09/12/2024
A Philadelphia man who received a $4.1million settlement from city officials after he served 24 years behind bars for a murder he did not commit is headed back to jail.
Shaurn Thomas, now 50, pleaded guilty in court on Thursday to killing 38-year-old Akeem Edwards on January 3, 2023 over a $1,200 drug debt, the Philadelphia Inquirer reports.
He had previously been convicted of second-degree murder for the November 1990 shooting death of a Puerto Rican businessman, and was sentenced to life in prison
But Thomas had long maintained his innocence - saying at the time of 78-year-old Domingo Martinez’s death he was incarcerated at a juvenile jail, according to the Innocence Project, which helped get him released in 2017.
Attorneys from the organization discovered detectives knew Thomas had a potential alibi, and even had 36 pages of undisclosed witness statements pointing to other suspects, but zeroed in on Thomas because of statements made by two alleged co-conspirators.
Those co-conspirators’ stories, however, changed over time, and one even wound up recanting his testimony - claiming that cops fed him a false story and assaulted him until he repeated it.
The Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office ultimately declined to retry the case, despite prosecutors saying they were not entirely convinced Thomas was innocent.
Thomas was then released from prison and said at the time he had ‘no animosity’ toward the police, and planned to ‘just move on forward,’ according to ABC News
Three years later, Thomas settled a suit against the city for $4.15million.
He had also joined a network of other Philadelphians who were freed from prison after their convictions overturned.
There, he met Ketra Veasy, whose brother, Willie, had his murder case overturned in 2019.
The two dated on and off for six years, and last fall, Thomas asked her to connect him with her childhood friend, Akeem Edwards, to see if he might sell some co***ne for him, prosecutors had said.
The ex-convict then gave Edwards a sandwich bag filled with drugs and told him to bring back $1,200 from the proceeds, which Edwards never paid by January 3, 2023.👀⛓️💔