[static whirs]
Downloaded from YTS.MX
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Official YIFY movies site: YTS.MX
- Here, here, here, here.
He's here. - Okay, you got him?
- Yeah, he's here. He's here, he's here.
- I'd hit play.
- I got one officer down. I got one officer down.
Police. Send the medics over here.
- They're coming, they're coming, they're coming.
[sirens approaching]
- This another officer? - [shouting indistinctly]
- Don't worry.
- Oh, my God.
- Sean, no! Sean!
[indistinct radio chatter]
Sean!
- Don't worry. - Sean! Sean!
Sean! - Do you have the description?
- No, I don't have a description.
- I need Foxtrot, I need Foxtrot.
I need that unit medic right now.
- Sean!
[dramatic music]
- Hold on, hold on. Get his legs, get his legs.
- We should wait for the medic. [indistinct radio chatter]
- Transport him in a car. Officer's down.
Officer down. [indistinct]
We got to transport.
- We got any suspect information?
- I didn't see anyone.
- Sean was calling me to come over here,
and I came around the corner, and shots were fired.
I was watching the other side.
♪ ♪
- Come on, bud, what happened?
- We were watching 'cause we thought
we saw someone in the alley. - Uh-huh.
- Sean was covering that corner,
and I was covering over there.
All of a sudden, Sean called me over.
As I was running around the corner,
he started firing, and as he started firing,
Sean fell.
I didn't even see where the shots were coming from.
- Did you fire? - I did not fire.
- Okay, okay.
♪ ♪
- Baltimore City Police Detective Sean Suiter has died.
- A man who protected this city for nearly two decades.
- Suspicious killing of a police officer
roiling the city of Baltimore.
- A father of five.
- Someone who gave his life in the line of duty.
[siren wails]
- Everybody in a bad spot, let's get covered.
[indistinct radio chatter]
- Just before 5:00, our 18-year veteran
homicide detective was shot in the head.
- Officer's gun and officer's radio back there.
- They were investigating a murder.
They observed a man engaged in suspicious behaviors.
Detective Suiter got out of his car,
badge displayed on his waistband.
- There was no eyewitness to the shooting.
- Suiter was gunned down in the violent Harlem Park area.
- His partner was around the corner, shots rang out.
♪ ♪
- This ain't "Law & Order"
where they find a gun every episode.
You got to work for that shit.
♪ ♪
- We have notoriously one of the most corrupt
police forces in the country.
- I hope they looking for the truth.
I want the truth.
- He was shot in the head. How did this happen?
Who did it?
- Officer down.
♪ ♪
- There are a myriad of things that could have taken place.
I can theorize.
Pshh, it's Baltimore, don't be surprised
about anything that takes place here.
all: We want justice! We want justice!
- Sean deserves... all: Justice!
- Sean deserves...
- ♪ Tired of being strong ♪
♪ In the face of wrong ♪
♪ I'm looking for the answers ♪
♪ Nobody givin' chances ♪
♪ Tired of being strong ♪
♪ In the face of wrong ♪
♪ I'm looking for the answers ♪
♪ Nobody givin' chances ♪
♪ Oh, nobody givin' chances ♪
♪ Oh ♪
♪ Nobody givin' chances ♪
- Without Sean, life's been different.
Very different.
But, you know, even the strong get weak sometimes.
Everybody always say, "You strong,
you strong, you strong,"
but...
I'm not as strong as everybody think I am.
Especially losing your husband
after 17 years being together,
that's tough.
- [smooching]
Give me my kiss.
Mwah!
Give me my kiss. Kissy, kissy.
Mwah!
[keys clacking]
- In Baltimore City,
you can be the most credible person in the world
and have a video of Sean Suiter
actually being murdered,
and you could take that to the cops,
and they probably still wouldn't arrest
whoever murdered that man
or however that situation happened.
It would be hard for me to believe
that somebody can penetrate the system with facts.
Baltimore doesn't work like that.
- The Commissioner addressed
whether the suspect used detective Suiter's
own gun to shoot him,
saying nothing has been ruled out.
Ballistic tests on shell casings recovered in the area
show they're all from a departmental service weapon,
which was the only gun recovered at the scene.
- That doesn't mean that there wasn't a second gun
at that scene as well.
- From the beginning of how this thing was reported,
we just sensed foul play.
- ...about the possibility that someone...
- I saw Twitter blowing up.
- ...gunshot wound that may have been related, but...
- So I'm an editor at Salon.com.
And I really wanted to figure out
who murdered Detective Suiter and why.
What developed for me out of the whole story
is this whole idea of Black lives really don't matter.
Like, even if you're a police officer, they really don't.
This Suiter thing happening in my hometown
made it extremely urgent for me,
because if a police officer cannot be treated fairly,
imagine how they would treat a person like me.
- I'm chillin' on the steps. For what?
What are you touching me for?
- Oh, my God. - What the fuck?
Hey, yo, what the fuck? [indistinct shouting]
- ♪ It ain't no sunshine around my motherfuckin' way ♪
♪ I know you heard that they killed Freddie Gray ♪
♪ The other day ♪
♪ That's why they got us out here prayin' ♪
♪ Like some fuckin' slaves ♪
- Sean Suiter's death occurred
when this police department is still very much reeling
from the 2015 uprising over the death of Freddie Gray.
♪ ♪
They're unable to stop crime in the city.
Crime was at a three-year, nonstop spike.
You know, just a lack of trust in this police department
and its ability to investigate a crime
and tell the truth about an investigation of a crime.
- It does happen in the midst of this massive corruption,
of this huge scandal.
♪ ♪
One of the worst police corruption cases
in recent American history.
Mind-blowing.
Mind-blowing!
♪ ♪
- This is a police department
that was very much on the ropes.
In a way, you know, a hero's funeral for a fallen officer
was a change of pace.
It offered a time to appreciate
what police officers do every day,
to hold up an officer who gave his life in the line of duty
trying to investigate a crime.
♪ ♪
It was an awful thing that happened,
but as far as the narrative is concerned,
all the shit that the Baltimore Police Department was taking,
suddenly, people were focused on hardworking cop
losing his life in the line of duty.
- Detective Sean Suiter lived and died a hero.
- The funeral was-- it was huge.
I think it was too much for him,
more than what he would like,
'cause he's not into all the fluff and frill.
- You've taught me so many things,
like how to love myself, family values,
and how to remain calm in some of the toughest situations.
One thing we didn't get to go over was how to handle this.
- I was heartbroken,
losing a partner, losing a friend.
Hell, the day that he was killed,
he looked at us and was like,
"All right, man, let me go out on the street
and try to find this witness."
And I was looking around like, "Okay, I'll go out with you."
He was like, "No, you're gonna rush me."
So I left, 'cause he knew I had to go
and pick my son up from school.
So he was dedicated, and that was the last--
last I spoke with him from there.
He was a good guy.
He was a good person.
That smile radiated before he opened the door.
That laughter came through
right as soon as he began to talk.
Sitting in a car together,
talking about everything from our family to me
trying to figure out how a D.C. guy who works in Baltimore
and lives in P.G. is a Dallas Cowboys fan.
I said, "Man, you must be the most confused cat
I've ever met before in my life."
- It's hard to find the words to tell a story like this.
It has been a very emotional day.
When he was pronounced dead, like, I knew who he was.
I knew I saw him on an earlier murder.
I had a tweet ready to go with his picture,
and immediately the tweet got retweeted.
And that's when I realized that this guy
is a pretty well-loved guy.
- I knew him for years,
when he was patrolling this area.
He was a good officer, he was real friendly.
He ain't give nobody trouble unless you gave him trouble.
Let me say that. - He got a lot of respect.
- We called him Scarface
because he had a scar on his face.
- My uncles were cops.
My dad was a cop. My cousins were cops.
I come from a long line of blue.
And so I grew up in the culture, and so I know it.
As a reporter, it's worked in my favor.
But, you know, when you cover
a story like this from my perspective
and I'm talking to Nicole Suiter
and I'm seeing the casket, it resonates
because I know my mother spent 25 years
fearing what could happen because her husband was a cop.
- When a cop is killed, it's an attack on American policing.
- What else can you give us right now?
Anything?
- No, I never saw the shooter. - He was there?
- Sean was behind the white van.
Sean peeked out as I was watching the corner here
and from that alley. - Yes.
- Sean waved me on, he said--like this.
And so I started-- - And then Sean went in?
- Sean went in, and he yelled, "Stop! Stop! Stop!"
So I went running, and as I went running,
the shots started to fire.
I saw Sean hit the ground, and I saw, like, parts--
- Where did you see that from? Here?
- No. No, no, Sarge.
I ran toward the alley where he went in.
- Okay. - You saw where they found him?
So I got to that point, and the shots started firing.
So I started backing out and looking around.
- You don't know if it was from a house or from the street?
- No.
- So he saw something, so most likely he was on foot, right?
- Most likely this guy was on foot.
- All right, let me get that information.
- In the moments and hours and days
after Detective Suiter was killed,
it clearly appeared to be a homicide.
- Be advised...
- There was no reason to think it was anything else
based on what was being said and just the way it played out.
You know, we had an officer shot and killed
in the line of duty.
They were searching for a suspect.
- He is only described as an adult African American male
wearing a black jacket with a white stripe
on the black jacket.
- They told me that my husband was shot,
and I still didn't--it still didn't register in my head.
Like, someone came up to me and said,
he was a-- he was a good man.
I was like, "What you mean, he was a good man?"
And they was like, "No, no, no, no, no.
That's not what she meant."
And I just broke down.
- He couldn't, you know, say what he wanted to say
'cause he was in the bed with tubes in his mouth
and blood coming down, and...
I just couldn't hear his voice
telling me that he's okay.
- The doctors in there, the mayor in there,
I'm like, what is-- this has got to be--this--
what's going on?
But no one, no one told me he was shot in his head.
- I remember that night I was at shock trauma.
- Questions? - People had been telling us
that he was dead-- it hadn't been confirmed.
And there was this great uncertainty
about what happened.
And my phone rang, and I got a call from someone saying,
"This was a hit.
"He was gonna testify tomorrow against the dirty cops."
It was someone I didn't know,
and they sounded a little nutty.
So I kind of put that in my back pocket.
- A massive presence of federal agents
and Baltimore City Police blanketed the area
around Bennett Place in West Baltimore,
where Detective Sean Suiter
was shot in the head earlier this week.
Police believe the killer is still in Baltimore.
- The initial information that we had to work our way through
was from Detective Bomenka,
who was obviously traumatized by the fact
that he was just with his partner,
at least his partner that day, who was shot.
We were under the impression, based on some tips that we got,
that a suspect was on the loose in the community.
- Police had guns drawn, waiting to move in,
and used an armored car as they searched for a suspect.
[tense music]
♪ ♪
- We were held hostage in these houses
for at least five to six days.
For us to be trapped-- even if the event took place,
it took place way up there.
- I remember being down that street,
and there were snipers setting up to raid some of these houses.
- Military tanks in this alley.
He had this sawed-off shotgun
out like this, like they actually had a suspect!
- The regular people in Harlem Park,
they had nothing to do with any of this,
but the abuse that they were willing to subject them to,
police that don't serve and protect them,
police that abuse them...
who said, "Oh, we don't care that we are supposed to be
"operating constitutionally now.
Let's shut down Harlem Park."
And so they're easy targets.
- My name had came up in a conversation that, uh,
dealing with Sean Suiter,
and that's when they came and raided my house
November the 19th and took me down for questioning.
- They trashed the house.
Our living room set. Trashed everything.
We didn't get none of that back--computers.
- We had a great deal of trouble
recovering all of the evidence.
When Sean Suiter runs into that space,
Detective Bomenka hears three gunshots.
Pop, pop, pause, and then pop.
We couldn't find where those bullets landed.
We couldn't locate a strike mark from those bullets,
either in the ground or on the adjacent walls.
Did they strike another person?
We are absolutely certain that the community will stand
with the Baltimore Police Department
to bring this heartless, ruthless,
soulless killer to justice.
[somber music]
♪ ♪
- Coming up in East Baltimore, the streets was home.
So I hit the streets, and I hit them hard,
and I've done everything from selling crack to heroin
and back and forth again,
and I had some good times, and I had some bad times.
And I made some really, really good friends
that I thought would last forever.
And one of them friends put a gun right to my head.
So I've pretty much, like, saw everything in the streets
and...
in that time, you learn about these police officers.
You learn about how they move and how they operate.
You learn the intricate part they play into the world
that--that we lived in.
I'm a person who has seen the ugly side of law enforcement.
- It's now been 16 days since the shooting of Sean Suiter.
It happened back there where that blue tarp is,
back through this very narrow little area,
with very little opportunity for people to see
what may have happened back there.
The Suiter case is not the first time
the Baltimore Police Department was criticized
for "sloppy scenes,"
for not having proper incident command.
And, I mean, one of the questions that exists right now
is, how come this department can't get it right?
They didn't take photographs.
They didn't properly record parts of the crime scene.
There were people traipsing in and out of that scene at will.
The suicide theory, which did come up today,
is just a possible theory.
The commissioner says it's not a leading theory at all,
but it is under consideration.
There was this "mistake made" about the entry wound,
allegedly by the hospital,
that identified the entry wound as the left side of the head
as opposed to the right side of head.
Well, if his gun--
if his radio is in his left hand, which it was,
and he's right-handed, think of what you have do
to get yourself to get a gunshot wound
into the left side of the head and kill yourself, okay?
So that information, which they operated on for four days
until it was cleared up at autopsy,
that, no, no, no, it's the right side of the head
and it's a close contact gunshot wound,
which is very indicative
of potentially a self-inflicted wound.
So, for four days, this investigation operated
on a false assumption.
And that is that he was shot on the left side of the head.
- The suicide theory emerged
because there was factions within the police department
that believed there was a cover-up taking place,
that they were chasing a phantom killer,
that they were having a hero's funeral,
and they were offering a giant reward
and tearing apart the city looking for somebody
who didn't exist.
But once that emerged,
once that got into the public domain,
people started to believe that that was a cover-up,
that that was an attempt for a police department
that was making no inroads
on solving the killing of one of their own
and was trying to sort of redirect people
and blame the officer himself.
Both views of the case are grounded
in a distrust of the police department.
- And so now you have,
was this a homicide,
or was this a suicide?
You're in that hole without a lot of facts.
I think it quickly became,
well, which one do we have evidence for,
and which one do you believe?
I'm not paid to tell you what I think.
I'm paid to tell you what I know,
and we don't know shit about this case.
- A week after Baltimore detective Sean Suiter
was shot and killed, the revelation
from the city's police commissioner was stunning.
Suiter was set to testify before a federal grand jury
the next day against eight elite Baltimore officers
already indicted in a police corruption investigation.
- And that was...
wow.
This certainly throws a wrinkle on the case big-time.
- Suiter wasn't just any officer
who was shot and killed.
He was also a federal witness against other police officers.
- If I'm about to go to court
and you're supposed to testify on me,
and now you're gone?
Come on.
- It was a lot of reporting about what he knew,
what he didn't know,
what he was going to testify to.
Was he going to get pulled into this big, massive scandal?
Was he a dirty cop? Was he a dirty cop?
Did he off himself in an alley?
Is this suicide?
Or did someone along the way in the police department
make sure he was killed
so he wouldn't testify to what he knew?
We don't know.
Did he have damning evidence
on other officers in the department?
We don't know.
- You cannot add more drama and conspiracy to this.
Being a media relations chief,
coming into an environment where there is a big trust gap,
I'm trying to open up the doors and give people a glimpse in
without compromising the integrity of investigations,
which is also important.
We know that people are clamoring for information.
We say so little, sometimes it's not enough clarity.
- Are there any other fingerprints
besides the detective's?
- We're not going to get into those--
We're not getting into all the specifics
of every piece of evidence we have.
So it was just ripe for conspiracy.
It comes to-- look at the partner.
The partner had something to do with it.
It's like, come on.
When you know things to be absolutely,
unequivocally false,
it's hard to sit back and just listen to it.
You talk about frustrating and upsetting, it's like--
people are just making up stuff.
Literally making it up.
[somber piano music]
♪ ♪
- There is no information that has been communicated to me
that Detective Suiter was anything other than
a stellar detective, great friend, loving husband,
and dedicated father.
When I asked the FBI to take over the investigation,
I did so knowing that if they had any information
or even a shred of information
that this could have been a conspiracy
to murder Sean Suiter that was orchestrated by other cops,
if the FBI thought that that was the case
for one millisecond, in my opinion,
they would have taken over that investigation in a heartbeat.
[indistinct chatter]
The fact that they did not take over the investigation
was an indicator to me
that they didn't believe that theory.
In the letter, it says,
"No information has been developed to indicate
"Detective Suiter's death was directly connected
to an FBI investigation."
- I think it's very strange that the feds
did not get involved in the investigation of the shooting.
This guy was killed the day
he's supposed to go testify in a grand jury for you,
and he's dead from a gunshot wound.
Like, why wouldn't that be a federal case?
Leo Wise, the Assistant U.S. Attorney,
told me that as soon as he got the phone call
that Suiter had been shot, he believed it to be a suicide.
I found that to be a remarkable statement.
You wonder if that has to do with the things
that they had heard along the way about him.
- The information that was given to me by the FBI
and the U.S. Attorney's office,
Sean Suiter was never the target
of any of their corruption investigations.
He was merely scheduled to testify
in front of a grand jury
about an ongoing corruption investigation.
They told me, in fact, word for word,
"Sean Suiter was not a dirty cop."
- March 1, 2017, earlier that year,
seven members of the Baltimore Police Department
are arrested.
- The case began about a year ago.
It involved a covert investigation.
The seven defendants were members
of the Gun Trace Task Force.
I'm Sergeant Wayne Jenkins of the Gun Trace Task Force.
- Their job was to go out and get guns off of people
that were illegally possessing them
and carrying them on the streets of Baltimore.
Unfortunately, we found out the methodology
they were using to go out there and do it.
- The seven officers are charged with racketeering.
Some of the suspects face up to life in prison.
Others, decades in jail.
- They were robbing drug dealers in the city
with precision and investigatory skill.
They had black hockey masks,
fake guns that they would place
into people's cars to frame them.
It was a mob in the middle of the city
run by the Baltimore Police Department.
- Hey, come downstairs right quick.
They about to get it open.
- They really got them.
I mean, they had them on wiretaps.
Like, they had evidence, hard evidence of what was going on.
- Do not--nobody touches-- You understand me right now?
- I'm keeping the camera rolling.
- This video, taken in March 2016, in the basement
of a Northeast Baltimore drug dealer,
shows former Baltimore sergeant Wayne Jenkins,
who led the Gun Trace Task Force,
recording the discovery of a safe they blasted open.
But federal prosecutors say the video
was really a reenactment to cover up the fact
another 200,000 was taken from the same dealer by Jenkins
and other members of the gun squad.
- This was seven officers,
it went on to be eight, you know,
charged with just, like, blatant corruption,
blatant misconduct.
Some of their best and brightest,
some of their most efficient,
and they're being accused of egregious crimes
over a long period of time.
We put this here to try to visualize everybody,
to see how they're connected.
You have these officers who pleaded guilty
who are trying to get lesser sentences.
Before he became a homicide detective,
Suiter was working with these guys.
Jenkins is the leader of the squad when they get indicted.
Suiter had worked with Ward. He'd worked with Jenkins.
He'd worked with Rayam and Gondo at times.
Of course, his grand jury testimony
was about a case in which he and Jenkins
had arrested somebody.
So he was being asked to come in to testify
before a grand jury about his role in that.
- This is the case in which Detective Sean Suiter
was scheduled to appear before a grand jury,
the day after he was murdered.
Suiter was going to testify about this scene
back in 2010 where a high-speed chase
ended with a collision with another car, killing one
and destroying this front porch in Northwest Baltimore.
[uneasy music]
- On this particular day, these police officers,
they saw a couple Black guys in a car,
figured they might have something on them.
"Let's take a run at them."
You can't do that, but they did it,
and they did it every day...
all over the city.
- The only thing true about that particular police report
was that we had a car accident and somebody died.
Everything else was a lie.
♪ ♪
- This is the actual spot that I was parked in.
I noticed
through my side view mirror
that a car was approaching.
There was two cars that pulled up.
One pulled in the front, and one pulled behind me.
- Wayne Jenkins and Ryan Guinn were in the first car.
Detective Suiter was in the rear car.
Like a car pulling up not wanting to damage the car,
but it was more so, I believe,
them to get us tight in as possible
so they can do whatever it is
that they were attempting to do.
Now the car in back of me bumps me.
I turned my head to see, and then I heard doors opening.
And that alerted my attention to the front,
and they was actually out the car with guns drawn,
with masks on their face, and all I could see was their eyes.
- These were not police cars.
Our clients, of course, would not know
that they were police cars.
There were no lights, there were no sirens.
When they took off, they genuinely believed
that they were being robbed.
- They know why we fled.
You know, we didn't know who the hell they were.
They were right on our tail the whole time.
The only thing we was thinking about is our lives.
- I began to go on very fast down Belle Avenue.
I could see another car at a stop sign.
So I'm trying to turn away from the car,
and we end up turning the same way.
- Police say it was these two,
Umar Burley and Brent Matthews,
who were fleeing police and crashed into a car
on the corner of Belle and Gwynn Oak Avenue,
killing the father of a Baltimore City police officer.
- The officers, they realized
they had a serious problem on their hands.
It was a high-speed chase.
Couldn't justify the chase, the stop, nothing.
Didn't find any drugs in the car,
didn't find any weapons in the car.
They jacked up these two men
for no reasonable articulable suspicion,
no criminality afoot.
So what did they do?
They got on the phone, and they called in for heroin
to plant inside the vehicle.
My clients believed that Gladstone was the officer
that showed up with the heroin.
Matthews and Burley were wrongly convicted
and sent to prison.
They framed Mr. Burley and Mr. Matthews
to justify their own criminality.
- 28 grams of heroin. [chuckles]
That's a lot of heroin to just pop up in the car.
[scoffs]
The depths that people go through to save their own skin.
[uneasy music]
♪ ♪
- Sergeant Wayne Jenkins was already a key player
in the Baltimore police corruption case.
Now he faces another 20 years in prison,
the result of new charges that he planted drugs in a car
in 2010 to justify chasing the driver and a passenger.
Sean Suiter was involved in the original stop of the vehicle
and the chase, the indictment says.
It suggests he was set up to recover the drugs.
- Obviously it was a concerted effort,
as they were blocked in.
Jenkins and Guinn got out of the car with guns and masks.
It would be difficult to imagine that the car back here,
that detective Suiter wouldn't have seen that.
Unfortunately, you know,
we're never going to exactly know who planted the drugs,
whether it was Jenkins himself.
Jenkins denied planting them.
It could be Suiter-- we don't know.
Suiter was the one that recovered them.
I'm not sure that you can believe any of the officers
'cause it's all self-serving,
but we do know they were working together.
♪ ♪
- Getting to the truth in these incidents is difficult.
I think that there are people lying on all sides.
We do not have an independent eyewitness
between the officers and Umar Burley.
One idea I had was to do a public records request to see
if they would turn over the dispatch audio,
so I got that today.
This audio is from the moment.
This is real time, what they were saying
before anybody knew that this was going to happen.
I'm trying to figure out how this--
was Wayne Jenkins and Sean Suiter,
were they robbing people with masks on
in the middle of the day in 2010?
Because if that's true,
Sean Suiter is incredibly corrupt.
Going back seven years before his death,
he was rolling around the city
in the middle of the day with masks on robbing people.
So...
yep.
They actually give the tag number
before the crash, before the chase even.
There is no doubt about it.
They're discussing stopping this guy on the radio
that other officers are listening to.
I think that's telling.
If you're robbing somebody, I don't know that you do that.
That's a good thing for Sean Suiter's case
that he's not corrupt.
But that's with the caveat that these guys lied,
they covered their tracks, they knew how to do it.
So anything's possible.
- A car crash.
Guys, they're running, trying to shoot each other.
There is a 911 call from a citizen,
who is coming on to this as it's happening.
And she sees a car crashed into a fire hydrant.
She thinks it's regular people just chasing
after each other with guns, and--which is interesting.
I mean, if they had their lights and sirens on,
wouldn't you know that they were cops?
Three of them.
- The one with the gun had on an orange sweatshirt?
- Right.
- There's things on this that go towards one narrative
and things that go towards the other narrative.
- Federal Prosecutors now say
Burley and Matthews are innocent.
Today their convictions were vacated.
- I may have been released, but nothing has changed.
My life will never be the same again.
- We've had, as a firm, as a lawyer,
and as a resident of Baltimore,
some familiarity with these rogue police units.
But I had never seen a situation
where the federal government overtly made efforts
to pull someone out of prison and release them.
- The federal judge called their convictions
the result of "raw, crude police corruption."
- The key player in the investigation of Sean Suiter
is Wayne Jenkins...
because Suiter was the one
who was supposed to testify against Jenkins.
You know, I would never say
that a person committed a murder
unless I knew they did it.
I would never say a person had ordered a murder
unless I knew they did it,
but what I will say is that they're very capable of it.
Police officers kill people all the time.
♪ ♪
If I was the suspect
I'm probably going to go this way,
because that's too open and that's too open.
This shit is too residential.
And I'm gone. [laughs]
I'm gonna hit this corner, and I'm gone.
[chuckles]
They took the black jacket off
and put their police uniform back on.
[chuckles] And then they just went ahead about their business.
When I was a kid, right,
I had a real good friend named D.I.,
and he got shot in the head.
He was holding a Walkman, and the first thing he did
was drop the Walkman before he hit the ground.
And that was the first thing I thought about
when I started, like, piecing together information
on what happened to Sean Suiter.
You shoot yourself in the back of your head, as they say,
and you still squeezing your radio tight, it's just--
I don't know, it's a little strange to me.
It doesn't really-- it doesn't sound right.
- I first heard about D. Watkins--
I read a review of one of his books
in "The New York Times."
I mean, I was interested in an actual, authentic story
from somebody who was in the game,
who was in the street,
who was sort of, I guess, on the other side,
if that makes sense.
I think Sean Suiter was killed
because he was going to testify in front of a grand jury.
- What would you be thinking in your office?
Would you be like, "Yo, we got to look into this,"
or you'd just be like--
- I would be thinking, who's left?
[chuckles] Who's left from the Gun Trace Task Force
who hasn't been federally indicted?
And I don't mean the core group of guys.
I mean supervisors,
outside people, you know,
and the city police department may not know.
Only the feds may know that information.
But there's obviously somebody else out there
with something to lose.
The Gun Trace Task Force was making somebody look good
because they're bringing in so many gun arrests.
And those commanders don't want to know.
They don't want to know what they're doing
to get all these guns.
They don't care.
They don't want to know how the food's being made.
They just want to eat it.
- Suiter probably thought the department had his back,
and they probably did, all the way up until they didn't.
- But remember,
Suiter was testifying to events back from 2010
when he worked with some of the guys in another drug unit.
There are other people involved in that scandal
that I'm sure are trying to protect themselves at all costs.
[tense music]
♪ ♪
- A major development from the witness stand
where former Baltimore City Police detective Momodu Gondo
made a stunning admission.
He says Detective Sean Suiter
stole money when the two worked together
in a specialized enforcement unit a decade ago.
- Detective Gondo was, I think, pretty unequivocal
that he had stolen money with other officers for a long time,
and he described it as being something that officers did
to sort of fit in, to gain each other's trust.
That if I know that you're stealing money
and you know that I'm stealing money
then we've got each other's back.
We're both in on this together,
and he said he was stealing money with Sean Suiter.
- Gondo was, without question, reliable,
the most trustworthy,
truthful cooperator that they had, and...
- Gondo said he was dirty on the witness stand.
So, if you look at those weeks leading up to November 15th,
what's Sean Suiter looking at
as he headed for that grand jury appearance?
He knows that Momodu Gondo has pleaded guilty.
He was cooperating with the feds,
and he was willing to talk.
October 24th, the FBI came to visit Sean Suiter.
He refused to be interviewed by them,
and they delivered a subpoena for him to appear
before the federal grand jury.
What we learned after Suiter's death
is that Gondo told the federal authorities,
while he was cooperating, that Suiter was dirty.
There's a lot to look at.
- He's gone from an officer who died in the line of duty
investigating a homicide in a dangerous part of town
to having his whole history questioned,
is sort of a shocking development.
- Before we be too judgmental, you know,
I mean, it's enticing.
You know, you're dealing with a dope dealer.
Who's going to believe him?
It's not like he earned this money.
I mean, you know, it's greed.
It's greed that's motivated this,
but, I mean, that's what you see all over,
from top to bottom.
From Washington to, you know, to Baltimore,
the motivating factor was the greed.
[sirens blaring]
- Sean's death showed me how cruel life can be sometimes.
And his love showed me how life can also be good.
We just have a lot of unanswered questions.
I always believe someone seen something.
I always believe that.
Love you, Sean.
- There exists a serious tug-of-war
within the Baltimore Police Department
over what this case is.
The people advocating the suicide theory say
the evidence was mischaracterized
and it wasn't explained.
There was a suspect.
There was a guy seen with a white stripe on his jacket.
It turns out, as more information came along,
that that was somebody that they had spotted
earlier in the afternoon.
And people say that Detective Suiter,
maybe he sensed that trouble was coming.
He's a father of five.
There's a financial incentive
to have the death appear to be a murder...
that that would be the kind of death
that his family would continue to receive benefits.
If it's a straight-up suicide,
it's ruled that and everybody knows it,
you don't get benefits.
You know, people within the police department,
they're pointing to dirt on his leg
and saying that that's proof of a violent struggle.
Is that proof of a violent struggle?
- Hold on, get his legs, get his legs.
- We should wait for the medic.
- Transport him in a car. Officer's down.
Officer down.
- I actually attended the academy with Sean Suiter.
Really quiet guy, really nice.
Always, like, you know-- even though he's quiet,
he was always smiling, easy to get along with.
I would cross paths with him here or there,
and we remembered each other from the academy
and would kind of like, just like, "Hey, what's going on?"
In Internal Affairs, I handled all specialized units,
which would've included units Sean Suiter was in.
So I never saw his name in a complaint.
I never heard of him being involved in a complaint.
I never heard a supervisor or another cop
ever say anything negative about Sean.
He's just a guy I could never imagine even--
even doing anything wrong.
I know for a fact that there are plenty
of corrupt cops within the department,
because I investigated some of them
and they remain in that department.
Jenkins waited for me
after work one day at Internal Affairs
because I was investigating some of his guys.
And he, like, corners me in the parking lot,
and he's, like, right up in my face.
Like, I thought he was going to hit me.
Like, that was it, we were going to go.
Mentally I just broke. I couldn't take it anymore.
I attempted suicide twice.
I mean, for years, I had been sort of struggling
with what the mission of the police department was.
I was afraid to speak up
about a lot of the things I had seen.
I was investigating cases where I felt like
maybe I was in danger,
you know, retaliation from cops I was investigating.
I finally realized, I mean, I can't work in the police--
I can't stay. I just had to quit.
It was going to kill me.
It was going to kill me one way or the other.
[dark music]
I just didn't understand how shitty cops
get through that department unscathed, unpunished,
and Sean lost his life in that department.
♪ ♪
- When I became the Baltimore Police Commissioner in 2015,
I was on Larry Young's morning talk show on WOLB.
He said, "Make sure you rent and don't buy."
The mayor, Catherine Pugh,
wanted Sean Suiter's investigation
to be solved in a hurry.
She saw it as a stain on her mayoral administration,
and she grew growingly frustrated with me
that it wasn't solved,
and I grew growingly frustrated with her
that she was interfering with the integrity
of a murder investigation.
- It has been a revolving door
at the top of the Police Department.
This is the third commissioner since 2015.
- Commissioner Kevin Davis
was fired in January.
And the Mayor installed
Darryl De Sousa as Commissioner.
One of my topics to talk to him about
was the Sean Suiter case.
Do you have an idea of what you think happened?
- I have an idea I'm not going to share it right now,
but I can tell you that I am bringing a independent,
outside source to come in and take a look at it.
- And that was the big headline that came out of that
was the new commissioner was going to push forward
on an independent review board on the Sean Suiter case.
- We all went up to the police headquarters,
and they put on a big dog-and-pony show for us
about who's going to be looking into this and who's that.
Everyone had a great résumé.
There's some old homicide cops on there from BPD,
police officers from around the country.
- It's an open criminal investigation
requiring confidentiality.
- They said they are not going to reinvestigate the homicide.
They're going to look at everything around it.
And they said, "But it's not going to be done
"out in the public,
"so we're gonna vote to close the meeting,
and then that's the last thing we're gonna hear."
- I want to thank you all for coming
and for being so cooperative.
Thank you all very much.
- And then sandwiches came,
and all of the journalists had to go.
People want to know what happened,
and they're going to try to put something together
to make people feel comfortable.
You know, they got to have a story,
'cause you can't let a cop die without a story,
not in America, definitely not in Baltimore City.
[somber music]
♪ ♪
- Could you talk to us a little bit
just about your client's state of mind right now?
- Well, as he said in court, Mr. Ward is very remorseful,
very sorry about what happened.
- What happened?
- Wayne Jenkins received 25 years in prison.
It was not the maximum.
He turned around and faced the crowd,
and for several minutes apologized for his conduct.
He was sobbing.
His voice was cracking throughout.
- I'm sorry for your loss.
- Thank you.
- When I look at the whole case as presented,
the most shocking thing to me
was on April 27, 2015,
when the drug stores were being burned and looted,
Jenkins was stealing the drugs.
He was looting the looters.
Trash bags full of stolen pharmaceuticals.
You talk about brazen.
A Baltimore police sergeant in charge
of an elite Gun Trace Task Force
was looting.
I mean, we had to have the National Guard come in here.
That really kind of sums up the brazenness
with which this group of people operated.
- In Baltimore, there was a Viking-like mentality
for many, many years that encouraged
the slippery slope behaviors
that that Gun Trace Task Force went down.
We tend to give those all-star cops a pass
because they do what?
They go out, they hunt, they gather,
they bring back bad guys and drugs
and guns and search warrants and cash.
- He didn't deserve this. He was a good person.
You're either a good person or a bad person.
He was a good person.
- The first time I ever got kicked in the ribs
by a cop when I was laying on the ground
for saying something slick out my mouth,
this officer, his name was Daniel Hersl.
This hero, that was him.
[overlapping shouting]
- I was in my 20s, early 20s,
and he kicked the shit out of me.
And I'm like, "Bitch..." [chuckles] Right?
But you can't do nothing.
♪ ♪
People in the neighborhood, they knew Hersl.
They knew Hersl wanted money... all the time.
It's like he always had a bill due.
Daniel Hersl should have, like, $100 million buried somewhere
'cause he was always on the prowl.
And as you can tell by the big smile on Danny Hersl's face,
they are having a good time,
and this is just boxes of stuff
they're stealing out of these people's apartment.
- So, when my editor first asked me
to get into the human side of Danny Hersl,
I was like, "Yo, fuck that."
He lost his ability to be defined as a human
when he started fucking robbing and stealing
and ripping off taxpayers while we pay his salary.
So it's like, how do you get to be a human?
I thought that was like some classic white privilege shit.
You know, you do some evil shit, and we got to say,
"Oh, he was a lone wolf. Oh, he was tortured."
You know, I was like,
how the fuck am I going to do that?
But then I had to sit back and realize,
well, you know what?
[chuckles] D. Watkins, you did some fucked-up things.
You know, you ran these streets,
and you did all this wild stuff,
so you don't deserve to be treated as a human.
There's no shot at redemption for you.
I'm from East Baltimore,
and Daniel Hersl is from East Baltimore.
I like difficult.
This is a chance to define a cultural moment
and tell the story of two boys from East Baltimore
who completely had opposite paths.
I started out in the street,
and I ended up as a college professor.
He started out as a police officer
and then ended up doing 18 years in federal prison.
[indistinct shouting]
Danny Hersl and I have a whole lot of parallels.
We both lost family members.
We went to some of the same schools.
Some of his friends who I got to talk
said that he was a loyal guy.
He was a person that was down to do whatever for his friends.
I didn't sign up for something easy.
Talking about race and trying to see humanity in a person
that has been a devil to you and a devil
to a whole lot of people you know isn't an easy task.
- Hey, you the author, right? - Yeah, what's up?
- You came to my school. - What school you go to?
- I go to City. I like your book, man.
- Thank you, I appreciate it.
Hersl and I are both victims of the drug war.
He was on one side. I was on the other side.
Did he have a chance to know right from wrong?
Yeah, he did. But he chose wrong.
Did I have chances to know right from wrong?
Yes, I did, and I chose wrong
until I felt like it was time for me to choose right.
It's just like musical chairs. I chose before I fell.
I take personal responsibility for my actions,
just like I think he should take personal responsibilities
for his actions.
But the one thing that me and that clown have in common
is that we both did what we saw.
That's what we saw, that's what we saw people doing around us,
so that's what we tried to do.
- The eighth largest police department in the country
in turmoil tonight.
- Darryl De Sousa is done.
The commissioner of just four months resigned this morning
as he battles federal charges of willfully
not filing his taxes for three years.
- I tell you, when De Sousa was made chief,
I got a list of questions from the press
that involved his vetting,
and I remember calling City Hall and saying,
"Hey, we have answers to these?"
I mean, some of them were so basic.
It seemed to be an emotional selection
without due diligence.
All of this could have been avoided.
- The truth is that the mayor of Baltimore controls
the Baltimore Police Department to a large extent.
Everything goes back to the political leadership,
the political "misleadership" class
that seems to always be in office.
People have been interested
more in currying favor with power
than they have with elevating the people
that needed their support.
The fact that this city has basically bled dry
entire communities for decades,
giving people nothing,
inadequate education, not even a trash pickup.
There's no economic engine in many communities
intentionally for a long time other than the drug trade.
That isn't the fault of the people.
That's the political establishment
creating that environment.
- We're awaiting the final report
from the independent review board.
I'm sure everybody in town is going to be trying to get it
before it comes out, myself included,
but we're just waiting.
[rising music]
♪ ♪
- Come on, man! Killed himself?
Get the hell out of here. That's bullshit.
- The safest thing for Baltimore is to say,
"Police officers would never kill another cop, never.
"They would never kill another cop.
They'll never do that. Suiter killed himself."
And that maintains the narrative
that I'm working so hard to dismantle.
- And what we now learn,
he wasn't just going to testify as a witness.
He was testifying under limited immunity,
which is a very different kind of witness.
He wasn't so-called "target"
of the GTF investigation, but he was a "subject" of it.
It means that the feds didn't really know
what he knew or did.
- They released it the night
before they had a press conference.
And along with it, they released a piece of video
that I had been trying to get my hands on forever.
They released an audio clip
of Sean's last audio transmission.
- [shouting indistinctly]
- Which was unintelligible,
but there's still some sound there, you know, and...
- [shouting indistinctly]
- That was interesting to me.
And then I read the report.
And, you know, it was rumored
that it was going to come out as suicide,
and then you read it in black and white
where the IRB board said,
"We conclude that this is suicide."
And I looked at that, and I was like,
"Okay, now show me-- show me where it's at."
And so I read that report three times that night.
I didn't see anything new--
no new physical evidence,
nothing to suggest that they can conclude unanimously
that Sean Suiter killed himself.
It wasn't there for me as a reporter.
- Uh-huh, okay. Thank you very much.
I'll call you if there's anything--
I reached out to former commissioner Kevin Davis.
I don't know, in any other town, this might be shocking,
but he completely condemned the police department,
and he said that there is a culture there that,
you know, they were culturally trying to,
you know, cover this up because they couldn't handle
not being able to solve the case.
He also said that he refused to meet with the full board
because he didn't trust members of the police department
who were on the board.
That's a pretty shocking statement
from somebody who ran the place for three years.
He is an outsider, and he ran the place for three years,
and he's basically telling the public
you can't trust anybody over there,
and they are going to sort of juke this case
to what they want it to be.
That's coming from someone who ran the place
and saw it from the inside out.
[gentle music]
- Questions?
- Mayor, do you accept the finding of self-inflicted?
- Well, let me just say this-- you know, first of all,
you know, my condolences are still with the family.
I'm also looking forward to hearing
from the review committee as well, you know,
because I think there needs to be a thorough understanding
of their own findings.
- There's no question that the Independent Review Board
that reviewed the evidence in the case
and the facts of the case has placed a lot of weight
on the connection to the Gun Trace Task Force case
to the death of Sean Suiter.
- The commissioner says, "Okay, there was a man
in a black leather jacket."
- Right, and that is what the report says.
And the report reveals that there were some inaccuracies.
- Knowing what you know now, do you regret
the hero's funeral with public road closings
and a vast PR campaign surrounding it?
- Well, I didn't orchestrate that,
so let me just say that, again, these are findings
that are still being reviewed and will be shared.
- So you don't feel at any point that you were misled
by anyone on the police department?
- I think we all-- well, according to this report,
we've all been misled.
- To hear someone totally drag your homeboy, man...
Like, he just--
That's not him.
Like, to hear that from people that didn't know him...
It was--it was-- it was jacked up.
It was a jacked-up day.
- The physical evidence definitely takes you
to a self-inflicted conclusion.
But when you really think about the case,
either you've got Sean Suiter
who needs to make his suicide look like murder,
and if he is targeted because of what he may know
about other activities of other officers,
you've got someone who needs to make his murder
look like suicide.
- There wasn't ever supposed to be a conclusion
drawn from the IRB.
I was shocked when I found out
that there was an actual conclusion.
[car horn honks]
- Can you address people who may be looking at this
saying this is a really far-fetched scenario?
- The totality of the evidence, not individually,
but the totality of the evidence
builds a compelling case
that the conclusion is very well supported,
and there is unanimity on all recommendations,
all findings, all conclusions that were made in the report.
- To what extent did your investigators
look at the theory that many in the community
are saying this was a hit put on Suiter by the BPD?
- I refer you to the report.
It turns out that we were able to exactly time
sort of the sequence of events
and there was a total of eight seconds
when somebody wasn't being observed,
and you couldn't get in, do that,
put the evidence in, raise the arm up,
close the arm-- it was not possible.
- I just want to clear up a factual matter.
It says that Hersl had pleaded guilty and agreed to cooperate.
But he was one of the two who didn't plead guilty.
Was there a mistake?
- No, I believe it's the same Hersl.
- This is a big mistake.
This is a fairly large public trial
that we all covered, that he went to trial,
and it went on for weeks,
but it says in here that he pled guilty.
But beyond that, did you guys also interview other people
in his family or in his life to help state of mind
that this grand jury may not have been the only thing
that was stressing him out to make him commit suicide?
- Let me just say this, you know,
we followed the information, and we followed the facts.
We do not attempt to understand what his state of mind was
when he took the actions that he did.
We can't surmise that about Detective Suiter.
We can't.
- I didn't know about the factual error
that was in the IRB report, a big one.
I don't like embarrassment. I don't like being wrong.
This shit should be right, period!
This is not just a report.
This is somebody's life.
We're about to tell someone's family
that we don't believe your husband was killed.
We believe he did it himself. Oh, sorry for this fact.
No, no, no, it's no margin for error for that.
- Based on the fact that no one knew my husband
better than I did,
I will not accept the untimely death of Sean
as nothing other than a murder...
which has been covered up
for reasons unbeknownst to me or my family.
Sean did not deserve to die in this manner,
and no one deserves to get away with this.
- Nicole knew that there were wolves.
I saw an effort by certain individuals
within the Baltimore City Police Department
to demonize Sean,
to turn him into another one of these shadowy GTTF figures.
What does the Baltimore City Police Department
have to gain by lying about Sean?
- What do you think is going on here?
Why do you think this is happening?
- To be honest, I don't know why this is happening.
But something's happening.
- There is nothing to indicate to me
that he took his own life.
I am the one who reached out to the U.S. Attorney's Office
and requested immunity.
He was not worried about his involvement in this case.
The U.S. Attorneys handling the investigation
made it clear to me that they saw Sean
as a witness to the Umar Burley case,
not a suspect.
Now I'm trying to make sure that two things happen--
that his family gets benefits and that somebody
actually investigates his fucking murder,
which I really don't think are two big things to ask.
[siren wails]
- The intricate plan on staging this
for insurance purposes just bothers me the most.
As Black families, we just go through shit.
We go through shit.
We go through shit, and then we go through shit
while we're getting through other shit
that we're going through-- that's not strange.
He wasn't some corporate guy on Wall Street
running a foundation.
He was a fucking cop. He's in the street.
He's seen pain. He's been through shit.
So to tell me that he can't stomach doing a little three,
four years in the joint, come on, man.
- Your partner is close by in daylight...
in a fairly populated part of town,
and you are going to contort yourself
in a way that makes it look like someone killed you,
but you're killing yourself.
You're going to fire three shots,
two of them randomly
and then the third into the back of your head.
If you wanted to kill yourself on the job
specifically to get the benefits to your family,
there are a million other easier ways to do this
than to concoct this incredible scene here.
What's at stake here is Nicole Suiter
and her family and this man's legacy.
What's at stake here is maybe their benefits,
which could total a half a million dollars.
What's at stake here is how this man is remembered.
- It just don't make sense. He had no reason.
He wasn't involved in anything.
Tell me he was involved in something.
The only thing Sean probably guilty of
is knowing that his partners was dirty
and didn't turn 'em in.
If he's guilty of anything,
that's the only thing he's guilty of.
I'm not angry at the police department.
I just want justice for my husband.
I don't think I'll be able to get that
with a lot of anger in my heart.
- People are still, still working the case.
Like I said, I stay away from it
because of how close I am.
What's up, player?
I was good this morning, you know?
Just interesting because this case right here
that I'm on out here for
is a case we were working on together, you know?
Damn, I wasn't trying even to--
Come on, man. [chuckles]
All right, champ, get me together.
Let's get this going.
All right. [sniffles] Sorry about that.
All right, so, yeah...
it's kind of rough.
[uneasy music]
♪ ♪
- I want to go where he was killed,
so the community down there can remember Sean.
I want it to resurface
so his killing don't go in vain.
- In a quarter mile, make a right turn.
[sirens wail]
♪ ♪
- Waking up this morning was kind of hard.
Getting myself together was kind of hard.
Just reopening wounds all over again.
Doesn't seem like it's been a year, though.
- That day, we were going to go out together.
I didn't know that he was set to testify at the grand jury
in this GTTF shit, and some people were like,
"Well, you're his partner. Why wouldn't he tell you?"
That's something that he had to deal with.
I didn't know about it.
I didn't know.
- My husband was never a coward to commit suicide.
Let's just say that Sean,
if he was involved in something,
which he wasn't, he's going to take his punishment like a man.
- Being there that day at the vigil,
it was a strange feeling because it was no feeling.
It hurt for so long that it just--
the pain couldn't be any more.
- Sean is all right.
Sean has made that journey that we all have to make.
- [sobbing]
- Brian unveils new information tonight
that Suiter's attorneys say further discredits
the suicide theory.
- This is Sean Suiter.
Taken just days before a review board says
he killed himself.
The last intimate moment Nicole and her husband shared.
She texted this video to him an hour
before he was shot on November 15th last year.
He called, they laughed,
he said he would stay up for her
when she got home from her night shift.
The main theory of this independent review board
is that the day Sean killed himself,
he chose a junior homicide detective.
I guess the implication is that he wouldn't know
what Sean was doing.
That was their theory.
- Did it sound like they were coming from up?
- It sounded like it came just from the alley.
That corner-- it's all T'd off.
It was vibrating back and forth.
I didn't see the shooter. I didn't hear any cars.
I didn't see any cars speed off.
I didn't see anybody run.
- I come to find out that it wasn't
Sean's case that they were on the street for.
It was that junior detective's case,
and there's paperwork to that effect.
In fact, it was David Bomenka
who had the more active case on that block.
It partly relied on the witness testimony
of a woman in the 900 block of Bennett Place.
The documents show she was located on the morning
Suiter was shot but refused to cooperate
with the homicide operations team
dispatched to bring her in.
Sources close to the investigation say
Detective Bomenka was then ordered to return to the block
later that day and convince the witness himself
and that Sean Suiter was simply
the only other detective available to go with him.
- "Take Suiter with you,"
because Sean was the only guy on the floor.
That's what sources have told me,
and I've confirmed that three or four different times,
which questions the IRB's conclusion
that Suiter pushed to go out there that day
and work with a rookie cop in order to kill himself.
[keys clacking]
- It's a big sticking point for Suiter's supporters
that, you know, the IRB got it wrong.
It discredits the IRB's work in that regard.
I don't know that the whole theory disintegrates.
- In concluding Sean Suiter took his own life,
an independent review board cited the lack of evidence
of a second person through DNA testing or fingerprints.
Now we've learned there is DNA evidence
that could suggest a second person.
It was found on Suiter's gun,
according to a source familiar with the investigation,
and does not belong to Suiter.
But it is not traceable.
It has not been linked to a specific person.
- All of these different reporters, you know,
"Suiter's DNA is here and there.
There's another DNA. There's no DNA."
There's no, you know, whatever.
And all of the information coming from the police
makes perfect sense
if your department's not full of liars.
- Hey, is there anything going down
that I should know about?
Yeah. Yes, really?
Okay, can you fill me in so I'm not behind the 8 ball?
Fuck, I had no idea how to confirm that.
Hmm.
[sighs]
There's going to be a big report tonight.
Before you got here,
our former police commissioner pleading guilty,
and now this is going on.
- It remains one of the biggest open wounds
from last year's record-setting violent-crime rate--
the death of homicide Detective Sean Suiter,
shrouded in mystery, a litany of unanswered questions.
Tonight this is at least one of the leads
police gathered in the weeks after his shooting.
This is an interview
inside the Baltimore Police Department's Homicide Section
on December 8, 2017.
The man being interviewed is Donte Pauling,
picked up on a gun possession charge
three weeks after the death
of homicide detective Sean Suiter.
- This is a hard-core leak.
- Pauling tells these officers
he heard what happened to Sean Suiter
and began detailing how he knew the guy
who knew how it happened.
This is the video released
by the independent review board this summer.
That is Suiter behind the van.
The IRB used this video as evidence to say he was pacing,
working up the courage to jump into the alley
and shoot himself.
But Pauling is now telling detectives this is
when Suiter decided to run into the alley
to confront a suspect leaning over his drug stash,
gun drawn in plain clothes.
Pauling never did get the man's name
who allegedly overpowered Suiter
and killed him with his own service weapon.
- We still didn't even know
it was an officer yet...
- What is unclear is what ever came of this tip.
It is important to note that the IRB report says
police ran down 54 tips
and that "all leads were exhausted,"
but the report does not mention this lead specifically.
- All right, I got to make a phone call.
Tell me why this wasn't a credible tip
so I can offer another side of the story.
I'm like, you can't "no comment" this.
People are gonna-- people are so distrusting.
You've got to say something.
[uneasy music]
♪ ♪
- We have, notoriously,
one of the most corrupt police forces in the country.
There is still a great deal of denial.
In a culture where there is not only no duty to report,
no protection for whistleblowers,
there's actually a coercion to go along.
Good officers that go into the department
idealistically thinking,
"I'm going to be a good officer,
I'm going to serve and protect the community,"
they go into this system,
and they have superiors that are part of this culture,
and they are pressured to conform to the culture.
♪ ♪
- It's very rare for any police officer in Baltimore City
that's in the streets to be squeaky clean.
Everybody got some dirt on them.
That's why nothing ever gets done.
- I'm with Detective Rayam here approaching this vehicle,
this Honda minivan--
- Sean Suiter worked with Wayne Jenkins.
I know Sean Suiter had warned
Gondo and Rayam about working with Wayne Jenkins.
That means he knows Jenkins is dirty.
If you telling Gondo and you telling Rayam,
"Yo, look out for Jenkins.
Watch him. He up to something," right?
But you don't really say nothing to the powers that be,
then you a part of the problem, straight up.
One of the questions that I get hit with a lot
is the amount of Black police officers we have
and the amount of Black politicians.
The problem is the system is racist.
The people are pawns.
We knew this for years.
You know, even when, like, some other publications
write about them,
they still think that it's maybe, like, a handful,
but it's more than a handful, it's large groups,
because it's a tradition in America for police officers
to treat Black people a certain kind of way--
devilish, evil, steal, oppress,
anger, aggression, bullshit.
It's what they do, so, like, we know this.
So we know it's not over yet.
- I never intended to do anything
that could not stand up to scrutiny.
- Number 51 is on the books.
[applause]
Bernard C. "Jack" Young
was sworn in as Baltimore's next mayor
in front of a standing-room-only crowd
at the War Memorial Building...
- In my lifetime, nothing has ever changed.
Like, I've seen so many mayors come through this city.
I've seen so many politicians come through my neighborhood,
knock on my door, knock on this door
and talk about what they gonna do,
and nothing has happened.
Everybody wants change, right?
When we talking about change, it's a slow hustle.
It takes a long time.
It means all of the work and the time it takes
for you to move the ball forward just an inch.
- In the news tonight,
The Baltimore City Police Department
says the case is closed.
Detective Sean Suiter killed himself
two years ago in Harlem Park.
- It was a statement few saw coming,
brief and with no context,
issued by the city police commissioner.
Case closed.
- If the commissioner thought he was putting an end
to all this with his statement yesterday, he did anything but.
- I just want to know how many times
y'all gonna kill my husband?
This is an embarrassment to our family, his friends.
We ready for war.
Like my lawyer said, we ready for war.
- If that's how they want it, then they better be ready.
- We're not wearing these shirts for nothing.
- Baltimore's top prosecutor says this case is not over.
- With all open and pending matters,
I cannot ethically comment on them.
- The State's Attorney's office did not respond to our question
about what they may be pursuing.
- So open and pending meaning there is
an investigation by your office.
- It is an open and pending matter.
- That was all the State's Attorney
would say today,
but for its part, the office of the chief medical examiner
says Suiter's death does remain a homicide.
- The chief medical examiner
said that he had some real concerns about the case.
He noted the fact that the casings
couldn't definitively be linked to the gun,
just that they were the same type of gun.
He said it just wasn't good enough,
but the biggest thing for him was that
Suiter had gone through their training
on how to tell the difference between a homicide
and a suicide.
Shooting yourself in the head,
Suiter would have known that's a clear sign
that someone shot themselves
and that he wouldn't have done it that way.
He would have shot himself in the chest
because that is less likely to appear as a suicide.
So the chief medical examiner
felt as though the way he did it was, in some ways,
too obvious of a suicide to be a suicide.
all: Give us the shooter... - For Sean Suiter!
- My husband did not kill himself.
It was a homicide, not a suicide.
- Where are the police today?
Where are the people that said they were his friends?
- Sean deserves... all: Justice!
- I want you to look around and tell me where the mayor is.
I want you to tell me where the commissioner is,
because I assure you they're all standing behind me
looking out of the damn window.
all: Justice!
- And I never knew that when we got the call
this same day two years ago that two years later
we would still be fighting the same battle.
- Sean deserves... all: Justice!
- Sean deserves...
[somber music]
♪ ♪
- Did Sean Suiter kill himself?
Did somebody in the alley shoot him?
Was it a hit
from the Baltimore City Police Department?
At the end of the day, Sean has joined a list
of a whole lot of Black people in the city
whose killing will never be solved
because the system is broken
and it has been for a long time.
[indistinct chatter]
- Push it back, push it back.
- And we keep doing the same things to try to fix it.
Elect a new mayor, hire a new police commissioner,
hire 10,000 brand-new police officers.
They all come in and subscribe to the same shit.
[indistinct chanting]
Poor leadership breeds revolutionaries,
and we just got to be there to pick up the pieces.
♪ ♪
- Give me my kiss.
Mwah!
- ♪ Tired of being strong ♪
♪ In the face of wrong ♪
♪ I'm looking for the answers ♪
♪ Nobody givin' chances ♪
- ♪ Tired of being strong ♪
♪ In the face of wrong ♪
♪ I'm looking for the answers ♪
♪ Nobody givin' chances ♪
♪ Oh ♪
♪ Nobody givin' chances ♪
♪ Ohh ♪
♪ Nobody givin' chances ♪
♪ ♪
[bright tone]