ST. LOUIS — Thomas Williams begins each morning with a pep talk.
“You’ve got to do this,” he tells himself. “T.J. has to go to school. Stop being lazy. Get up.”
He gathers his strength, uses his hands to lift his legs to the side of the bed, hoists himself into his wheelchair and heads down the hall to get his son to the bus stop.
Williams, 33, was shot and paralyzed from the waist down on May 30, 2020, while driving home from downtown Ƶ. A man in another car pulled up alongside him and opened fire, injuring Williams and killing Williams’ passenger, Marcia Brown.
At first, the criminal justice system responded as expected. Police put out a notice on the shooting and arrested a man soon after. Prosecutors charged the man with murder, assault and gun crimes.
But nearly three years later, justice remains elusive. A trial was scheduled for last summer, but days before it was set to begin, prosecutors dismissed and refiled the charges. Evidence wasn’t ready, they said.
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It’s one of thousands of cases that have been delayed, refiled, continued or dismissed altogether during Circuit Attorney Kimberly M. Gardner’s six-year tenure. In that time, prosecutors dropped more than 9,000 criminal cases, many of which were on the eve of trial. Judges dismissed an additional 2,700 cases, sometimes because of failure to prosecute, evidence violations or violations of defendants’ rights to a speedy trial, according to a lawsuit earlier this year filed by Missouri’s attorney general.
On top of the dismissals, Gardner’s office went from having roughly 60 prosecutors when she began to about 20 recently. Families watched as their cases shuffled from prosecutor to prosecutor. Victims called the office but rarely, if ever, received case updates. Families monitored online court records on their own, and they often took off work for hearings and trials that didn’t wind up happening.
As a result, cases have dragged on for years. Crime victims and their families are left grasping for answers, with a mix of anger and frustration.
In one recent case, a family stood outside the courthouse and told reporters they were frustrated after no one from Gardner’s office showed up to a scheduled trial. Another let out a chorus of groans in the courtroom when they heard yet another prosecutor had quit the office, leaving their case in limbo. Still another was notified for the first time by the Post-Dispatch that a murder conviction in their loved one’s death had been thrown out on appeal.
For Williams, shot almost three years ago, it’s too hard to dwell upon his shooter’s court case while he’s working on his recovery.
“I don’t even think about it,” he said. “I just know that when they call me, I am going to do my job and give my testimony.”
But for Marcia Brown’s mother, Yulonda Brown, the case is never far from her mind. She wants justice for her daughter, and she says the system is keeping victims in a fog.
“It’s been hard,” she said. “It’s been a mess.”
Gardner’s office said in a statement that helping victims has been one of her “top priorities,” touting the “dedicated and hardworking victim services team” that “works cooperatively with attorneys to keep victims updated.”
Last week, after months of pressure, Gardner announced that she would resign June 1. But some crime victims and their families question whether their cases will ever be resolved.
‘My world just turned upside down’
For Johnetta Doss, the frustration has been building for three years.
Doss’ daughter, 18-year-old Carieal Doss, died on April 17, 2020, after agreeing to meet a fellow teen in a parking lot at 2838 Franklin Avenue.
Doss said Carieal left her grandmother’s house, where she was staying that night, and left her game console running. It looked like she was going to come right back.
Instead, police found Carieal shot in the back of the head in the city’s Jeff-Vander-Lou neighborhood.
“My world just turned upside down,” Doss said.
Doss turned to alcohol and cigarettes to cope. Once healthy enough that she joined the police academy, she had a heart attack three months after Carieal’s death. She was twice committed to a mental health facility.
Doss kept in touch with detectives, even digging through Facebook messages she thought might be relevant and sending them in as evidence. She waited and waited for someone to be arrested.
Then, a 19-year-old was charged with Carieal’s murder. She didn’t hear from prosecutors, she said, but she figured they would do their jobs.
When she saw hearings scheduled online, she made her way downtown to the courthouse to see justice be served.
“I couldn’t leave other people to do my job,” she said. “That’s all I know how to do, is take care of her.”
But sometimes, nothing would happen. Family members who took off work to accompany Doss to court did so for nothing. The hearing would be moved to another day.
Doss said she would sit in the courthouse’s wooden pews, seething with anger. She spoke with a victim advocate at one point, but at other times attorneys would walk past her.
“Sitting in that courtroom and listening to them, and watching (the accused shooter), it just brought back pure hate,” she said.
Doss’ case dragged on for a year, and a new prosecutor eventually took over. She started giving Doss updates.
One day, when Doss was sitting at her kitchen table scrolling through her phone, a news report popped up.
The previous prosecutor on the case, saddled with a massive caseload, had failed to turn over key evidence, including a DNA report, Facebook messages and other information from police. The mistake was disastrous. The charges had been dismissed.
“I didn’t want to talk. I didn’t want to be around anybody,” Doss said. “I felt like this is a justice system. And justice needs to be served.”
On a recent Friday evening, Doss dressed in a black velvet gown and worked the room at an event space in Florissant. She was holding a ball for victims of gun violence in honor of Carieal. It was like the prom her daughter was never able to attend, she said. A group of mothers who also lost their children surrounded a table, picking up framed photos of their children and an award for the work they’ve done surviving grief and helping others.
Doss stood up and read a letter she wrote for Carieal: “I know I can’t be with you now, you can’t be with me, but safe in my heart, you’ll always be.”
The crowd applauded.
“That was hard, ya’ll,” she said, wiping away tears. “That was hard.”
At Doss’ house in north Ƶ, a poster of Carieal welcomes visitors on her front porch. Her daughter’s smiling face appears in every room, plus a hallway leading up the stairs. A chair at the kitchen table is marked by a T-shirt with her picture.
Gardner’s resignation leaves an opening for a new chief prosecutor set to be appointed by Gov. Mike Parson. Experts and attorneys say it will take months, or even years, to rebuild the decimated office and catch up on the backlog of cases.
Doss said she desperately hopes someone will review her daughter’s case and refile charges. But in the meantime, she said, “I feel helpless.”
“I’m in a situation where I have absolutely no control over what happens,” she said. “I’m just, again, sitting and waiting, hoping and praying, asking God to move things in the way they’re supposed to be moved.”
‘It broke me to pieces’
Early on May 30, 2020, Williams and Marcia Brown had left a celebration in downtown Ƶ. They were trying to get back on Interstate 70 when Williams got turned around. He passed a gas station and noticed a vehicle pull up behind him.
Surveillance video from the gas station at North 13th Street showed Raymond House, 37, and others getting into a Jeep Grand Cherokee before the shooting, court records say. Videos showed the Jeep chasing Williams north onto Grand Avenue, where it pulled alongside him and a person opened fire.
Williams, who was in EMT training, knew immediately that he was paralyzed. He was shot three times. He looked over at Brown and knew her injuries were fatal.
An eerie calm came over him as he diagnosed himself to the paramedics. But he was also confused about why he’d been chased in the first place. He found out later it was a case of mistaken identity.
Williams underwent multiple surgeries to repair the damage from the bullets.
On June 5, 2020, House was charged with the shooting. Williams sat for a deposition with prosecutors to offer his statement.
Still, he said he couldn’t dwell on the criminal case. There was too much already going on inside his head.
His arms and leg were in casts, so he could barely move. Depression overcame him. He suffered from survivor’s guilt and ran a long list of what-ifs: What if he didn’t go out that night? What if the highway exit he needed would have been open? What if the shooter hadn’t gotten the wrong guy?
For his entire life, Williams said, he had tried to stay away from violence. His mother moved the family from the city’s south side to Washington, Missouri, when he was a child. Gangs were trying to recruit her oldest son, she said, so she moved them to get away. But years later, Williams was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease and his family returned to Ƶ to get him treatment.
By 2020, Williams was the healthiest he’d been in years. He was working at a Schnucks distribution warehouse and was training to be an EMT.
He said it angered him that such a seemingly inconsequential series of decisions put him in the wrong place at the wrong time. He had to go back to the hospitals he hated. He felt alone.
Deep bedsores developed on his body as he dealt with depression. He needed surgery to repair the wounds, and his mother still dresses them daily.
One night, Williams’ mother woke up in her condominium next door, feeling that something wasn’t right. She went to check on her son and found Williams foaming at the mouth. He said he had tried to kill himself and was floating toward a white light.
“This whole thing took me somewhere,” he said. “It broke me to pieces.”
Meanwhile, Yulonda Brown was enveloped in her own grief. Around the same time she lost her daughter, she was consoling friends who had also lost loved ones during the summer of 2020.
She created a memorial Facebook page for her “angel” Marcia, who tried to help people in need. She posted updates — a video from police seeking help identifying suspects in the killing, a video of herself at her daughter’s gravesite, information about a virtual balloon release.
At the same time, she was dealing with a legal system that she says was not serving her daughter.
She noticed that the prosecutors in her daughter’s case were overworked and exhausted. She wanted to take action. She requested meetings with city officials, the governor of Missouri and anyone who would listen. She went on TV.
Then, last July, weeks before the suspect’s trial was set to begin, prosecutors filed a motion to delay. They said critical DNA evidence hadn’t been completed and they needed more time. But the judge didn’t grant a continuance, so prosecutors dismissed and refiled the charges instead, pushing them to the bottom of a long list of cases. A new assistant circuit attorney was assigned to handle it, and it would be months before it came back up for trial.
“You gotta be kidding me,” Brown remembered thinking.
‘Why hasn’t somebody updated me?’
Williams has tried to put aside frustrations with the court system. His parents fill him in with updates on the case and Gardner’s office, but he doesn’t watch the news. He stays off social media. He has vowed to stay positive.
He recently got shared custody of his son, T.J., and he spends each day making sure the boy eats, does his homework and gets answers to the litany of questions he asks about rockets and space and his latest obsession, anime cartoons.
It has helped some with his survivor’s guilt and depression, Williams said, but he still has days where he wants to shut the blinds and lie in bed. He has trouble sleeping. He is lonely.
Williams said the court case may bring some closure, but his real focus is on the future. He still has dreams of becoming a trauma nurse. He wants to be social again and maybe find a group of paraplegics like him. He wants to show T.J. the world.
“Even though it’s really, really tough, I do got plans,” Williams said. “I just hope one day I can heal up and get a little support and maybe go back to school.”
Last week, Yulonda Brown spoke about how much she dreads Mother’s Day. She never dreamed she’d be in a “dirty club” of people who have lost a child. She tries to think of solutions. She prays and goes to therapy.
The trial in her daughter’s case is set for September. She had hoped there would be no more changes and the prosecutor would stick around.
But he quit the office on May 1. No one notified her. A Post-Dispatch reporter delivered the news to her during a recent interview.
Yulonda Brown put her head in her hands and cried.
“Why hasn’t somebody updated me?” she said. “Why hasn’t someone from the city called?”
Editor's note: This story corrects the spelling of Crohn's disease.