24 minute read
COVER STORY
from Inlander 01/28/2021
by The Inlander
“And you understand that people who lie to us, or try to point us in the wrong direction, can be charged as an accessory?”
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“Yes, of course.”
He asks again if there’s anything she can tell him.
Still, she never tells him she knew the suspect’s name the night of the incident. But she wants the potential killer to be caught. She really believes that guy she found on Facebook is the same guy she saw at the bar, so she says what she can.
“I know it’s Joe,” she says.
Days go by, New Year’s Day passes, and there’s no more evidence against Joe Riley. But rumors were circulating. Riley was getting weird, nasty comments on his Facebook page from people who knew Jarman. On Jan. 2, records say, Melville checks Riley’s Facebook and sees two of these comments.
Melville decides to act. It’s then that the detectives go knock on Riley’s door and arrest him in front of his family.
The next day, Jan. 3, Riley’s bond is set at $150,000. The affidavit of facts, signed by Melville, states that “[Witness B] introduced Joseph as ‘Joe’” to her friend. Neither woman described that happening in the interviews obtained by the Inlander.
The Spokane County Sheriff’s Office attempts to build a case against Riley over the next few days and weeks. But there is no case to be made. There are no receipts proving Riley was at Ichabod’s. A bartender working the night of the beating says she knows Riley, and he wasn’t there that night. Still, Riley remains in jail for two weeks before he makes bail.
18 INLANDER JANUARY 28, 2021
The parking lot of Ichabod’s East, a bar in Spokane Valley, where Daniel Jarman was knocked down and beaten. YOUNG KWAK PHOTO
Doug Phelps, Riley’s attorney, called the arrest of his client “terrible police work.”
“They ignored all the evidence that pointed away from Joe,” Phelps says.
UNRELIABLE WITNESSES
It’s not uncommon for eyewitnesses to identify the wrong person, criminal experts say. In fact, it factors into more than 70 percent of convictions overturned through DNA evidence in the U.S., according to the Innocence Project, a national nonprofit that works to free innocent people.
But Riley’s case is unique, says Jim Petro, former attorney general of Ohio and author of False Justice: Eight Myths that Convict the Innocent. Usually, wrongful identification occurs in a lineup where witnesses must choose the person matching their description out of several. Petro says he hasn’t seen any cases where witnesses use social media to misidentify a guy they saw at a bar as a killer.
Petro, who worked with the Innocence Project in Ohio, says investigators should always be wary of arresting someone based on eyewitnesses alone.
“Eyewitness I.D. should never, without other support, be on its own considered adequate,” Petro says.
He says the credibility of the two witnesses, the fact that Riley didn’t have marks on his hands, and his lack of criminal history should have been red flags caught by investigators.
“They made a mistake,” he says. “A mistake is a mistake.”
He adds that the boss — Spokane County Sheriff Ozzie Knezovich — should require the investigators involved get additional training.
“If the leadership of the police department didn’t take the mistake seriously, then they’re at fault also,” Petro says.
The Spokane County Sheriff’s Office has faced intense scrutiny when previous investigations fell apart. In 2012, three men were released from prison after their convictions in an armed robbery were tossed out. That case wasn’t based on a mistaken eyewitness, but a jailhouse snitch who gave false testimony. A sheriff’s office sergeant said the detectives failed to corroborate the informant’s statements, calling it “extremely poor police work.” But Sheriff Knezovich, contradicting that sergeant, defended the investigation, arguing the detectives were thorough. The three men received $2.25 million in a settlement.
Knezovich tells the Inlander he can’t comment much on the Jarman investigation, due to pending litigation. But he says he “most definitely” has confidence in Melville’s abilities as a detective.
“Frankly, it was Melville’s investigation, and continued investigation, that cleared the first suspect,” Knezovich says.
Indeed, Riley made bail a couple weeks after his arrest, and by the end of January 2020, his first-degree assault charge had been dismissed. But Riley fears he was too close to being wrongfully convicted. Before his case was dismissed, he says prosecutors were telling him and his attorney that they had enough to put him in prison. At his arraignment, a prosecutor said the charge would likely be upgraded to second-degree murder. ...continued on page 23
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And Riley doesn’t credit detectives with clearing him. The assault charge was dropped only after Witness B called detectives back on Jan. 28 and said that she made a mistake and Joe Riley was the wrong guy. A friend showed the witnesses pictures of someone else named Jamie Peterson, records state, and as soon as the women saw it, their hearts sank, now believing Peterson was the guy.
Detective Melville knew of Peterson. In fact, according to Melville’s investigation notes, he already knew Peterson was a dead ringer for Riley. There was a receipt from Ichabod’s the night of Jarman’s death in Peterson’s name, and Melville had looked him up on social media and compared him to Riley, noting the similarities.
Peterson, 39, did not respond to calls, texts or voicemails seeking comment for this article. Nor did his friends and family members. At Peterson’s Spokane Valley home, a block away from an elementary school, a woman answered and said he wasn’t there. The Inlander left a note and business card there with contact information. Shortly before this article was published, Peterson blocked an Inlander reporter from seeing his Facebook and blocked the reporter’s phone number.
A year ago, on Jan. 29, a day after Witness B pointed to Peterson, Melville called Peterson. The detective had found his phone number from a report that Peterson was in a bar fight months earlier. Peterson agreed to meet with Melville at a pizza place around lunchtime. Peterson acknowledged he was at Ichabod’s bar the night of the fight but said he left just after midnight, when his receipt was printed. In fact, phone records pegged him in the area of Ichabod’s as late as 2:03 am, minutes after the assault of Jarman.
Then Melville noticed something else: A “lasered off” tattoo on his left arm, exactly where one of the witnesses described one being on the suspect.
As investigators narrowed in on Peterson, they discovered that his involvement was something of an open secret among those connected to the bars near the crime scene. A bartender at nearby Sullivan Scoreboard answered a call from Melville in March. When she was told Melville was seeking someone who was involved in the fight, she replied, “You mean Jamie?”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Wilson Criscione has been a staff writer at the Inlander for five years, examining systemic issues in education, foster care, criminal justice and homelessness. He can be reached at 509-235-0634 ext. 282 or at wilsonc@inlander.com.
Chad Kemp, a bouncer there who agreed to an interview with the Inlander, told Melville he didn’t see what happened that night, but he heard about the incident shortly afterward. He says multiple people told him within a day that it was Peterson. One of those people was apparently an eyewitness.
Melville contacted that witness in March. The witness described to Melville how he saw Peterson on Dec. 29 standing over Jarman, saying something like, “He wanted to start shit, he wanted to keep running his mouth.” When the Inlander contacted this witness, however, he denied ever speaking to a detective.
Nobody with information on Peterson, including this witness, volunteered to tell law enforcement. At least nobody but the two women allegedly in the car with him and Jarman that night.
Kemp says it’s possible people are afraid of Peterson. Kemp knew him as someone who could cause problems at the bar. Peterson also has a felony on his record for making harassing phone calls more than a decade ago to his then-estranged wife. According to court documents, he threatened to hurt his wife’s dad if Peterson’s assault rifle wasn’t returned, then later “threatened to kill” her entire family. Peterson’s father, meanwhile, is Lee Peterson, an attorney with Craig Swapp & Associates, a prominent law firm specializing in personal injury cases. Lee Peterson did not respond to multiple phone calls and messages from the Inlander.
With Riley released and his charges dismissed, the investigation into Peterson slowed to a crawl, as detectives waited for DNA results from Witness B’s car. Then, in August, Melville collected a DNA swab from Peterson, comparing it with the DNA sample found in the car. It was a match. Peterson had denied knowing those two women or Jarman, but his DNA had been found inside the same car that Jarman and his attacker are seen on video exiting at 2 am.
Considering there were now three witnesses identifying Peterson as the man who punched Jarman, along with DNA evidence and phone records proving he was there, the Spokane County Sheriff’s Office recommended that Peterson be charged with second-degree manslaughter.
It wasn’t enough. The Spokane County Prosecutor’s Office declined to charge Peterson. The case was closed.
County Prosecutor Larry Haskell tells the Inlander that “in this case, the evidence supported a likely mutual combat or self-defense scenario… in addition, the prosecutor must evaluate potential problems with the case and make a judgment call on all foreseeable issues including credibility of the state’s case.”
Haskell did not answer follow-up questions asking if, after Riley was arrested and charged, new evidence supported a self-defense scenario for Peterson. He also did not say whether Riley’s initial arrest, or the investigation itself, hurt the credibility of the state’s case.
LYING TO PROTECT
When her husband went to jail for a crime he didn’t commit, Shalee Riley didn’t know what to tell the kids. She had to come up with something, so she said he had an emergency business call and he had to go away. Joe Riley and his wife Shalee in the tattoo shop that he owns. YOUNG KWAK PHOTO
“I had to really hold it together,” she says. “It’s sad. I had to lie.”
The whole experience has shaken their sense of security to this day. Joe now sleeps on the couch, in an effort to protect the family, and he often wakes up in a panic. They don’t go out much, and not just because of the pandemic. They feel like they might get framed for a crime.
“We don’t trust people. Things are not the same,” Shalee says. “We can’t believe this happened, and the justice system is like this.”
Joe Riley says that he will still go to the grocery store and hear people call him a murderer. He’s always explaining himself. His tattoo business has suffered.
He constantly wonders why this happened to him. He looked up Peterson, and he isn’t so sure they look that much alike. Riley gets angry thinking about him at all.
“If it was self-defense, why wouldn’t he turn himself in? Why did he willingly and knowingly let me sit in jail and make me take the fall and almost lose my entire life, if he’s so freaking innocent?” Riley says.
Jarman’s family has similar questions. His sister, Jami Humphries, doesn’t understand why Riley was charged but Peterson wasn’t.
“The thing that frustrates me the most is them saying that it was self-defense,” she says. “I believed in the system until this.”
Jarman’s loved ones are still seeking justice. They won’t accept that the case is closed with no charges. His mom, Janet, says she still cries for him every day. Maybe he shouldn’t have been out drinking that night, she says, but she’s pretty sure he wasn’t planning on getting killed doing it.
“He was a good guy. Troubled. But a good guy,” she says. “He was getting better all the time.”
His kids, 6 and 8 years old, never got to move into the Spokane Valley house with their mom and dad. Clark instead moved them back to Soap Lake. They miss their dad. They were told that he was in an accident and died.
She hasn’t told the boys what really happened yet.
“I know when they’re age appropriate, I’m going to have to tell them the actual truth,” Clark says.
How will she tell them their dad’s killer got away with it? n
JANUARY 28, 2021 INLANDER 23
Robert Tombari (the Poet) runs through lines in An Iliad at Stage Left Theater. YOUNG KWAK PHOTO
THEATER WAR CRIES
Stage Left’s streaming production An Iliad gives audiences a startling look at what war does to humanity
BY DAN NAILEN
Imagine if, through twists of time and It’s part of the theater’s Alone Together space, you were cursed to live through series of prerecorded streaming produchumanity’s worst moments. Moments tions that will run through 2021 thanks to when men and women brutally clash on a Spokane Arts Grant Award. battlefields, suffer in infirmaries, die at At its heart, Lisa Peterson and Denis each others’ hands via swords, guns, spears O’Hare’s play An Iliad is an epic and and bombs. imaginative work of The Iliad fan fiction,
Then imagine your lot in life is to and based on Robert Fagles’ translation of move through the centuries telling stories Homer’s Trojan War tale. When Peterof those wars, forever forced to relive those son and O’Hare wrote their play, they horrific clashes until humanity finally were driven by their reaction to the 2003 wises up and stops killing each other. Iraq War and searching for a way via the
That seems like a pipe dream, I know, theater to address what it means to be a the ending of war. But that’s the only hope country at war. That eventually led them for the Poet to change his life in An Iliad, to The Iliad, and then to create their own a new filmed stage production arriving character within Homer’s work, the Poet. Friday from Spokane’s Stage Left Theater. ...continued on page 26
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FROM LEFT: Stage Left Managing/Artistic Director Jeremy Whittington, actor Robert Tombari and An Iliad director Susan Hardie YOUNG KWAK PHOTO
Nearly two decades after the war that inspired its creation, and three millennia after the Trojan War, An Iliad is still, unfortunately, utterly timely. That’s part of what attracted actor Robert Tombari to pitch An Iliad as a potential Stage Left show when he was poking around for one-actor shows last summer.
“I fell in love with the character of the Poet when I read it,” the 28-year-old Tombari says. “He’s just so different from any other character I’ve read before. I connect to him on some level. And this story needs to be told right now.
“There’s always been war in my lifetime. I don’t think we’ve ever known peace, really, as a country. We’re always involved in proxy wars and different skirmishes from around the world.”
Tombari’s acting challenge is considerable. Not only is he on stage alone for 90 minutes, but he is tasked with tackling some lines delivered in Greek, slipping in and out of several characters in the Poet’s stories, and propelling the show through its shifts in tone and eras.
Of course, while Tombari’s challenge is not dissimilar to what it would be in “normal” times, the jobs behind the scenes are taking on some new demands thanks to the virtual aspect of An Iliad’s production.
For director Susan Hardie, that means thinking about cameras in place of a live audience, among other things.
“It’s a play, and we’re staging it as a play, but … we’re really aware that this is going to be filmed,” Hardie says. “We’re always keeping in mind the notion that we have three cameras available to us. Because this isn’t pure theater, we have to embrace the tools we have.
“I’m directing this with a mind toward, ‘Oh, wouldn’t it be fascinating if the Poet just talked directly to me on my screen? If there was a moment when the Poet filled the screen with his face?’ Really utilize the tools we have available that we wouldn’t normally … Rather than being restrictive [staging the show via streaming], for me, it’s really opening things up to new possibilities.”
One moment in the play comes to mind as ripe for a creative approach from Hardie and Stage Left videographer Paul Watts. There’s a point when the Poet gets lost in his rageful thoughts and starts listing every war that occurred on Earth, starting with the Trojan War and proceeding up to and beyond the Iraq War and recent actions in Syria and Afghanistan. The playwrights made their script adaptable for adding new wars to this dramatically long recitation.
Rattling off this massive list in front of a live audience would be a stunning moment, a collective realization of just how many wars the Poet (and humanity) has witnessed. A screen on stage, and the computer screens of viewers at home, give Watts the opportunity to flash images from many of those wars, images that will drive home the horrors in a way no monologue could.
“The Poet, this is all happening in his head,” Hardie explains. “He’s taking this trip through these wars, through the horror, because he’s lived them. That’s our conceit, that he’s been there on the front lines all this time. What we’re hoping to convey is this sense that this man, this wanderer … is being moved by all he has seen.”
Having read the script, it’s hard to imagine anyone who logs in to An Iliad not being moved right along with the Poet. There’s humor along with the horrors of war, and exciting passages as the Poet unfurls the showdown between Achilles and Hector. Thankfully (to me, at least), it’s not delivered via the dactylic hexameter rhythms of Homer but in a much more conversational, modern style that makes it easy for the audience.
“The Poet is talking about things like what it’s like to get cut off in traffic, and how rage can take over. It’s not just on the battlefield, but it’s the rage within us,” Hardie says. “I see war on my television set, and in the paper, and I intellectualize war ... But I totally get being cut off in traffic. I get what it does to me personally. There are many moments when the Poet brings it home like that.”
Jeremy Whittington, Stage Left’s managing and artistic director, was struck by the play from the moment Tombari pitched it to be part of the theater’s one-person show series, Alone Together. The idea of streaming one-person shows came after Stage Left had success streaming some of its regular festivals as well as a couple of plays. Landing a SAGA grant kicked the idea into gear as part of the way the theater is “rolling with the punches” of the pandemic. Whittington notes that, thanks to that grant, An Iliad will be the first time everyone involved with a Stage Left production will be paid for their work.
For the audience, the play offers a way to experience stirring theater while supporting local artists. And with An Iliad, they have a show worth doing both.
“It’s that personalization of war that is told very well through this script,” Whittington says. “It’s a beautiful roller-coaster of emotion. It’s done with levity, and with seriousness, and with fun storytelling and tragic storytelling … The point the Poet is trying to make for us is to help us connect so that we might learn something.” n
An Iliad • Jan. 29-Feb. 7, Thu-Sat at 7 pm, Sun at 2 pm • $20/$15 for seniors, military and students • Online; tickets and info at showtix4u.com/event-details/44777 and stagelefttheater.org
