At about 1:30 a.m. on May 6, 2001, 54-year-old Earnest Jenkins drove his car to a Citgo gas station at the northwest corner of Damen Avenue and 55th Street in Chicago, Illinois. Michael Watson and his nephew, Stanley Watson, rode along.
At the station, Jenkins stayed in the driver’s seat, Michael Watson got out to pump the gas, and Stanley Watson went to pay for it. As Stanley, who was a member of the Gangster Disciples street gang, walked back to the car, he saw a member of the rival Vice Lords street gang approaching with a gun.
Shots then erupted. At least eight shots were fired. Jenkins was struck multiple times and died. Michael Watson was shot in the leg and survived. Stanley Watson was not injured.
Police interviewed several witnesses at the police station, including Brandi Grant and Shemika Mason. Mason told investigators that she had not been present at the Citgo station at the time of the shooting. Grant told police that she had arrived at the Citgo station in a car just before the shooting. Also in the car were driver Mario Brown, Quina Davis, and Manuel Stewart. Grant told police she saw the shooter but did not recognize him.
Quina Davis was later contacted and said she saw the shooter but did not know who he was.
Michael Watson told the police that he saw the shooter but did not recognize him. Stanley Watson also told police that he did not recognize the shooter.
None of the witnesses who were present during the shooting told police that the shooter was an occupant of the car driven to the Citgo station by Mario Brown.
In the days after the shooting, detectives had not identified a suspect, but they did have a description of a car that was present at the Citgo station when the shooting occurred: a tan “box style Chevy.” On May 18, Detectives Brian Forberg and John Foster sighted the “box Chevy,” driven by 19-year-old Kevin Jackson who was accompanied by Mario Brown.
Interviewed at Area 1 by Forberg and Foster, Jackson and Brown denied being involved in the shooting and were released. Michael and Stanley Watson were shown photographs of the car. Michael Watson said he had seen the car weeks before the shooting and that the shooter had been in the car. When he was shown photos of Jackson and Brown, Michael said neither man was the gunman.
On June 2, 2001, police interviewed Vernon Clay, a gang member who lived and dealt drugs near the Citgo station. Clay said he knew nothing about the shooting. On June 11, detectives took Clay into custody and interrogated him for most of three days and two nights. At first, he said he had been home sleeping at the time of the shooting. He later said he had been present when the shooting occurred and that the gunman was a man named Norman McIntosh.
Clay gave another statement saying that he saw Jackson arrive at the station in the box Chevy with Mario Brown, Quina Davis, and Manuel Stewart. Clay signed a statement saying he saw Jackson get out of the car, walk across Damen Avenue, and return with a gun to the station, where he fired at Jenkins’s car. He said the shots were fired from the passenger side of the car. Clay claimed in the statement that Jackson was angry at Stanley Watson for making sexually suggestive comments to Quina Davis. Clay was then released.
Over the next several days, detectives brought Semika Mason, Quina Davis, Brandi Brant, and Manuel Stewart in for questioning. Mason first said that Jackson was not at the station at all. Stewart said the gunman was someone he knew as “Rick Party.”
Davis and Stewart were administered polygraph examinations. Police falsely told them that the polygraph test had found them deceptive when they said Jackson was not involved. Police said Davis then said Jackson was involved but refused to sign a written statement. Stewart, however, signed a statement implicating Jackson.
Grant and Mason eventually also signed statements implicating Jackson.
On June 19, 2001, Jackson was arrested and charged with murder and attempted murder.
Grant, Stewart, and Clay testified before a Cook County grand jury that Jackson was the gunman.
Jackson went to trial in July 2003 before Cook County Circuit Court Judge Evelyn Clay.
The prosecution’s theory was presented through the statements allegedly taken from Stewart, Grant, Clay, and Mason. The prosecution contended that Jackson arrived at the Citgo station in a car driven by Mario Brown, and in which Manuel Stewart, Brandi Grant, Shemika Mason, and Quina Davis were passengers. Jackson allegedly became angry because Stanley Watson made sexually offensive comments to Quina Davis, who the prosecution theorized was Jackson’s girlfriend. Jackson allegedly got out of the car, walked across Damen Avenue, and returned with a gun. He fired at Stanley Watkins, but struck Jenkins and Michael Watson instead.
The prosecution presented evidence that Jackson was a Vice Lord, and that Stanley Watson was a Gangster Disciple who had been warned by Michael Watson to avoid the Citgo because it was Vice Lord territory.
The prosecution called Stewart, Mason, Clay, and Grant. Each testified that they were at the station when the shooting occurred and that Jackson was not the gunman. They said their prior statements implicating Jackson were false and were the result of police coercion.
Grant testified that she was left in a room for hours before being interviewed. She said she repeatedly said Jackson was not there, but the police said she was lying. She said the police told her that if she didn’t name Jackson, the crime would be on her. Grant, who was pregnant at the time, was told that if she did not implicate Jackson, she would have to give birth in police custody. She said she relented and signed a statement. She was kept in the station overnight and taken to the grand jury the next day.
Clay insisted that he was sleeping at home at the time of the shooting and did not know anything about it until he was given details by Detective Forberg at the police station. Clay said he was kept in a room at the police station for an entire day before anyone spoke to him, and he was in custody for a total of three days. He claimed that the police threatened him with imprisonment, said it would “cost [him]” if he did not testify, and threatened to inform everyone on the street that he had cooperated with the police and identified Jackson as the shooter. He said that he was told at one point he would never see the streets again unless he implicated Jackson.
Mason testified that she was interrogated by the police all night before meeting with an assistant state’s attorney who wrote out her statement. She said that Detectives Forberg and Foster called her names and said she was lying when she said Jackson was not the gunman. She said the police were “telling me what they wanted me to say.” She said she had an outstanding arrest warrant at the time, and that the police promised her that if she went along with what they wanted her to say, they would take care of the warrant. She said she signed the statement because she did not want to go to jail.
Stewart testified that he was at the gas station with Mario Brown, Grant, and Davis. He said he saw Davis talking to Stanley Watson and then heard gunshots. He said he and Brown then drove away. He said he saw the gunman and that it was “Rick Party,” not Jackson. He said detectives threatened to charge him with the murder unless he implicated Jackson.
The prosecution was then allowed to impeach each of these witnesses with their original statements to the detectives and to the grand jury. Detectives Forberg, Kevin Howley, and John Clisham testified and denied that any of the witnesses were mistreated, threatened, or coerced.
Michael Watson testified about the shooting and said Jackson was not the gunman.
A police crime lab analyst testified that nine-millimeter shell casings were found on the ground at the rear of the car. Crime scene photographs showed the driver’s side window was shot out and a bullet hole in the car’s rear window.
Dr. Adrienne Segovia, a deputy examiner with the Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office, testified that on the day of the shooting she performed an autopsy on Jenkins’s body. Two bullets had entered Jenkins’s body near his left armpit and traveled from “left to right and towards the back.” One of those had exited his body “on the right side of the back.” A third bullet entered his left abdomen, traveled “side to back and downward,” and exited “on the left side of the back.” A fourth bullet traveled through Jenkins’s left forearm. The prosecution asked if the wounds she described would be consistent with Jenkins, seated in the driver’s seat of the car, “leaning over to his right at the time that the fatal shots were fired.”
Dr. Segovia said that they might, as long as his left side was exposed. The prosecutor asked if the wounds would also be consistent with Jenkins turning to his left, to face the driver’s side window.
“It’s possible,” Dr. Segovia said. “Again, as long as the left side is exposed, because that’s where the entrances are.”
During closing argument, Jackson’s attorney criticized the prosecution’s attempts to steer Dr. Segovia’s testimony as “nonsense,” saying, “You heard the State’s Attorney trying to get Dr. Segovia to say maybe it was consistent with this guy in the driver’s seat somehow turning his body around. I suppose they’re going to argue that he turned his whole body around and was facing the rear, so the shots come from the passenger’s side of the car.”
The defense attorney noted that the detectives had not yet spoken to the medical examiner when they took the witnesses’ later recanted statements. Had they done so, the attorney argued, they would have understood, “Hey, we got a problem here,” because the nature of the wounds indicated that someone had shot Mr. Jenkins from the driver’s side of the vehicle.
In rebuttal closing argument, the prosecution insisted the medical examiner’s testimony supported its theory of the case—that Jackson and Stanley Watson were arguing near the rear of the car and Jenkins, in the driver’s seat, turned to see what was going on, thus exposing his left side to shots fired toward Stanley Watson.
The prosecutor also argued to the jury that “every one of these handwritten statements and every one of these grand jury transcripts is corroborated by the physical evidence.”
The jury began deliberating shortly after 2 p.m. on July 24. During the evening, the jurors could be heard arguing loudly. They requested for a diagram of the crime, but that request was refused by Judge Clay. They then asked for a posterboard, a marker, and tape.
At one point, they sent out notes asking about the law relating to a hung jury, saying they were deadlocked at 10 to 2. They asked how long they would be deliberating. One note asked, “How do we sleep?”
At 9:15 p.m., Judge Clay ordered the jury sequestered for the night. The following day, July 25, 2003, after a few more hours of deliberation, the jury convicted Jackson of first-degree murder and aggravated battery with a firearm.
Prior to sentencing, Jackson’s attorney filed a motion for a new trial, arguing in part that Jackson had been visited at the Cook County Jail by Rick McShan, who was known as “Rick Party.” McShan admitted that he was the gunman and apologized to Jackson. During an evidentiary hearing on the motion, another inmate, Duan Armfield, testified that he was in the visiting room with his girlfriend, Holly Miles, and overheard McShan’s admission. Miles also testified that she heard McShan admit to the shooting.
Judge Clay denied the motion for a new trial, saying that it was “the province of the jurors to sort out the facts and determine what occurred.”
Jackson spoke up at this point, saying, “I didn’t do this, man…I didn’t do this, your honor.”
Judge Clay told him to be quiet and then sentenced Jackson to 45 years in prison.
In 2006, the First District Illinois Appellate Court upheld the convictions and sentence, noting that the physical evidence supported the initial statements of the witnesses.
Acting without a lawyer, Jackson filed a post-conviction petition in 2007 which Judge Clay dismissed without a hearing. Jackson filed a federal petition for a writ of habeas corpus, but it also was dismissed without a hearing.
In 2017, now represented by attorneys Elizabeth Bacon and Brandon Clark, Jackson filed a motion seeking to file a successive petition for post-conviction relief. The motion included affidavits from Clay, Stewart, Davis, and Grant re-asserting that their original statements were false and the result of police coercion.
Davis, who had not been called to testify at Jackson’s trial, said that she saw the shooter, who ran right by her, and she recognized him as “someone from the neighborhood.” She said that individual was not Jackson, whom she had grown up with and would have recognized. Davis further said that she was questioned by the police for three days, and “they just kept insisting that was the way it happened” and pressured her to confirm their theory. Davis said the detectives threatened to charge her as an accessory to the murder and told her that her daughter would be taken away from her. Unlike the other witnesses, however, she had no outstanding warrants, and she refused to give a statement saying Jackson was the shooter.
The motion also described similar coercive conduct by Forberg and Foster and other detectives in other cases, particularly the murder prosecution of Maurice Patterson, who had been exonerated in 2010.
In 2012, the city of Chicago had agreed to pay Patterson $3.4 million to settle a federal lawsuit. The lawsuit claimed that one of three witnesses who had identified Patterson had been held for three days until she identified Patterson. The lawsuit said that the officers, including Forberg and Foster, had pressured the witness and at one point let her know that Patterson would be the third person in the lineup.
In 2018, Judge Clay denied the motion. The First District Appellate Court affirmed the denial, although Presiding Justice Mary Lane Mikva dissented, saying that the case had “all the hallmarks of one in which the wrong person was convicted.” Justice Mikva said further proceedings were warranted based on the affidavit of Davis, who had not testified at the trial, and that the evidence tending to show a pattern and practice of coercion by Forberg and Foster constituted newly discovered evidence.
The Illinois Supreme Court agreed to hear a further appeal, but in 2021 again affirmed the denial. Justice P. Scott Neville Jr., in a separate concurring opinion, said he was “deeply troubled” by the allegations of police coercion. He urged the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office to not “sit idly by” and to undertake an investigation of the allegations.
Jackson’s case was subsequently reviewed by the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Conviction Integrity Unit (CIU), but it decided not to take any action. An apparent conflict of interest was discovered. An assistant state’s attorney working in the CIU was married to Detective Forberg. As a result, Thomas Geraghty and Robert Owen were named special assistant state’s attorneys to independently review Jackson’s case.
On August 4, 2023, Geraghty and Owen presented a 77-page report to the State’s Attorney’s Office concluding that Jackson’s convictions lacked “sufficient integrity to be allowed to stand.”
In addition to the coerced statements, the report cited an independent re-examination of the evidence by forensic experts Dr. Jack Hietpas and Dr. Joseph Peterson, who concluded that the shots had been fired from the driver’s side of the car. This contradicted Clay’s pretrial statement that the shots were fired from the passenger side. The crime scene investigation was “negligently conducted and seriously incomplete,” the experts said.
The report said that the prosecution “should consider agreeing to vacate Kevin Jackson’s conviction in the interest of justice and allowing him to be released from custody, and not retrying him.
On December 5, 2023, Jackson’s lawyers filed a petition for relief from judgment. The petition said that although the defense had not seen Geraghty and Owen’s report, it believed that it recommended that Jackson’s convictions be vacated. By that time, at least a dozen defendants had accused Forberg, who had retired in 2023, and other detectives of misconduct, including coercing witnesses into falsely implicating people in murders and other felonies. The prosecution did not oppose the petition.
A month later, the defense received a heavily redacted copy of the report. The prosecution refused to provide an unredacted copy, claiming it contained protected work product. The defense supplemented its petition with the redacted report.
When the prosecution presented the redacted report to Judge Angela Petrone, who had inherited the case after Judge Clay retired, Judge Petrone noted that entire pages had been redacted and said that version “doesn’t look like it’s going to be that helpful.” Jackson’s lawyers agreed and made an oral motion to compel production of the unredacted report.
The prosecution objected, citing work product. Judge Petrone handed the redacted report back and ordered the prosecution to give her an unredacted copy, saying: “I’ll determine if it’s work product. Okay?”
The unredacted report was given to Judge Petrone. Four months later, in April 2024, the defense filed a written reply in support of its motion to compel production of the unredacted report to Jackson.
In June 2024, Judge Petrone denied the petition for post-conviction relief without ruling on the defense motion to obtain the full report. Judge Petrone said she was troubled by the State’s Attorney’s office’s failure to oppose the motion to vacate Jackson’s conviction. She said there was no new evidence and that the authors of the report had “improperly assessed” the recanting witnesses.
When the defense renewed its request for a copy of the report after the oral ruling, noting that the judge had relied upon it in her ruling, Judge Petrone said that was the first she had heard of the defense request for it. The defense reminded the judge that precisely such a motion had been pending since December. Jackson appealed.
Although the case was on appeal, Judge Petrone scheduled a date for a ruling on the motion to compel. When the case was back in court on July 8, 2024, the judge ordered the prosecution to produce the unredacted report, noting that the report had been leaked to the news media, and that it didn’t contain any exculpatory information or anything else of value for the defense.
Jackson also filed a motion seeking his release while the case was being appealed. The First District Appellate Court denied that motion but set the case on an accelerated docket. The parties argued the case on October 1, 2024.
On October 2, 2024, the appellate court ordered that Jackson be released immediately. On October 8, 2024, Jackson was released from custody.
On October 25, 2024, the First District Appellate Court, in a ruling authored by Justice Mikva, reversed Judge Petrone’s denial of the motion to vacate the conviction.
The court excoriated Judge Petrone.
“Everything about this case has been extraordinary—from the troublingly thin evidence upon which Mr. Jackson was convicted, to the disturbing facts that have been uncovered regarding the tactics employed by the detectives in this case, to the State publicly taking the position that it does not oppose the extraordinary relief that Mr. Jackson seeks and that it would not retry Mr. Jackson for these crimes,” the ruling declared. “[W]e conclude that any reasonable review of this record demonstrates by a preponderance of the evidence that there are facts that, if known at the time of Mr. Jackson’s trial and direct appeal, would have prevented his convictions.”
The court ruled that Judge Petrone’s failure to order the prosecution to produce an unredacted report to the defense was “an abuse of discretion that tainted the process and requires reversal. It limited defense counsel’s ability to present a fully formed argument, which likely contributed to…[Judge Petrone’s] failure to focus on significant new evidence in that report.”
The court said the forensic report which said the shots were fired from the passenger side of the car was “[p]erhaps of greatest significance.” The court noted that the trajectory of the bullets appeared to be an issue for the jury, and the prosecution’s version had been relied upon by appeals courts in prior decisions in the case.
“In sum, the new forensic experts…now unequivocally conclude that the trajectory of the bullets…does not support the State’s theory of the case,” the court ruled. Judge Petrone, the appeals court said, never mentioned the forensic evidence in her ruling.
The appeals court also criticized Judge Petrone for disregarding 10 pages of additional allegations, including “instances in which Detective Forberg took statements from witnesses who later recanted, threatened witnesses with the loss of access to their children, and falsely told witnesses that they had failed polygraph tests.”
The court declared “that any reasonable person would have to conclude that the report contains new information demonstrating by a preponderance of the evidence the existence of a meritorious defense: that these convictions resulted solely from coerced and false statements.”
On February 13, 2025, the prosecution dismissed the case. In September 2025, Jackson filed a federal civil-rights lawsuit against Chicago police detectives, the City of Chicago, Cook County and multiple prosecutors. Jackson also filed a petition for a certificate of innocence.
– Maurice Possley
Posting Date: 06-30-2025
Last Update Date: 05-06-2026
