#262 Maggie Freleng with Brian Parnell

I have a question for you, Jason fire Away.

You know, sometimes when I talk to people after decades in prison, twenty thirty going on forty something years, how many people have you experienced that do have such a strong support system, like they still have their parents, brothers, sisters, connected with their children that they might have had before prison.

Well, I don't know the percentage, but I can tell you this, For the people that do, it's a literal lifeline. Just knowing that there's people out there that love you, that care about you, that are concerned for your well being. It can be literally the thing that saves people, and it could be the thing that helps to free them.

It's like a gaping hole. It's as if his family has been constrated along with him. In other words, we're doing the time with him.

From love for good is wrongful conviction with Maggie Freeling today Brian Parnell. On August twenty eighth, nineteen ninety seven, Konstantinos Bulius, also known as Gus, finished closing up his two pizza shops in the suburbs of Philadelphia. He went home to his wife, Daphne and two children. Sometime later that night, Daphne woke up to a loud bang. She found Gus lying on the floor, shot in the back. Daphne and her children tried to help and called nine

That was a shock. I was really in shock, Like, oh my.

God, you know, this is like, oh man, I still feel the emotions. I mean, talking about it right now is making me tear of because I don't know if you've ever been accused of something that you know you didn't do, no affiliation with. And I've been living this nightmare for twenty going into my twenty four first year.

Brian Parnell was born in Philadelphia on Valentine's Day, nineteen seventy two, to Corinne and DeAndre Parnell.

Brian Parnell is a very fun, loving kind of guy. He's a family very family orientated above all.

That's how Brian describes himself. He grew up in a large, loving family. His father was a mailman and his mother was a federal law enforcement officer. His parents divorced when he was little, but they worked hard to maintain family harmony.

And I was blessed with very very beautiful parents, not just you know, my biological parents, but also my stepparents. Even though my dad and my mom went through whatever they went through, they never reflected that on us. They made sure we were in, you know, a part of each other's lives. Because my two younger sisters they have a different mother than I do. They made sure we all knew who we are. You know each other and interact with each other. So when I say that we

Brian's sister Tamra remembers this time fondly.

Bryan was always doing something. He had like dogs growing up, reptiles, frogs, fish. He was your normal child. But in being your normal child, he was very caring and concerned. He was compassionate. He had like a imagination that was just out of this world. My mother brought him this red outfit and he would put that outfit on and he would do the Michael Jackson's Billy Jean and then he would do the moon walk, or he had that dance and that song down tag.

Brian's first child, Brian Junior, was born when Brian was twenty five years old.

I used to take him out to the park when we's River Drive and we would go to this old big shop and buy the steel bread and I would take him out there and we would see yeese and that was like one of the most beautifulest things, just to see his mind expand at an early age. You know, being around him, it changed me as a man.

Brian's daughter, Brianna, also brought some surprising changes to his life.

He would do his daughter's hair and I never knew a man to do a little girl's hair, And he would fix her hair and.

It was neat tamrasas. Brian was a great dad, gannaling the love and support his family gave to him onto his children.

My brother was in their life every day until this happened.

By the time Brian Junior, Brianna and his son Cameron were born, Brian was ready to have a career to support his family. He had a dream of opening an automotive shop because he'd always loved cars. He even had his own hot rod, so he enrolled at Lincoln Technical Institute to pursue a career in automotive mechanics. Things for the young dad and future mechanics were going great, that is until September eighteenth, two thousand and one. Brian was at school that morning.

That morning was one of the most hands down craziest mornings of my life. We was setting up in the lab, we was inside the shop, and we was getting ourselves together for that day and principal comes to the door. He's like, far now, I want to see you in

Brian denied any knowledge of the crime or any connection to Gus. Brian explained how he had only been to the town Gus lived in twice in his life. He was cooperative with police.

You know, whatever you want to do. I want to give my hair and my samples up for DNA testing. I offered all of that from the gate that approved my innocence. I'm gonna give it to you.

Despite his efforts to prove his innocence. Brian was arrested and charged with the murder of Gus Boulius and to understand why we have to go back four years to the night of the murder. Almost exactly four years earlier. Gus Bullius arrived home after closing his pizza shop at around two forty am. Gus's wife woke up to the sound of voices in the hallway, a loud bang, the thought of someone falling, footsteps running out the house, and the screen door slamming shut. She ran out of her room,

If nobody else on this planet knows, I know that he was with me that entire night until the next morning.

Brian had an alibi witness. Brian was with his girlfriend at the time, the mother of his child.

This is Mark Howard.

I'm a professor of Government in Law at Georgetown. I'm also the director of the Prisons and Justice Initiative, and I co teach a class informally called Making an x Honery with my childhood friend Marty Tankliffe, who was himself an x honore of course, and we have our students reinvestigate possible wrongful conviction cases and if they feel strongly about it, to advocate for the person's inno sense and exoneration.

The Making an Exonery program created a partnership with Discovery, who carefully reviewed Brian's case and concluded that Brian Parnell did not kill Gus Bullius.

Brian did not know the victim. Brian did not know that part of town. He'd only been there a couple times in his entire life. It was not an area that he frequented. He had zero connection to the victim. He'd never been to the pizza shops. Brian had zero connection to any of that, so then.

Why did the police home in on Brian. At the crime scene, Detective Stone and Beam collected DNA, a sliced window screen in the dining room, hair samples, and several partial fingerprints from the window sill, ledge, and screen, and those fingerprints are what would later lead the police to Brian Parnell. This episode is underwritten by AIG, a leading

It's an approximation. It's humans making judgments based on similarities to their naked eye. So keep that in mind. This is not science, This is really more art.

Fingerprints have to be compared manually by experts. Detective Beam was actually considered the best fingerprint guy in Chester County after just a few FBI training courses in latent print testing. He didn't have an academic or doctorate degree in forensics, and Beam was the sole person left to determine who these prints belonged to.

And again, if prints were partial fingerprints, okay, so they weren't even full fingerprints, they're not good material to make a strong match.

Even if you do have a full print fingerprinting has been more or less debunked as junk science in the world of justice, similar to teeth impressions and fiber comparisons.

And fingerprints have been accepted as evidence in courts for over one hundred years, and people assume that it's reliable.

This is Mary Moriarty, chief public defender in Hennepin County, Minnesota. She's talking to Wrongful Conviction junk Science host Josh Dubin.

You are first looking at a fragment of the print, and it is totally within the subjectivity, the subjective discretion of a fingerprint analysis or examiner to decide whether there is enough information on that print to even go ahead and compare it. So just think about that. It is completely subjective.

The Pennsylvania State Police search for the person who matched the partial prints for over a year. They then concluded the person whose prince they matched was not in their system, and they registered the prince to the Unsolved Latent print database. Now here's the thing. Brian's Prince had been in their system at the time of the murder. He was actually arrested in the past on an unrelated minor charge. Yet

It came completely out of nowhere because it was four years after the crime had taken place.

Detective Beam was determined to close the case. It seems Detective Beam still had the Gus Boulias murder on his mind.

At some point, four years after the crime, at a conference in Miami with the FBI, the detective brings these prints and then asks the FBI to look at them in a database and it comes up potentially being similar to twenty four people. One of those people is Brian Parnell.

Brian's Prince eventually popped up four years later as a potential match among dozens of others when the FBI ran them through their National Integrated Automated Identification System i APHIS database.

But we're talking about a very weak, partial fingerprint that one person who was hell bent on solving this crime, who had a tremendous amount of pressure on him to find somebody, decided this is the guy, and Detective Being just fixates on Brian Parnell from that point forward, doesn't even look at the other twenty three.

Despite testing the hair and DNA found at the scene of the crime, neither of which showed up as a match for Brian, he was arrested.

And I think when he found Brian, it seemed convenient, even though obviously Brian had no motive, didn't know the victim, didn't really go in that area, but he was close enough. I think the fact that Brian's African American likely played a role. The fact that Brian had a previous criminal record, although very minor one. I want to emphasize, no violent crimes, nothing whatsoever. Just a couple minor offenses, and most of

The prosecutor at trial was first Assistant District Attorney Patrick Carmody. At trial, the fact that the DNA and hair samples did not match Brian was a hurdle for him.

So they suddenly developed with this very common as you know in wrongful conviction cases. Oh well, then there must have been a second perpetrator me.

Although there was no effort to ever find the second perpetrator. The prosecution had no murder weapon, no witnesses, no motive, and no connection between Brian and Gus Boulius. Brian was also forty minutes away. The partial fingerprint was the only evidence used against Brian. In fact, during police interviews with Gus's friends, family, and colleagues, they gave the names of multiple people who actually could have committed the crime.

The victim's wife thought that the person knew him and came through the front door. There were a lot of people with motive, with opportunity, people who had talked about killing the victim, people who had grudges against the victim, people who thought the victims stolen money from them.

In fact, according to police reports and interviews, on the day before his murder, Gus told his business partner that he had become aware that a couple of his employees were discussing breaking into his home to rob him. At the time of the murder, there was nearly fifty thousand dollars in cash hidden in the rafters of Gus's home office in his basement, and his colleagues knew about that money.

And the lead detective, Kenneth Beam, for some reason, was fixated on two partial fingerprints on the screen of a window coming into the house and decided that only the person who matched those fingerprints would have committed the crime, and therefore he rejected all these people who were obvious suspects and didn't investigate them because he decided their fingerprints didn't match.

And Prosecutor Carmody ran with this. He was determined to get a conviction after all this time, which allegedly included bribing Brian's alibi witnesses. Here's Brian's ex girl friend, Lakeisha, one of the people he was with that night, talking to someone from Brian's team.

The DA or whoever he was was, asked me all the questions and the police officers were bullying me. Basically, they told me that they would offer me their eight thousand dollars to say that Brian did it a house and witness protection and then I declined, and then they basically told me if I didn't cooperate and do what they wanted to do, they would take away my children.

Now you might be wondering what about Brian's defense and alibi Brian's parents were lucky enough to be able to hire private attorneys. His defense team were lawyers Ronald Joseph Tarik, kareem Elscha Boz and Gerald Aston, and they came highly recommended to Brian by another incarcerated person. But quickly Brian realized they were not going to help him to the extent that he needed.

And I said, I want you to talk to my family, my entire family. And they didn't do none of that. He said, I called him, nobody answered the phone. Said that's not true, because they call you and they tried to sell Oh, I didn't get no calls from your family. I said, that's not true.

They told Brian they were dropping his alibi defense and that meant both alibis, because Brian also had a physical inability to commit this murder the way the police and prosecution said it went down. Police insisted the killer came through the window, but Brian he was on crutches at the time of the murder.

At least a week before the incident and after the incident.

Here's Mark again, and.

There's no way he would have been able to climb through the window when he was on crutches and couldn't walk I mean, it just defies credulity.

But his defense did not bring up his injury or call his alibi witnesses. They did not question the validity of the fingerprints or call their own experts. And alternate suspects were also not presented. So I had to ask Brian, how did that feel?

It hurts, And to be real with you, I said to myself, they're railroad. This is a railroad job, and it's a sloppy rail road job. It's blatant. I'm sorry, it's emotional. I'm sorry if my voice is breaking up, but it hurts.

In First District Attorney Carmody's closing statement, he said, quote, I want to thank mister Parnell for not wearing gloves that day. He gave us the evidence. The defense can't explain away the fingerprints, bottom line, and that's going to convict them, and it did.

The fingerprints are what led to Brian being convicted. A very weak partial fingerprint. So imagine a jury of well intentioned people who are believing law enforcement, believing the evidence coming forward in trial hearing. It's a one hundred percent match that is completely fictitious. It's just outrageous. And the

After only two hours of deliberation, Brian was convicted of second degree murder and burglary on July fifteenth, two thousand and two. He was sentenced to life in prison without parole.

First of all, it was devastation to the entire family.

Here's Brian's sister Tamera again.

It says if his family has been incarcerated along with him, in other words, we didn't do to crime, but we're doing their time with him. It's like a gaping hole. You know, the person still exists, but you can't have regular contact or interaction with them that you normally would have on a day to day basis. It's horrible because you have to try to function as a family unit

And she says Brian's incarceration deeply affected his children, who were so young at the time.

They had a hard time grasping in the beginning that he was away in jail with bars and guards, in a place an institution where we don't have any control over him coming out. Because they didn't understand. They wanted him to come with them when we would go visit at the prison. They wanted him to play with him.

It was also hard for their mother to understand that.

My mom in the beginning, she engulfed herself with this case, Like her dining room table used to stay full of his files and Affidavid's, the whole everything. She had crime scene pictures, everything, and she really studied the case a lot more than any family member. Yeah, it's like, how do you help parents wrap their mind or adjust to the fact that their child has been incarcerated wrongfully, let alone, but for twenty one years you can't.

But it also personally hurt Brian's mom because she was law enforcement and she taught her kids to cooperate and respect the law.

So that's where it becomes a double betrayal for my mom because she's like my children. I raised him. I raised them, and I raised him to be truthful and honest and to cooperate with law enforcement. How do you take incarcerator or make someone guilty of some and fix things to make it like it was they did the crime. So, yeah, that hurts. It's a dagger.

I actually looked at law enforcement officers through the eye of my mother, and when I say I used to have that belief that certain gods would do above and beyond. Don't get me wrong, but there were a lot of good ones out there because of my mother, and that right there is where I try to keep it. I try to keep it still in that realm, because I believe it or not, there are a lot of police officers that really mean and do good. You have a lot of them.

While in prison, Brian has enjoyed studying law and assisting others who are incarcerated with legal work. He's even helped some corrections officers with the law when they were helping their family members. Brian says when he gets out, he wants to advocate for the wrongfully accused, help change the laws that results in mass incarceration. He plans to call his organization home Front.

Me and my son came up with My oldest son came up with the concept of calling it the home front to help family members in my situation. Geared towards parents, siblings, and children, more so, to teach them how to advocate for their family members that's incarcerated.

But at fifty years old. Above all, Brian works every day to prove his innocence so he can get out and be with his growing family.

I have a whole bunch of beautiful nieces and nephews, and I even have now two granddaughters and I have one on the way.

Wow, how old your granddaughters?

The oldest is five and the youngest is two.

After being incarcerated for so long, Brian says, what he's gone through is a nightmare.

I wouldn't wish this on nobody. It's a nightmare to be accused of killing a man. I walk through these walls at this institution day in and day out with the conscience clear because I know I never killed nobody a day in my life.

Brian has filed multiple appeals and they've all been denied. As of two thousand and five, one of Brian's attorneys, Ronald Joseph, was placed on administrative suspension and has not practiced law in Pennsylvania since. Brian is also represented by the Pennsylvania Innocence Project, which is seeking additional testing of evidence. This could result in a DNA profile that could then be uploaded to the national database, and that could be the very thing that finds who actually kills Gus Bulius.

Lot more to it than just being free, because the prison part it was hard, but it's not harder than being thrown back into a big old ocean and you don't know what's in it or what's there no more.

Thank you for listening to Wrongful Conviction with Maggie Freeling. Please support your local innocence organizations and go to the links in our bio to see how you can help. I'd like to thank our executive producers Jason Flamm and Kevin Wurtis, as well as senior producer Annie Chelsea, researcher Lila Robinson, story editor Sonia Paul, with additional production by Jeff Cliburn and Connor Hall. Special thanks go to Mark