Before he was a convicted murderer serving more than thirty years, before his mugshot was splashed across Chicago papers after Dan Treell Davis's death, before he became a symbol in the slow unraveling of Kabrini Green.

Before all of it, Anthony Garrett was just a boy from the West Side.

I had a great childhood.

I had a great prayer.

They yod, They did what they had to do to sub and they did made sure that we kept a roof of our it, and it made sure we kept fooding on something closed on our back.

I just was the one that made the choice to go the wrong way.

I was the one that made the choice.

Frankly, if there was one thing that compelled me to look further and deeper into his innocence claim, it was his ownership of it all.

Here was a guy fighting for his freedom, telling anyone who will listen that he was innocent.

Yet when it came to his life, he didn't shirk anything, didn't blame the system or his caregivers, school or circumstances.

I was the one, call me naive, But something about his sense of accountability gave more credibility to his claim made him more believable to me, made him someone I wanted to better understand.

I'm Dax Steblin Ross and in this two part bonus series of Crying Wolf, I'm asking a simple but urgent question and the murder of seven year old Dan Tell Davis.

Did they get the right man?

And if not, what forces led a city to arrest convict and forget the wrong one.

In episode one, we traced the build up, the fear, the media frenzy, the need for a monster.

We looked at how a single confession became the cornerstone of a conviction.

In this episode, we're turning the lens inward.

We'll explore Anthony's torture claim, his innocense argument, his fight to get free.

I know this is not the most popular route.

Why give so much airtime to a convicted child murderer?

What about the victims?

What about balance and equal time for them?

It's a fair question.

The dominant narrative has always been Dantrell's, as it should have been.

His mother's grief became a rallying guard.

His loss moved a city.

But Dantrelle's family weren't the only ones left grieving.

They weren't the only ones whose lives were upended by the tragedy, because if Anthony Garrett didn't do it, then the state made a different kind of victim, and his family has been living with that silence for decades.

Welcome to Crime Wolf.

The bonus episodes The Case of Anthony Garrett backed one.

We called it Home.

From birth to thirteen.

I grew up on the West side of Chicago.

We started out on fifteenth in Cotta when my grandmother stayed and then we left there and went to forty five thirty four West Wilcox and we stayed there until I was like thirteen can I graduated out of Junior High And once we did that, my mother moved to us and we moved to Kabring Green.

She's been gone since twenty ten, but in talking with Anthony and his sister Cynthia, it's clear their mother was and remains a force.

My mother drove the CTA bus and she was very strict on us.

We had to we got out of school, did our chores.

We had to meet her on the corner of Division in Cleveland so we can ride up and down the street my home bus.

She was kind of straight when Anthony, Cynthia, and their three younger siblings arrived in Cabrini in nineteen seventy one.

Mom left CTA for a job in the city's housing authority.

She was assigned to Cabrini and quickly got up to speed on their new surroundings.

Meanwhile, Anthony got acclimated to his new near North side home.

The only thing I remembered so how back then I saw how beautiful fielders look, real clean.

No, no, no, Karni, you know, dombage was being picked up.

James was on the little faster than a round of grass, you know it was.

It was beautiful to me now a cow.

Young Anthony's first encounter with Cabrini, want echoed by Cynthia, stood in such deep contrast to the place it would become.

Set against the backdrop of Dan Trelle's murder.

The twenty twenty three film We Grown Now depicts the Cabrini of the early nineteen nineties as a withering fortress crumbling under the weight of violence and poverty.

A pair of boys roughly the same age Anthony would have been when he arrived, stalked the ghostly halls of condemned buildings for old mattresses that they can use as trampolines.

Two decades earlier, Young Anthony's experience was quite different.

When I moved over there, the day violence in a let's say, I guess moderation, not like these kids do it today.

It wasn't none of that.

You know.

They had to rule over there with the gangs, and during daylight hours there was no game banging at all.

You know, you had to play.

You had to play sports, you know, softball, basketball, football, whatever it is.

You had to be active, and you had to go to school.

As he recalls it, gang life in Cabrini was totally different than today.

Back then in my days was more or less like the gangs being protective of the neighborhood, even though it was violent, you know, in there, but you know, it was definitely the protection of the neighborhoods, you know, it was.

It was never all about you know, just because you you you in this gang and you in that game.

It was never all about that.

When I was coming up, it was about us protected, you know, making sure our neighborhood stayed the same.

There was none of that riff rafts going on over there.

Was that so what was the police role that that?

People will say, that's the police's job, what you're doing doing that?

But who can secure you in your neighborhood better than you?

That's just the way we don't back then.

You know, the.

Police was there, you know, to get out of hand.

It was definitely there.

But I mean, you you can do it better than the police can.

It didn't take long for young Anthony to catch the eye of the Mickey Cobras.

Founded in the nineteen fifties on the South Side of Chicago.

They had evolved into a group known for being organized and disciplined.

Unlike in the movies, Anthony wasn't forced to join, nor was he seeking the family he didn't have.

No, his reasoning was far more adolescent.

I guess it was just you know, being cool.

That's all it was about, you know, being cool, being you know, being cool with all the guys.

I mean, I could have been cool with them even if I hadn't to join the gang, you know, I mean, it just was That's all it was about to me.

At the outset, Anthony kept his gang profile low.

Above all, Cynthia recalls he remained his mother's son.

But he covered it so well, because it was nothing she could tell him to do that he would do, keep me right there.

So it's you know her man.

If it was just to go downstairs and watch my father so and because he was always, you know, when he needed to be at all, he was there.

But he could only hold his two worlds mama's boy and gang member apart for so long.

Bak did.

I wasn't in it the tail.

Don't do no violence or none.

But you know, it just grows on you.

You know you do wrong to me.

I had to do it back.

The brushes with the law began at seventeen.

He caught his first charge, marijuana possession.

Then came more serious arrests theft, driving without a license.

He dropped out in his senior year, another decision he still regrets.

Then, just before his nineteenth birthday, he caught his most serious charge to date, aggravated assault.

That's when his mother stepped in.

My mother soon as I got I got out of that trouble, but I wasn't really out of the trouble.

My mother ended up pulling the train and they said to be in the army.

And now I got to the military.

The late nineteen seventies marked the low water mark for the army brand.

Vietnam scars marred communities all over America, but black men had been disproportionately fed to the front lines.

Now they were back home, bitter broken.

Coupled with the Army's transition to an all volunteer force in nineteen seventy three, the war led to declining enrollment, which made Burgeon and delinquents like Anthony prime candidates for the military's new pr campaign to boost numbers, job training, discipline, college money, a second chance.

It all sounded great to his mother, and for a while it looked like Anthony had found a lifeline.

I went to Kentucky Fort Knox, Kentucky for a basic training, I went to for Benning, Georgia for aaiit advanced afty training.

And I went to Fort Lewis watch teams, as they called.

A permitted party.

He learned sharpshooter basics, how to break down a rifle, clean it, reassemble it, how to identify, track and engage target with a standard issue rifle, the same training every soldier got, nothing more, But after Dan Trell's murder, that routine instruction would morph into myth would turn Anthony into a trained sniper.

But before all that, army life was good for him and the path that had seemed clear.

He even rose to the modest rank of platoon leader.

But then two years in he abruptly left.

I wondered, what happened?

Did you feel like the military something you ever felt you could stay longer in?

It sounds like you didn't stay that longly.

Why I truly regret I didn't.

I truly regret I didn't.

But yeah, I could have stayed longer if I wanted, But I really regret.

So he came back home, back to the Green.

Welcome home was great.

Cose it than our family, you know, I mean, even with the friends that I knew the.

Guy and could bring in Green.

It was.

It was a great welcome home.

But I went right back to what I was doing before I went.

In short order, Anthony's rap sheet spiraled into a tired cycle.

With each offense came a Stinton County, followed by a few quiet months and another offense rinse and repeat.

Most involved unlawful weapons possession, which, considering his job as security chief for the Cobras, had a certain logic to it.

But then came a murder charge, and that's when finally his mother discovered the truth about her son.

He was a notorious gang member.

Anthony beat the charge, but his mother issued a warning that still echoes beyond her grave.

He told me, either you quit it or you won't think as they'll either did or any penitentiary for a long time.

I see how they worked out for me.

I winced the words of a man looking back on a life that could have been resigned, almost at peace.

But the line from that first murder trial to the next was hardly a straight one.

A solid decade stood between himself in that interrogation room with Detective Zuli, and in that time, Anthony was trying, trying to pull things together, to salvage what he could, act too, trying to change even while he stayed in the gang.

Anthony Garrett was trying suddenly, steadily to turn the ship.

He wouldn't have called it redemption, maybe not even change, but there was a quiet pivot happening.

It started with the kids.

Anthony had always loved sports, and sometime in the eighties he started volunteering with the Little League team in Cabrini.

He was the head of the like the kids programs over the Cabrini Green.

He was the reason why I was the umpire for the for the Little League baseball teams and.

Al Carter was a longtime community worker and one time Cabrini kid himself.

He took a liking to Anthony.

He was dependable, committed.

He mentored the boys, offering them structure and rules and pride.

Eventually he even got put on payroll.

He helped them kids.

You know that's why I You know you love you so much.

You and his or not.

You make sure they got to school, make sure they got home.

So same with the adults.

Yelp, make sure they was able to walk in the building him safe.

He also started working, working whatever he could get, especially like driving trucks, like the solitude and the structure of it, so he got his CDL.

Soon Aina entered.

She lived on the South Side near sixty ninth.

Anthony met her by chance.

He was visiting Cynthia, who'd moved out that way, when he spotted Aina walking her regular route from the L.

She still smiles at the memory of their first meeting.

I used to walk the certain route on my way home from the L sixty Ninth Street l to my house.

I used to work walk a certain path and I would see him every day when I got to a certain spot.

And then he started stopping me talking to me, and then he started walking me home.

So that's kind of how we get together.

After a few weeks, he introduced Ana to Cynthia, and the two women clicked.

Aina became family.

She grounded him, gave him another reason to step back from gang activity.

He pulled back from the Cobras even more, started spending more time at home.

Eventually they had a son.

Anthony was trying.

He didn't always have the right tools, and his efforts didn't cancel out the years of doing wrong.

But he was putting in the effort.

You could feel it.

That's what makes what happened next so devastating, because for all the slow and perfect progress Anthony had made, it didn't matter first.

It was the work.

His past just wouldn't stay buried every kind of You go around and.

Go back to my record, and oh, you convicted felon, And you know what I'm saying, We can't.

He can't keep you, so he gotta let you off, you know.

And I had to co found another job and keep on doing the same thing over and over rope, you know.

So, I'm just wish I could have found one that actually would have kept vic deveil it would ope.

Then came Dantrell in the city's need for a monster.

Anthony Black, poor gang affiliated with a notebook sized record, fit the bill, and just like that it was gone, pucked from his family, from his kids, from the life he was trying to build.

For years, he would sit in prison and try to prove that his confession was the product of excruciating torture.

After Raymond Prusac, no one outside of his family seemed to listen, not until Jennifer Black.

She was the first to see the pattern.

She had spent the better part of a decade tracing a similar pattern in Lee Harris's case.

She didn't need to be convinced of Zuli's capabilities.

She already knew.

Jennifer's plan was simple in theory, difficult in execution.

Prove Anthony's confession was the product of torture, and it collapses the state's case.

No confession, no conviction.

But to do that, she needed to get Anthony's long dormant claim before the Illinois torture Inquiry and Relief Commission Turk, and to do that she needed more than just Anthony's word.

She needed corroboration, a pattern, a mirror.

She found it in a man halfway around the world who claimed to have endured the same detective's brutality, this time not in a police station, but in a war prison.

Mohammadu Uld Slahi is known to the world as the author of the best selling Guantanamo Diary, a memoir detailing his ordeal inside the world's most infamous prison.

His story has been told at conferences, in law school classrooms, and on primetime television.

It has become a major Hollywood film, starring Jody Foster and Benedict Cumberbatch.

The Martenian the broad shokes of his story.

Slahi was an electrical engineer who, as a young man, received training at an Alcada camp during the Soviet Afghan War.

Years after he had left that life behind, disavowing any association, he received a phone call from a cousin while living in Germany.

The cousin needed him to help his sick uncle.

The cousin was also a senior Arcada figure.

Little did Slah know, the phone the cousin used to call him was owned by Osama bin Laden, and the call was being tapped by the CIA.

In the months immediately after nine to eleven, the hunt for suspects was intense and largely fruitless.

Sla He became an easy mark for the powerful Panic global intelligence network that desperately needed to show results.

In late two thousand and one, he was picked up by the Martinian authorities for questioning.

He told his mother that he would be back in time to break fast.

Unbeknownst to him, they were working for the United States.

The next thing he knew, he was being shuttled through a chain of secret prisons from Jordan to Afghanistan to Guantanamo.

Along the way, he was accused of masterminding the failed Millennium plot and of recruiting nine to eleven hijackers.

He became the subject of a special interrogation plan personally approved by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

In all, he was held for fourteen years, eight of which spanned the Obama administration.

Slahi never saw his mother again.

In the beginning of his ordeal, Slahi resisted, but when we spoke from his new home in Amsterdam last summer, the affable efuse of fifty four year old who, despite his ordeal, looks a decade younger, recalled the endless cycle of violence.

He endured, I don't want to resist anymore, but I didn't know what to say.

I didn't know what would stop this madness.

I was overwhelmed, completely overwhelmed.

The men and women who carried out his torture plan, who would not let him sleep for seventy days, who doused him with freezing water, beat him, stripped him naked, and assaulted him.

They all made one thing clear.

If he didn't talk, much worse was in store.

They kept mentioning him that he is the boss, and if I don't make the decision to talk, they he will come to me himself.

So the man would come and meet.

Then one day Slahi finally met the man behind the one sided mirror, and on that day his already twisted torture to get another cruel turn.

Captain Collins aka rich sured Zulie into the room, wearing camo and presenting himself as a naval captain.

He was a handsome man.

He was like not very white, a little bit like brownish, very pointy nose or maybe because of the sun.

Then very point knows, very angry man, you know, very very direct.

There is no like introduction.

He came and de handed me a letter.

The letter purportedly came from the Defense Department ESLA.

He tells it.

The letter suggested his mother could be taken, and Zuli warned him she would be placed in a men's prison where he couldn't guarantee her safety.

Then he stood up and walked out.

He is very professional, and I can tell you that he won the party absolutely, one hundred percent, because it was like I was numb.

Now I woke up, fully woke up, and now I want to confess as to confess, yes, absolutely, because my mother now is a red lion.

But it was like it was like I didn't know what to say.

But all of a sudden, I know, now I need to say something.

Sometime after sly, he says, Zuli had made his objectives clear and left the room.

He heard dogs barking.

He first thought the dogs were for someone else.

He felt for them, then he realized they were barking outside of his cell.

Along with the dogs, a team of masked interrogators entered his room.

A wild, chaotic scene ensued.

He was beaten until he lost consciousness.

When he woke up, it was bloody and his ribs were broken.

The perversity didn't end there, According to Slahi, Zuli had him moved to a different building and his records were taken out of the prison system.

So when the Red Cross came to check on detainees, he wasn't there.

And if he wasn't there, he effectively didn't exist.

I was his property, and you put me in a place that is only accessible to him.

At first, Slahi's account all sounded outrageous, too extreme to accept and get the thread from Anthony to Muhammadu appears unmistakable.

Guantanamo represented in many ways the most distorted evolution of the interrogation approach that had drawn earlier concerns in Chicago.

The same techniques only amplified what distinguished Zuli, according to multiple accounts, was not a personal appetite for direct physical violence.

Unlike John Burge, who was alleged to have inflicted harm himself, Zuli was repeatedly described as someone who oversaw interrogations rather than carrying out the physical acts.

Others on the team handled that part his role, as it was characterized in statements and testimony was to orchestrate the process, observing from a distance, stepping in periodically, and shaping the direction of the interrogation.

To be sure, we reached out to Zuli and his legal team.

Neither as responded to our questions, nor has he been charged with any wrongdoing to date.

Wasn't this exactly how Anthony's interrogation had unfolded?

Did this not sound similar to what he said way back in nineteen ninety two, two burly men wearing jerseys entered repeatedly and beat him.

And speaking with Slahi, I noticed how he inflects even the darkest parts of this story with humor.

He laughs when he recalls the violence he says was inflicted on his mind and body, when he reflects on the conduct he attributes to Zuli.

Initially I thought it was just a coping technique, a way of distancing himself.

But as I played the interview back in the weeks that followed, I began to understand what was actually moving underneath the humor.

I don't think straight when I'm tortured.

I just want the pain to stop.

It's not like I'm thinking what would happen tomorrow?

What would happen after, because you know, you think of consequences if someone comes.

If someone comes to you, give you a cup of coffee and ask a question, and then you make a confession.

That's if this confession is wrong.

This is I cannot explain.

But if someone torture you physically or psychologically or both in my case and the case of my brother Anthony, you are not yourself.

So you know that's you are.

That's one.

Once someone violated your humor rights and your dignity and tortuo, I assure you that you are not anymore.

That ducks you become a completely different person.

And so I had no choice, and they had the script ready.

There was just one more thing before I did this confession.

When I was bleeding, letcher Zuli came to me and said, I told you not to fuck with me.

The final act, everything recalls Slahi changed once he started confessing to plots he had never heard of in places he had never been.

Zuli cookies.

Then he brought him an article about a Soviet pilot who defected to the United States.

Then he let him watch black Hawk down the nineteen ninety three battle in Somalia, when two black Hawk helicopters were shot down during a mission, triggering a deadly battle between American forces and Somali fighters.

Slahi was on a path to becoming the first nine to eleven suspect sent to death, a turkey being fattened before the slaughter.

Meanwhile, Zuli was poised to become a national hero.

Slahi was going to be his crowning achievement, the ultimate act of patriotism.

But then information that had long been concealed came to light.

Concerns about Zuli's interrogation tactics were fully exposed, and the case against Slahi began to unravel.

Long before all of that, though, way back in nineteen ninety two, Anthony Garrett claimed that Detective Zuli prepared a script for him as well.

After beatings and being shackled to a wall, he says he was handed a pre written document and told it would all stop if he just signed.

No.

One believed Anthony when he said it was the product of coercion and didn't matter that he said it the first moment he could.

It was too late, but with Slahi's aid, a new narrative was lurching to the surface.

I felt the force and conviction of Slahi's words, his authenticity felt undeniable to me, even over Zoom.

His mission in life is to expose injustice, so I knew if he'd ever had the chance to tell his story in a US court, it would go a long, long way.

Okay, So back to Garrett's claim.

On April nineteenth, twenty twenty three, the Turk announced its ruling there is sufficient evidence of torture to conclude by a preponderance of the evidence that the claim merits judicial review.

It read the Commisit referred Anthony's claim to the Chief Judge of Cook County for further review.

In short order, the prosecutor's office quietly extended an offer time served.

Anthony could walk, no trial, no headlines, no cross examination.

But in the ultimate bet on myself move, he refused.

He'd fought too hard to prove his innocence, and accepting the deal would have meant registering as a child offender for the next ten years.

He also wouldn't have been able to soothe the state.

That wasn't freedom, That was a life sentence by another name.

Still, a new review means new risks.

This could be Anthony's last shot, his final chance to prove what he'd been saying all along.

It also meant new evidence the pattern in practice angles that Jennifer had been honing, most recently with Lee Harris, who had just been released less than a month earlier, ready for an encore.

In Lee's case, Jennifer identified date inconsistencies in general progress reports, shifts she believed reflected changes in the investigative account.

She saw similar issues in Anthony's file, But let's not bury the lead.

The pattern in practice that mattered, the one that moved the commission, was the evidence of coercive interrogation.

If you had given me all three four of the Zuli cases that I have and asked me to evaluate them for strength to see which one I should file first, I probably would say tony'says the strongest.

By what she meant, the prosecutor's case hung entirely on a confession.

No physical evidence, no eyewitness, no forensic link, nothing else.

So now that the confession had been challenged at the product of coercive tactics, the central question before the judge was whether absent those tactics, there would be a confession at all.

Break the cause of chain and the case case unravels.

That's exactly where Jennifer planned to slot in Slahi.

He was her closer.

The only problem getting him in the room.

Mohammadu Uld Slahi, author survivor, truth teller, was still barred from setting foot on American soil.

He had never been charged with the crime, let alone convicted of one, but he was still in the government's no fly list.

So when Jennifer sought to introduce his testimony by zoom, the prosecution pushed back.

They raised three objections.

First, they argued Slahi's status as a suspected terrorist during the post nine to eleven period put him in a different category altogether, one, where as they put it, different standards apply.

Second, they dismissed the Guardian expose, which had examined Zuli's interrogation methods, as biased and untrustworthy.

And third, they objected to the idea of virtual testing.

This was, after all, a criminal hearing, and not even an international one.

Letting a foreign national appear via video, they claimed, would compromise the integrity of the court.

I couldn't help it, sigh, even now, as the state prepared to defend the conviction rooted in the confession taken by a detective whose interrogation methods have been challenged in multiple cases.

The system resisted reckoning.

It questioned the witness, It scrutinized the platform, It burrowed itself in procedure.

But in July twenty twenty five, two years after the Turk ruled in Anthony's favor, Judge Adrian Davis issued a ruling that made just change everything.

Sly he would be allowed to testify live over zoom.

On November twenty fourth, twenty twenty five, Slhe's voice was finally heard in an American court room.

He told the court what it's like to be broken, what it means to confess to something you didn't do, and he did it on behalf of a man he's never met because his brother, and now they wait.

Judge Davis's ruling could end three decades of Anthony's suffering.

It could also end his efforts to get free.

It could reopen old wounds for the victim's family, or it could reaffirm their faith that the system got the right man.

As if today we just don't know.

Still, it's impossible not to wonder, So I asked Jennifer the million dollar question.

Does she think Anthony actually has a chance.

And it's very dangerous in this work to let yourself even think that, because I've had it.

I have thought that before internally and not expressed it and had my clients get really, I'm like, Mom, Jennifer Downer, you know, because I'm like, you know, nothing's guaranteed, blah blah blah, But I really believe we have the truth on our side with Tony's case.

Jennifer could have said facts, cold, hard, forensic, but she didn't.

She chose truth, and I trusted there was intentionality in that, a reason.

Truth, as Jennifer perhaps offhandedly notes, can switch sides.

In nineteen ninety two, the truth was that Anthony Garrett looked as guilty as any man could look.

He had the record, the gang ties, the proximity, the past.

There were other truths.

The fear was real.

Cities were reeling from violence.

Kabrini had become a symbol, and just days after Danchell Davis's murder, a presidential candidate stood in downtown Chicago, promising one hundred thousand more police.

The candidate one and within two years signed the largest crime bill in US history.

In two thousand and one, The truth was that mohammadu Oud Slahi needed to be responsible for some punishable offense.

He was Muslim, He trained in Afghanistan with a kada, a phone linked to Osama bin Laden had once dialed his family's number.

But another truth, America was in mourning.

The towers had collapsed, the enemy was faceless, and someone, anyone, had to answer for it.

Now Slahi is an internationally renowned author, an human rights activist who just might be the key to Anthony's freedom.

But if it's so fickle or at least flippable, what does truth really mean and where does it get us?

That question stayed with me, especially during my conversations with Cynthia and Aina, because they didn't just hope their loved one was finally getting out.

Their certainty was ground in a constellation of truths, truths born not in the courtroom, but in the concrete courtyards and the stairwells, the unspoken codes of Cabrini Green.

You see, Cabrini wasn't a place that you just lived in.

It was a world with its own rules and relationships, with complicated kinship networks and pockets of knowledge that only those fluent and survival could understand its own truths.

Take Hollywood, for example, the mysterious witness whose alleged tip to the police sparked Anthony's arrest.

For months, I assumed Hollywood was either myth or ghost.

But the truth, as Cynthia revealed, was more layered than that.

There were two Hollywoods in Cabrini, one male, one female.

The female has always been the suspected witness who the prosecution could not seem to find.

Turns out, Cynthia has known her practically her whole life.

They lived in the same building, three floors apart.

She'd even called the woman on the way to meet with me, would she come along.

Hollywood didn't want anything to do with it, even after all this time.

Still she offered Cynthia the truth that she could.

She told me.

She said, sus you know, I ain't when told nobody that my brother did none that that stupid.

You know, I ain't told nobody and my brother did that, because that's who she called him, her brother.

She said, I ain't doing nothing like that.

There was more, but.

Right after they said that about her, she shut.

The entire revelation.

Both that Cynthia had the woman whose alleged statement had led to her brother's arrest on speed dial, and that she had been shot floored me.

And yet I also wasn't surprised.

For Hollywood truth was and remains a danger, a risk she's not willing to take, even for someone she calls family.

And then there was another truth about the day of the murder, one that Cynthia herself had forgotten until her son reminded her, also on the drive to meet me, And like.

You know, I remember, ma, I remember because he came and gat me, me and my brother from school.

That morning after the shooting.

He was Anthony.

Aina had tried to get Cynthia's boys first, but the school wouldn't allow her to take them.

Since they shared a last name with Anthony, they let him take the boys.

My son told me, he said, I'll never forget my uncle came to get me.

Wow.

One final truth, this time from Aina.

My son only got two years with his father, two years.

So I was mad a lot.

That single gunshot ripped apart so many lives.

Where do these truths spit?

Though?

None of them, not Hollywood assurances, not his nephew's gratitude, not even his son's loss clear Anthony, They don't prove innocence, but they complicate the story further, blurring and already fuzzy narrative to borrow Jennifer's parlance, add currency to Anthony's side of the scale.

For years, these truths haunted the family.

To know your truth and not be heard, to be dismissed, to be disbelieved, it made them understandably bitter and distrustful.

Mad As Aina put it, I didn't set out to tell this story as their witness, but somewhere along the way, I realized that's what I'd become a witness to the truths this family has held for decades, a witness to a system that punished people not for what they did before, where they lived, and who they were.

But now, thanks in no small part to Jennifer, Cynthia, Aina and the rest of the family have something perhaps even more valuable than truth.

It's getting hurt for Jennifer to come along and open that heart up, you know, starting to spread out now, because it was.

Just with hope, and now we have better can hope you know, we have that he's looking real good.

Yeah.

Belief, Yeah, for thirty years, belief was all they had then On November twenty fourth, twenty twenty five, Anthony finally had something he hadn't had since nineteen ninety four, a live in person, hearing, a room, a judge, a chance.

Anthony entered the room slowly, painfully.

His back was wrecked from the transport, his gate stiff, He moved like a man carrying decades on his spine, and when deputies walked him into the glass walled courtroom, he looked out and saw faces of family and friends who had held his name quietly for three decades, finally saying it out loud again.

Judge Adrian Davis did him a solid Let them step forward, let them speak, let them look him in the eyes.

It was awkward, everyone spread across a courtroom, separated by glass and deputies, but it was the first true reunion he'd had since Clinton was on the campaign trail.

Before any testimony, the prosecutor stood and delivered an opening statement that felt like a time warp back to the nineties, the same old posture, the same flat, clinical recitation of Anthony's supposed guilt.

Anthony stiffened at the first sentence, Then he shook his head, followed by the soft and voluntary reactions, the tight exhale through his nose, the sudden stillness and his shoulders like he was bracing for impact.

Jennifer understood.

She calmed him.

Then came Slahi.

He appeared on the screen from Amsterdam and began recounting Guantanamo Bay, the cold room, the ice water, nearly dying, the sexual assault, the envelope with Zuli's name scrawled across it.

The court room went still.

Through it all, Anthony watched, holding his aching body erect.

This was the first time he had heard someone else describe the same tactics he said were used on him in Chicago, the first time that he'd seen that patterned laid bare in a courtroom.

Following two marathon days of hearings, I called Jennifer.

She was at O'Hare on her way to a much needed vacation.

She was exhausted, wired, still replaying the moments.

It wasn't over yet.

Zuli was supposed to testify, but backed out at the last minute.

There was a chance he would still appear, but who really knew.

We'd reached out to Zuli and his attorneys for common as well.

They didn't respond.

In the meantime, Jennifer had a closing to prepare when she got back, and it wasn't clear how the judge would ultimately rule.

Despite the uncertainties on the horizon, the last two days had been worth it.

I wanted Mohammadu to testify.

I wanted that to be on record.

I wanted the media in Chicago to hear it.

I wanted people to hear his story in a local way that applied to Richard Zuley.

You know that Richard Zuli did this to him and the American government condoned it, just like the Chicago police condoned his sadistic bullshit in Chicago.

So now so, and I hope Mohammad didn't have to testify again, didn't have to go through that again.

You know, Anthony Garrett and Mohammadu uld Slahi might have finally got their day in court.

But what does it say about us that it took thirty years, two continents, and a man tortured in Guantanamo for the truth to find a courtroom in Cook County?

How many more are still waiting to be heard, still buried beneath bad headlines, broken systems, and false certainty.

How many?

I'm Dax devln Ross and this has been Crying Wolf.

The bonus episodes the case of Anthony Garrett.

Crying Wolf is an iHeart and Clockwork Films podcast in association with Chalk and Blade.

I'm your host Dax Devlyn Ross.

The series producer is Sarah Stolart's.

The senior producer is Laura Hyde.

The serious script is written by me and by Sarah Stolart's.

Bonus episodes are written and produced by me Dax Devlin Ross.

Our executive producers are Christine Everett for iHeart podcasts, Naomi Harvey and Jamie Cohen for Clockwork Films, and Ruth Barnes and Jason Phipps for Chalk and Blade.

Thanks to Carolyn sher Levin from Reviewed and Cleared for her legal review and advice throughout the series.

Theme music by Kenny Kusiak and sound designer mix of the bonus episodes by Matt Nielsen