On Tuesday morning — at 9:25 a.m. to be exact — the RFT reported that city prosecutors were dismissing first-degree murder charges against Dejuan Allen, a 25-year-old who was first charged almost six years ago, when he was 19. Allen had spent five of the last six years in the City Justice Center.
Both Lin and Lisa Woods say they took note of the article's timestamp when a relative sent them the article later that day. Lisa is the mother of Kendrick Woods, 19, who Allen was accused of killing. Lin is Kendrick's aunt. At 9:30 a.m. Tuesday they had a meeting with the prosecutor's office in which they were told about the case against Kendrick's alleged killer being dismissed. The timing smarted.
"The word was out there, knowledge that this was being officially dismissed, was out there before the family was even notified," Lin says.
It was far from the first time the Woods family has felt left out of the loop when it comes to the now abandoned case against their son’s alleged killer.
Before Kendrick's death on December 2, 2017, Lisa says her son was a typical 19-year-old trying to find himself. He grew up in the city's Gate District and College Hill neighborhoods, graduated from Roosevelt High School and took courses at St. Louis Community College - Forest Park. He worked part time at Penn Station and made music on the side. A search of court records turns up no criminal history.
On the night of December 2, Kendrick was with three friends going to one of their homes on DeTonty in the Shaw neighborhood. According to Lisa, when Kendrick was on the house's back porch, two other men "appeared out of nowhere dressed in black clothing," and one fatally shot Kendrick. Both men then fled.
Lisa says that the first call she got from police told her that her son had been in an accident. She remembers her first thought was, "Who was driving?" It was until she, along with Lin, were at the police station downtown that an officer said they all needed to go to the morgue.
"That's how we found out," Lin recalls.
Within a few weeks, Allen was charged in Kendrick’s shooting. But after that, the case became an ordeal that dragged on for years. One prosecutor handed the case off to the next. The Woods say updates were sporadic. Years later, as part of his effort to remove St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner, who ran the prosecutor’s office for all but the final months of the case against Allen, Attorney General Andrew Bailey would cite Gardner’s failure to "inform and confer with" victims and their families.
In one instance, in the months leading up to Allen's trial, the Woods say they were told that Assistant Circuit Attorney Sai Chigurupati was handing the case off to another prosecutor. However, the same week the Woods were informed of this, they saw on the news that the new prosecutor was leaving the office all together. Chigurupati took the case back over.
The trial of Allen came amid what was essentially the nadir of Gardner’s tenure. It took place over three days in early May, about two weeks before Gardner resigned and at a time when the office was hemorrhaging prosecutors.
In the end, the crux of the case against Allen rested on two witnesses, one of whom it would later be reported by KSDK lacked credibility and did not actually witness the shooting. During the trial, Lin got a text from a third potential witness saying she was too scared to testify. "The [prosecutor] is not good enough," the text read. "If he gets charged they're coming after me."
Both Woods say that Allen's defense attorney, Paul Sims, repeatedly cast the other person with Allen that night as the shooter who killed Kendrick. But when that person took the stand, he denied it.
After three days, the jury failed to reach a verdict.
The trial received scant coverage amid the collapse of Gardner's office. One of the only exceptions was a KSDK article, which quoted a juror as saying Chigurupati "looked very nervous the whole time. It was just terrible."
The Woods don't disagree with the assessment, but they don't blame Chigurupati either.
"I am in no way blaming Sai for doing his job to the best of his ability. I fault all the prosecuting attorneys that abandoned the job," says Lisa.
At the time, after an exodus of staff, Chigurupati was the last remaining prosecutor in the office's Violent Crimes Unit.
The Woods say they were dealt an additional indignity on the day of the non-verdict. When the jury went out to deliberate, the Woods say they were ushered across the street to a different building and were told that when the jury was ready to announce their decision, someone would come and get them.
However, when the jury read the verdict in court, no one alerted the Woods.
"We missed everything," Lisa says. "They left us sitting over there."
Judge Scott Millikan declared a mistrial, Allen was set free on bond and everything seemed to be headed for a second round. But the office was getting new leadership, too. After Gardner quit, the governor appointed a new circuit attorney. Prosecutors came back into the office. Experienced attorneys joined the office as special assistants.
One of those special assistants was Gordon Ankney, the sixth prosecutor to take on the Allen case, by Lin and Lisa's count.
When Lisa and Lin went to meet at the circuit attorney's office on Tuesday, it was Ankney who they met with.
Lin describes Ankney as "easygoing." During their conversation, one of the major themes Lin says Ankney, an attorney with 40-plus years of experience, kept hitting on was that if he'd been a part of the case from the start, there were many things he would have done differently.
In a statement given to the RFT earlier this week by the Circuit Attorney's Office, spokeswoman Christine Bertelson said that after Gabe Gore was appointed circuit attorney, the Allen case was assigned to a special assistant circuit attorney for review and that ultimately, dismissal was recommended.
"The dismissal of this case reflects a decision reached following an application of the Office’s rigorous process," Bertelson said.
According to the Woods, the two people who had previously been witnesses in the case left town, in part out of fear related to their testimony, and Lisa says it's her understanding there were difficulties in getting them to come back to testify again. She believes that played into prosecutors' decision.
"They want to clear these cases from the docket," says Lin. "I think they mentioned maybe 500 cases they want to clear, so If the witness is going to require a little bit more work to locate…"
Her sister finishes the thought, "They're not going to put any money or effort into it."
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