Philly DA is investigating the 1988 murder of Marcus Yates — subject of The Inquirer’s ‘The Wrong Man’ series

The Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office is investigating the decades-old murder of 5-year-old Marcus Yates to determine whether one of the two men locked up since 1988 was wrongfully convicted.

The Inquirer’s six-part investigative narrative, “The Wrong Man,” published Dec. 10, uncovered evidence that Michael Gaynor was not the gunman or even in the Southwest Philadelphia candy store where a July 1988 shootout between two men took the boy’s life. The newspaper series was based on thousands of pages of court transcripts and police paperwork, 21 witness statements, and interviews with more than four dozen people.

The Inquirer determined that Paul Jacobs, also known as Peter J. Jacobs, a career criminal known to his associates in Philly only as “Harbor,” was the gunman who fired several times from the doorway, then fled after Marcus was shot in the head. His older brother, Malcolm, and another boy were wounded.

District Attorney Larry Krasner and investigators in the office’s Conviction Integrity Unit (CIU) met recently for almost three hours with the Yates family and State Sen. Anthony Hardy Williams, who has known the family since Marcus’ death, a tragedy that inspired him to enter public service.

Krasner declined to comment for this article, but the Yates family and Williams said they are encouraged that justice may prevail. Since last summer, when Marcus’ mom, Rochelle Yates-Whittington, met with both men convicted of killing her son, she has been convinced Gaynor is innocent.

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

Philadelphia homicide detectives did not seriously search for Jacobs, who was born in Jamaica and had lived in New York and Los Angeles. When asked about Harbor as a suspect during Gaynor’s trial for murder, lead detective Paul Worrell said: “I had investigated that name early on in the investigation. … That name was a nickname. That name has never been attached to any human being that is in my capability to find nor within the New York Police Department’s capability to find. Our determination was that person did not exist.”

Krasner told the Yates family and Williams that the office already has some files on the case but has also sought documents from the FBI, U.S. immigration officials, and law enforcement authorities in New York and Los Angeles, according to Yates-Whittington.

“Krasner is taking this case very seriously,” Williams said in an interview. “… I think he feels responsible for making sure that the review of these cases is irrefutable. He is very clear that he has to make sure that he is exonerating those who need to be.”

For that, Yates-Whittington is grateful.

For years, she was convinced that Gaynor and Ike Johnson were the two men responsible for taking her son’s life.

But as the years passed, she said, she found herself tormented by the tragedy and believed she could find peace only by telling the two men she forgave them.

After she met with each of them in prison video calls, she no longer believed the police and prosecutors’ account of the crime, and told her family Gaynor was not guilty.

In a quest to free him, she called the district attorney’s office last summer, but said she did not hear back. After “The Wrong Man” was published and a meeting with the DA was set up, she learned the office had been looking into it.

“Krasner allowed me to tell my story, my journey, and share everything that was in my heart,” she said.

“I told him how painful it would be if my son was sitting there in prison for 36 years for something he didn’t do. I told him I was adamant. [Gaynor] can’t get those 36 years back, but I want him to be able to see his 87-year-old mother before she dies.”

Delores Edmond, Gaynor’s mom, who lives in the Bronx, was relieved to hear the district attorney’s office is looking into her son’s case. “I‘m so very happy. I just want to see him and have him home before I pass.”

“That’s such good news,” Gaynor’s sister, Annette Campbell, added. “I want to see my brother get out.”

The convictions of 48 people have been overturned since Krasner took office in January 2018, according to his office’s data. Many have resulted in civil lawsuits with large jury verdicts or settlements. Last April, a jury awarded $16 million to James Dennis, whose murder conviction was overturned after he spent 25 years on death row — the largest wrongful-conviction payout in city history. In 2023, the city settled three unrelated wrongful-conviction cases for a combined $25 million.

If police and prosecutors had information favorable to Gaynor that wasn’t turned over to the defense and would likely have resulted in jurors reaching a different verdict, a lawyer for Gaynor could file a Post Conviction Relief Act petition with the court to try to vacate the conviction.

Many of the cases that have been overturned date back to the 1980s and 1990s, when police misconduct, fabricated statements, abuse of suspects, coerced confessions, and withholding of exculpatory material from defense lawyers were not unusual.

On the afternoon of July 18, 1988, Marcus was trapped inside Duncan’s Variety and Grocery store in Southwest Philadelphia with 10 other children when two men blasted guns at each other inside the tiny store where children played on three video games and eyed penny candy.

Marcus died at the hospital later that day.

Gaynor lived around the corner from the store and was a low-level crack dealer. As part of the investigation, police had seized a number of cars parked near the store, among them Gaynor’s 1988 Nissan 300ZX. Four days after the shooting, he called the police to claim his car and spoke to Worrell, lead investigator on the case, who told him to come to Police Headquarters at Eighth and Race Streets.

Worrell took Gaynor into an interrogation room and told him that he knew he was one of the shooters. Gaynor insisted that he wasn’t, that he hadn’t even been in the candy store.

Worrell repeatedly put a plastic bag over Gaynor’s head, cutting off his air to try to obtain a confession, Gaynor later said.

When contacted by a reporter, Worrell, now retired, would not talk about Gaynor’s allegations. A jury found Gaynor guilty of killing a little boy, he said. “I hope Michael Gaynor rots in jail.”

Hours after his interrogation, Gaynor was charged with murder. Police arrested a second gunman, Ike Johnson, also known as Donovan “Baby Don” Grant, in the Bronx 11 days after the shooting.

Witnesses identified Johnson as one of the shooters, but told police Gaynor was not there.

» READ MORE: What to know about our six-part Marcus Yates murder investigation, ‘The Wrong Man’

Ruby Duncan, the store owner, who was behind the cash register at the time, repeatedly told Worrell that Gaynor, whom she knew from the neighborhood, was not in the store, testimony and statements show. Duncan has since died.

Another witness, Stanfordson “Stan” Xavier, told police the other shooter was a man he knew only by his street name: Harbor. Xavier said when he pulled up to the store in a brown Buick, he recognized Harbor standing in the doorway. The two men had been locked up a few years back in Rikers Island prison in New York.

At the time, Johnson was outside on a pay phone and saw Harbor staring at him.

“Hey, batty boy, what you looking at?” Johnson said, using Jamaican slang.

“I’ll look where I want to look,” Harbor replied.

Inside the store a few minutes later, Harbor slapped a soda out of Johnson’s hand and punched him in the face. Harbor backed up a few steps towards the door and fired a handgun. Johnson, who also had a gun, returned shots.

Duncan’s son, Christopher, who witnessed the shooting, initially told police that the gunmen were Johnson and the passenger in Xavier’s car. In later statements, his account took a 180-degree turn, and he fingered Gaynor at the preliminary hearing.

But shortly afterward, he told his family and Gaynor’s lawyer that he lied because police had threatened him, beat him, held him for five days, and told him they could implicate him in the murder. Duncan has since died.

Gaynor’s girlfriend at the time, Ann Marie Mills, 19, signed a statement for police that Gaynor had told her he’d been in the candy store when a guy walked in, insulted him, and shot at him, so Gaynor fired back.

Mills told a reporter that when detectives interrogated her, she was new to the United States from Jamaica, hadn’t finished high school, and didn’t read well. She was petrified and just wanted to leave. Detectives told her she could go if she signed a statement, she said, so she did, not knowing what it said.

When a reporter read her the statement last fall, she gasped. “This is all lies,” she said. Prosecutors did not call her to testify at trial.

In South Los Angeles, Harbor was shot multiple times and died March 12, 1996, at the age of 34. The medical examiner’s office listed his name as Peter J. Jacobs.

He is buried in a mausoleum in Nassau Knolls Cemetery in Port Washington, N.Y., named “Harbor of Peace.”