Was an innocent man wrongly jailed? Or was a guilty man set free after a botched investigation?
And are Phoenix’s freeways safe from a potential killer?
These questions still haunt drivers on busy Interstate 10, Arizona’s main east-west corridor, which was sprayed with bullets in a series of unsolved shootings late last summer.
A 21-year-old man was arrested last September and charged with the shootings. But now he is free, and maintains he is “100 percent” innocent.
“I was simply not on the freeway shooting at people,” Leslie Merritt Jr. told CNN in a sit-down interview after his recent release from jail. “I didn’t. I did not do it.”
The Glendale, Arizona, father of two is soft-spoken but talks quickly, seemingly nervous. He arrived for his interview with CNN after finishing up his landscaping job, working in 100-degree heat. He wiped sweat from his brow as he buttoned a white dress shirt and threw on a sport coat, joking that it’s not his typical attire.
Merritt spent seven months behind bars before prosecutors dropped the 16 felony charges against him in April and a Maricopa County judge dismissed the case “without prejudice,” leaving law enforcement pondering how their investigation fell apart.
A judge ruled Merritt can get back his car and his gun — the same gun on which investigators built their case — on June 30.
He is trying to get his life back on track. But his freedom feels tenuous, because prosecutors could refile charges against him at any time.
‘A rush to judgment’?
For weeks last year, starting in late August, Phoenix was in the grip of fear. Police responded to eleven shootings along busy roadways, including seven on a roughly 12-mile stretch of Interstate 10. Nobody was killed, but the shootings injured a 13-year-old girl passenger who was cut by flying glass, shattered car windows and left a tour bus with a bullet in it.
“When they found it inside, lodged in a seat, I almost fainted,” bus driver Robert McDonald recalled. “Thank God the bus was empty.”
The FBI joined the investigation. A $50,000 reward was offered to help catch the shooter.
Then, on September 18, law enforcement swarmed Merritt as he walked out of a Walmart with his then-fiancé and their baby daughter. By then, Merritt said investigators were desperate to calm a community growing more afraid every day.
“I think it was a rush to judgment,” he said. A search of court records found no serious criminal convictions in Merritt’s past.
“They needed to arrest somebody to calm down everybody who was wondering and worrying,” he said. “I just got the short end of the straw.”
Changes in the shooting timeline
Police claimed Merritt was “forensically linked” to the first four shootings, which were reported on August 29 and 30, 2015.
From day one, Merritt was adamant police had made a mistake. He even offered to take a polygraph to prove it.
“Sir, I have nothing to explain this. I did not do this, man,” Merritt told a detective in a videotaped police interrogation on the day of his arrest. “I swear on the Bible, I put on my kids’ life, I did not do it.”
Police said evidence suggested otherwise. The state’s crime lab concluded that bullet fragments collected at the shooting scenes were fired by a 9mm Hi-Point pistol, a make of gun that Merritt had recently sold to a pawn shop.
“There’s no way it’s possible. I know for a fact that they can’t match my gun because I wasn’t shooting on the freeway,” Merritt told CNN. “And as a matter of fact, during one of the incidents, my gun was already in the pawn shop.”
Records show Merritt’s gun was in a pawn shop, Mo Money Pawn, on August 30 when officials initially said the fourth shooting had occurred. But detectives later changed the timeline. They said after re-interviewing witnesses, they discovered that particular shooting could have happened days earlier, before Merritt pawned the gun.
“So when they realized that Leslie’s gun was in the pawn shop for the fourth shooting, they tried to maneuver the timeline,” said Merritt’s defense attorney, Jason Lamm. “They had a theory and the facts simply didn’t fit. So they had to massage the facts to fit the theory.”
Behind bars for 222 days
Merritt said he was locked up in a 12-by-8-foot cell for 23 hours a day at the Lower Buckeye Jail, Arizona’s largest detention center. There, he said he lived in “total isolation” for seven months, just a short drive from his fiance and kids.
“Two hundred and 22 days” to be exact, he said.
Merritt said he was not allowed to have any contact with fellow inmates because he was classified a “hands alone, transport alone” detainee.
“You live alone, everywhere you go you’re by yourself,” he explained. He said he was told it was for his own safety.
He said he wasn’t even allowed to have direct contact with his family, including his fiancé and their son, now almost 5, and daughter, now 14 months. They tried to visit once a week but were forced to talk by phone, looking at each other through a computer screen.
“I call them nightmares, but I pretty much watched my kids grow up in dreams while I was in jail,” Merritt said, “’cause, you know, I’m told ‘188 years, you’re never getting out.'”
He described suffering “mental torture” as he missed milestones like his daughter’s first birthday and wondered constantly what his children were doing and if they were OK. He and the kids’ mother have since called off their engagement and are split up.
Expert turns case upside down
Merritt’s freedom came from an unexpected source. Prosecutors hired an independent forensics expert to take another look at the evidence. His test results turned the case upside down.
The expert concluded there was not a definitive match between Merritt’s gun and the bullet fragments collected from the shooting scenes.
“The four evidence bullets … could neither be excluded or identified as having been fired in the Hi-Point C9 Pistol,” the expert, identified as L.H. in court documents, wrote in his report.
Maricopa County Attorney Bill Montgomery had little choice but to drop the charges.
“We knew we had more work to do,” Montgomery said.
The court dismissed the case without prejudice, leaving the investigation open. But Merritt isn’t completely cleared in the case. If they come up with new evidence, prosecutors could refile charges within a seven-year statute of limitations, Montgomery said.
The prosecutor’s office and the Arizona’s Department of Public Safety declined to answer additional questions because of their ongoing investigation.
However, Frank Milstead, director of Arizona’s Department of Public Safety, said shortly after Merritt’s release in late April that he still believed Merritt was the shooter.
Lingering questions, fear
Meanwhile, plenty of questions remain. Was the shooter firing from another vehicle, from an overpass or from the side of the interstate? Was the shooter targeting a specific vehicle or firing at random?
Since Merritt was arrested, there have been no additional shooting incidents on Phoenix freeways that authorities believe are linked to the shooting spree last year.
Without answers and with no one in custody, Arizona drivers remain on edge.
“I have zero confidence that they’re actually going to find the right shooter,” said McDonald, the tour bus driver. “Even when I’m driving my own personal vehicle, I still try to keep an eye around my surroundings.”
Merritt, too, said he walks the city streets looking over his shoulder.
“I’m not in jail, but I still have a mental lock up. I’ll see an officer, or I’ll go out in public and it’s, ‘Am I going to get harassed?'” he said.
“I’m mad that I had to sit in jail for 222 days. My kids had to miss time with their dad. I missed time with them. I missed time at work so they didn’t have the financial stuff that they needed. And, just the fact that there’s people out there that think I did this.”