just signed. I didn’t read.”

Years later, a reporter would obtain a copy of the typed statement and read it to her over the phone. It said that Gaynor had told her he’d been in the candy store playing a pinball machine when a guy walked in and called him a “pussy.” The man started shooting at him, and Gaynor, hiding behind the pinball machine, fired back. After Marcus got shot, both he and the other man fled.

Mills gasped. “This is all made up. This is all lies,” she said. “I swear on my life, I said nothing like that. Michael said nothing like this to me.”

Read next chapter

Philadelphia detectives, pressured to crack a high-profile case, broke the rules interrogating two murder suspects | Chapter 3

The murder of 5-year-old Marcus Yates shook the city. Now, 36 years later, his mother is on a mission to free his convicted killer.

VIDEO

How did a mom discover the wrong man was in prison for her son’s murder? Listen to her story.

The Inquirer launched its own investigation and discovered that Michael Gaynor, who has served 36 years in prison for Marcus Yates' murder, was indeed the wrong man.