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Accused
At about 9 p.m. on March 16, 2006, Dave Evans was napping in his room at his rental house on 610 North Buchanan in Durham, North Carolina, when “I woke up to thundering knocks on my door like it was going to be broken down.” The Duke University senior, one of four co-captains of the school’s highly ranked lacrosse team, had just finished a grueling practice. Dave and co-captain Matt Zash, who also lived in the house, yelled to each other about who would get the door. Suddenly Dave heard, “Police! Freeze! Don’t move! Put your hands up!”He ran into the living room. “There were all these cops with their flashlights in our eyes,” he recalled. “It was like in a movie or something. The next thing you know, they were patting us down, going through our pockets, yelling, ‘Why didn’t you answer the door?’ I said I was sleeping. They shouted, ‘Who was in the backyard?’ ”
The cops said that they had a search warrant. Sgt. Mark Gottlieb and Officer Benjamin Himan had obtained it after interviewing a 27-year-old black woman named Crystal Mangum earlier in the day. An exotic dancer—a stripper—she claimed she was gang-raped at this house three nights earlier. As the officers read from the warrant, Evans and Zash interjected. These were lies, they said, and asked for a chance to tell what really happened.
Gottlieb ignored them. The police took $160 that was lying on a table—money they thought belonged to Crystal Mangum—and demanded to know where her wallet and cell phone were. On top of the refrigerator, the boys said. We found them in the backyard. “Yeah, sure you did,” sneered Gottlieb.
“We kept telling [the police] we would help in any way,” Dave Evans recalled. “I said I would take a polygraph.”
When Dan Flannery, another co-captain and housemate, came home, he found it filled with cops. He, too, asked for a chance to tell the truth. Instead, to his bafflement, Officer Richard Clayton accused him of assaulting a policeman weeks before. As cops surrounded Flannery, he feared he would be beaten up. In the background, he could see an officer helping himself to birthday cake. Flannery had just turned 22.
The cops backed off when they realized they had the wrong guy, but the night went from bad to worse for the lacrosse players. In an effort to show their innocence, they volunteered to be interviewed at the Durham police station. They answered every question and gave DNA, blood and hair samples, knowing that if any of their DNA was found on Crystal Mangum, it would mean decades in prison. The police put them into separate rooms and told them to write their recollections of March 13, 2006. As Dave Evans started writing his, Gottlieb said to him, “Tell us the truth or you’re going to jail for life.”
Evans remembered thinking, The truth will set us free.
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