David Clarke was 19 years old when he went to jail and spent four years behind bars on Rikers Island accused of murder. He was a National Honor Society student before he was arrested in 2007. He spent his time sending letter to anyone that would listen. A few words from a letter he wrote the Daily News read: “I feel like I am trapped in a system that was designed to try to keep me in jail rather than find justice, he wrote the Daily News one year ago. I am not looking for sympathy from anyone, nor am I looking for any favors, all I want is a fair trial to prove that I am innocent.”
David finally was freed after a month long trial. The jury took only 20 minutes to acquit him. This after waiting 4 years for a fair trial.
His lawyer Steven Kaiser, said, “They didn’t even wait for the free lunch, I think they genuinely felt sorry for the kid. They didn’t want him to spend a minute more in jail.”
Then here we are in the present 8 months later and he was shot right in front of his home. The killer is still at large.
The ex-murder suspect became a murder victim, shot to death in front of his Bronx home on Monday — killed in a penny-ante neighborhood beef unrelated to the murder case, his devastated family said.
His mother is left devastated, “Four years in Rikers, to come here and die in eight months? Why would God do that? It’s not even fair,” cried his mother, Anne Smith. “He was 23 years old. How do you die at 23?”
Her son’s friends told her that David had won a fistfight and the loser vowed to return with a gun for revenge.
“David thought he was joking. The guy is 16 or 17!” she said. “He came back five minutes later. Nobody knows why.”
Cops found the mortally wounded Clarke bleeding from the neck on sidewalk outside his Sedgwick Ave. building in the Bronx just after 4 p.m.
It doesn’t sound like it will be hard to find out who the guy is.
