The Wrong Man | Chapter 1

THE SHOOTING

A story of deception and redemption: The high-profile murder of a 5-year-old boy — and his mother’s quest to free his convicted killer.

Part 1 of a six-part series.

It was a wintry night in 2020, shortly before the pandemic would upend the world, and Rochelle Yates was thrashing back and forth under bedsheets and blankets.

She’d struggled in anguish for years, but in recent months had hit a tipping point. If she finally drifted off to sleep, she’d jolt awake in a clammy sweat from a recurring nightmare of her son, cold and limp, dying in her arms.

More than three decades had passed since 5-year-old Marcus Yates was killed, shot in the head, when he was trapped with 10 other kids between two men blasting guns at each other in a cramped candy store in Southwest Philadelphia on a sticky July afternoon.

The murder had gripped the attention of a crime-worn city like no other. A street would be renamed for him. His snatched young life popularized the phrase “caught in the crossfire,” and angry residents, stirred up by relentless TV coverage, demanded that the Police Department quickly lock up the killers.

Since 1990, Michael Gaynor and Ike Johnson have been serving life sentences with no parole in separate Pennsylvania prisons. Yates thought having them locked up would have given her peace.

It hadn’t. She felt entombed in her own prison, one so suffocating she once tried to kill herself.

It was close to 2 a.m. when she rolled out of bed, pulled on a robe in the dark, and tiptoed to her desk in the bedroom corner. Kevin, the well-worn Cabbage Patch doll that Marcus had taken everywhere, even on the back of his Big Wheel, sat on her desk, along with her favorite photo of her son.

A voice she heard in a dream that night was telling her the path she had to take.

She opened her laptop and wrote a letter to Gaynor, one of the convicted killers whose name stuck in her mind for years:

“In my heart I believe that I have forgiven you. But I need to know for sure. The only way to know this is for me to meet you face to face …”

COVID-19 would put all visits on hold. It wouldn’t be until spring 2024 that she would meet with Gaynor and Johnson, separately, via a prison Zoom call.

She came away aghast, barely able to speak.

The police account of the murder – the one she held in her heart for so long – was false, built on lies and deception.

Nothing was how it had seemed.

MORNING, JULY 18, 1988

Marcus Yates and his two brothers woke up at their grandmother’s house in Southwest Philadelphia, the day after a rollicking sleepover.

Children couldn’t help but have fun at Rosetta Talton’s place, which bubbled with energy all day long.

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.

A retired boutique owner who used to sell church dresses and felt hats with feathers and lace, Miss T, as she was known in the neighborhood, had also cared for foster kids for years. Even without blood ties, her grandsons, Toney, Malcolm, and Marcus Yates, considered them cousins.

After lunch, three of Miss T’s foster kids were playing double Dutch outside her home on Springfield Avenue near 60th Street. It was easy to frolic out front, in the shadow of Miss T’s baby blue hearse-long Ford station wagon parked at the curb. The block was lengthy, the sidewalk wide, and most houses had small patches of grass, and concrete front porches cordoned off with wrought iron railings.

A little after 3 p.m., the children scampered into the living room, where Miss T was watching General Hospital. They asked if they could walk six houses down to Duncan’s Variety and Grocery store on the corner, as they did almost every summer day.

“Sure,” she said. “Just watch out for each other.”

Lately, Miss T and her neighbors in this working-class pocket of Southwest Philadelphia, near Kingsessing, had felt somewhat uneasy. Around 1985, after the federal government had focused on quashing the heroin influx, drug kingpins discovered they could make huge profits by selling vials of highly addictive crack cocaine for cheap in urban, mostly poor communities of color.

The high from smoking crack was so fast and intense that users said after that first hit, they were always “chasing the ghost.” Mid- and low-level dealers took root here, as they did in other on-the-brink Philadelphia neighborhoods, pocketing hundreds in cash every day.

Miss T and other parents were alert, not yet fearful. There were no gun battles on the streets, so they went about living life.

Duncan’s, “the candy store” to the kids, was a neighborhood fixture. Owner Ruby Duncan had retired after working almost two decades as a nurse’s aide at the University of Pennsylvania, and the small, brick corner store kept her busy.

She loved watching carefree kids slip coins into the video games inside, while out on the sidewalk her Jamaican neighbors played dominos on folding tables with joyful reggae music blasting from a boombox.

Duncan had moved with her husband and nine children to Philadelphia from the island, joining a tight-knit community, many of them from Duhaney Park and other nearby neighborhoods in Kingston.

The three Yates brothers and the other kids from Miss T’s headed to the candy store just before 3:30 p.m on July 18.

At 11, Toney was the oldest. Never bored, he was always playing something, had lots of friends, never gave his parents lip, and felt responsible for his brothers. At 6, Malcolm was the serious, quiet one, Toney’s shadow.

Then there was 5-year-old Marcus, the youngest, a mama’s boy, the life of any party, a daredevil who would jump off stair banisters and wrestle his brothers. The three boys shared a bedroom, and would always invent their own games. They would tightly stretch a bedspread from the top bunk and race Matchbox cars down the hill.

They crammed into the tiny store with the low-slung ceiling. The L-shaped counter took up almost two walls. Penny candy, sodas, cigarettes, detergent, and snacks were stacked on shelves behind a counter shielded by plexiglass.

Three video games, Rush’n Attack, Pac-Man, and Alcon, stood flush against another wall. The open space was about 6.5 feet by 10 feet, so most of the children were within arm’s length. Ruby Duncan was stationed at the cash register watching The Guiding Light on a small TV.

Barely able to reach the joystick or buttons, Marcus pretended to play Pac-Man. Malcolm, with a quarter in his pocket, eyed the candy. Toney toyed with the video games.

Outside, trouble approached.

On a pay phone by the store’s front door stood Ike Johnson, also known as Donovan Grant, whose street name was “Baby Don.” Johnson was a drug dealer, a member of the Shower Posse, a Jamaican drug operation that got its name for spraying rivals in a shower of bullets. Baby Don, a mainstay in Southwest Philadelphia, often was found in one of the apartments across the street in a large, three-story home.

Another drug dealer, Stanfordson “Stan” Xavier, pulled up outside in a brown 1978 Buick with tinted windows.

Xavier called out to a man he recognized from Rikers Island prison in New York, standing in the doorway. They both had been locked up a few years back, each serving time for robbery and weapons violations.

“Hey, Harbor!” Xavier called out. Harbor, in Philadelphia from New York, who was about 5-foot-6 with sideburns and a green crocheted Rasta hat, jumped in the passenger seat and rolled the window down.

Xavier knew him only by his street name. Harbor, pronounced “Abba” by his Jamaican acquaintances, was an enigma in Philly. No one seemed to know his real name.

Johnson, still on the phone, saw Harbor staring at him. “Hey batty boy, what you looking at?” Johnson said, using a Jamaican slur.

“I’ll look where I want to look!” Harbor retorted.

Johnson slipped inside a house across from the store and returned with a beat-up .380-caliber pistol he’d bought a month earlier on the street for $20, and hid it in the pocket of his red-and-white shorts. He walked inside the candy store to grab a pineapple soda.

Harbor and Xavier went around the corner to a two-story rowhouse on Trinity Street, home base for a number of street dealers and their friends. Harbor, on a mission, went inside with Xavier.

Michael Gaynor, a slender, 6-foot, clean-shaven man, was watching The Jetsons on TV.

Gaynor moved to New York from Jamaica with his family in 1982 at age 15. He wanted to enlist in the Army after high school, but instead was impressed by the flashy drug dealer lifestyle and came to Southwest Philly in 1987 to sell vials of crack as a low-level dealer. He was not known to carry a gun or even use drugs. He just “loved the green,” his friends said.

Harbor didn’t talk to Gaynor but instead got a gun in a paper bag from someone else in the house, then tucked it in his waistband.

Minutes later, outside the store, Xavier was chatting with Christopher Duncan, or “Jumbo,” son of the store owner. Christopher Duncan lived above the store and knew practically everyone in the neighborhood.

Duncan saw Harbor, looking angry, head to the store. He knew Johnson was already inside with a gun, spotting a telltale bulge under his T-shirt near his shorts pocket. He knew the two men had already had words, and warned Xavier, “Something bad is going to happen.”

Even so, Duncan went inside and stood near the door.

Moments later, at around 3:50, Harbor came in. “Weren’t you the one outside that start talking all that shit?” he yelled at Johnson, inches from his face.

“Please, y’all big guys. Cut this out,” Ruby Duncan implored from behind the counter.

“Everything is OK, Miss Duncan,” Johnson said.

Harbor slapped the soda bottle out of Johnson’s hand and punched him in the left side of his face. Johnson lost his balance. The bottle shattered on the floor and Harbor pointed his gun at him while backing up a few steps to the doorway.

Malcolm, Marcus, and Micha McCode, one of Miss T’s foster kids, were in the open, closer to the door, between Harbor and Johnson.

Nowhere to run.

Harbor aimed at Johnson and pulled the trigger. Johnson, trying to shelter behind the Pac-Man machine, returned fire.

At the first shot, Christopher Duncan bolted out of the store. He peered through the window and saw the horror unfold.

Gunshots exploded like a barrage of fireworks trapped in a closet.

“Don’t hurt the children! Stop it!” Ruby Duncan screamed.

His eyes frozen wide, Marcus darted in circles, not knowing where to go. Toney, who took cover between the tall video game machines, yelled, “Get down, Marcus!”

Marcus dropped to his knees, then went down on his side, landing on the faded blue linoleum floor.

Good boy, Marcus, Toney told himself.

Malcolm, who felt burning pain in his foot, dropped at the same time. Micha was on the floor, too.

Blood oozed from Marcus’ head. For a second, Toney froze; then he crept on his stomach to Marcus and pushed his small, shaking fingers into the hole in Marcus’ head. Blood seeped through anyway.

Harbor, in the doorway, glared at Toney and pointed the handgun at his head. Toney stared at the gun barrel and thought he was going to die.

Click. The gun jammed and Harbor fled the store.

Toney sprinted out with other children to his grandmother’s house to call 911.

Malcolm tried to run, too, but once outside he stumbled. He’d been shot in the foot and hip. Unable to walk, he crawled and made it only across the street, then collapsed on the hot sidewalk.

Children screamed, one after another: “Marcus got shot! Marcus got shot!” Micha ran home, sobbing. He sank into the couch, not realizing he, too, had been hit until blood started to seep out of his sneaker.

Miss T, hearing the shots from her living room, tore down the street. She found Malcolm lying on the sidewalk, wounded but alive. There’s another child in the store, someone told her, and she turned.

“Miss T, don’t go in there,” a neighbor warned.

Inside, she saw her grandson, his head resting in a pool of his own blood.

When the police arrived, Miss T cried out: “Please don’t let my baby die.”

With no time to wait for an ambulance, officers carried Malcolm, Marcus, and Micha to a police wagon and sped to the closest hospital, Fitzgerald Mercy in Darby, 2.5 miles away.

Micha and Malcolm were bumping around on a metal bench, both crying. Marcus lay on a stretcher in front of them. An officer tried to steady the boys so they wouldn’t slide off while he pressed a towel against Marcus’ head wound.

Marcus’ eyes were open but full of blood. He focused on Malcolm, trying to get out either “Malcolm” or “Mom.” No words would come.

After hearing the commotion from the candy store, Gaynor walked outside to chaos. Police cruisers and news trucks blocked the streets. Neighbors mingled, some crying, as they whispered the names of the children who had been in the store.

Gaynor felt sick when he heard kids had been shot, and later that one died.

Meanwhile, Johnson flagged down a Yellow Cab and went to his house on Cleveland Street in South Philadelphia. At 5:30 p.m., he learned from TV news that Marcus had died.

The next morning, he took a train to New York.

Police Commissioner Willie Williams arrived in Kingsessing and urged neighbors not to take the law into their own hands. “Let the Police Department handle it,” he said. “We are as concerned as anyone, and we are better equipped to handle the situation.”

By then, Harbor had found his way to the two-bedroom apartment in Yeadon where he stayed with his wife, Valdene “Sharon” Morgan Jacobs, and their young son. In a strange twist, Sharon had rented the house from Ruby Duncan’s daughter, Charmaine, two months earlier. As kids, the two women had lived around the corner from each other in Jamaica and had gone to the same high school.

“We gotta leave,” Harbor told his wife of three years.

They fled Philadelphia within days.

They took the apartment keys, leaving the front door unlocked. Sharon didn’t tell Charmaine she had to slip away.

Days after the murder, a mutual friend told Charmaine that Sharon wanted her to know she was sorry, but she had to leave “right away.”

They wouldn’t speak for decades.

Harbor was on the run.

Read next chapter

When Marcus Yates was shot dead, Philly homicide detectives promised to find the 5-year-old’s killers — and fast | Chapter 2

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.