Confessions of a Serial Alibi (12 page)

Many people have questions as to who wrote my second affidavit. Was it myself or was it my attorney? To best answer your question I would say that Ali gave me an affidavit template and then I took that document and completely spun it on its head. Writing my second affidavit was a very long and arduous process. It’s something that meant a lot to me, so I took a lot of time getting it right. To be precise it actually took me twenty-four days. Much of that editing time was spent deleting, adding and rewriting wording. I would then send it to my lawyer for feedback and suggestions. I must have sent revisions to Ali and Gary about twelve times before it was completely done. It got to the point where my emails started to have subject lines like “You should know it’s the affidavit by now.” Initially I wanted to put all the information from my notes into the affidavit, but after thinking about it and discussing it with my lawyer, we felt that they would be too distracting from my overall goal. As a compromise between my heart and my head, I conceded to merely make mention of them in the affidavit. That way if the notes were ever needed to further explain things (in court), then they would not be anything unexpected to the court. Had I gone with my original instinct and infiltrated the contents of the notes into that document, it would have read a little something like this:

28. He told me that Adnan Syed had killed Hae Min Lee. Urick told me that Mr. Brown did not have any open cases for Adnan and that they are just fishing for anything as a last resort before this May (when 10 years is up). Urick told me that within the first 10 years of a life sentence a person can reopen their case if they have new evidence. The defendant can only do this if it’s within the first 10 years and if they have exhausted all their appeals and have no other recourse. He also told me there was no merit to any claims that CG was incompetent despite her health issues. I was fully assured that Brown would have no case in that matter.

Urick discussed the evidence of the case and everything he told me indicated that Syed was guilty. He told me that Jay testified to having helped bury Hae’s body and that cell phone records indicated that the calls were coming from the area where they found her body. Urick said, “If I had any doubt that Adnan didn’t kill Hae, it would be my moral obligation to see that he didn’t serve any time” and “Oh, he killed that girl” and “There is a snowball’s chance in hell that they could reopen the case with all the accusations that you’re talking about, let alone get him off.” Finally, he told me that at the time of the trial, Adnan had a bunch of witnesses ready to testify to him being at the mosque on that day, at that time; however, they all backed down once the cell phone records were proved. Kevin Urick convinced me not to bother participating in the case by telling what I knew about January 13th.

29. Urick and I discussed the affidavit I had previously provided to Chaudry. I wanted to know why I was being contacted if they had the affidavit, and the ramifications of the document. I never told Urick that I wrote my letter to Syed because of pressure from the family. I never wrote anything to please the family and get them off my back. What actually happened is that I wrote the affidavit because I wanted to provide the truth about what I remembered.

It was only after I considered typing all that did I realize how combative, long and exhausting it all sounded. My lawyer agreed. I mulled it over and decided not to “go there,” mainly because as I had reminded myself, my goal was to provide the truth about what I had remembered about January 13th, 1999. In fact, that very thought is what led me to add that very statement into the affidavit itself. After talking my thoughts over with my attorney, he again agreed. “We need to stay focused,” he said. We both also came to the conclusion that it was absolutely necessary to explain the context of my conversation with Kevin Urick. That way the court would understand Kevin Urick’s candor and comments were the sole reason that the defense was unable to obtain my testimony (despite their very courageous attempt to hire a private investigator). That’s why I merely alluded to my notations in my affidavit. I figured that my final affidavit statement spoke to the context of my conversation with Urick. I was also clear and to the point. I didn’t want to call Urick names or make speculations about his character. I didn’t want to speculate on his intentions for testifying at the original post-conviction hearing or play the “he said, she said game.” It was my belief that if the court needed more specific information, then the court could request the notations from my attorney, and at that time I would be more than happy to provide them.

On another note, I also didn’t want to put all my eggs in one basket. I instinctively knew Urick would deny the context of our conversation. What I didn’t know was whether or not he’d also try to publicly attack me somehow. I figured that perhaps if Urick became aware that I had specifics about our conversation, but not an idea of which specifics, then he would have more pause about retaliating. I also didn’t want him to get a head start on verbally wiggling his way out of what he’d done either. I figured for the time being that keeping that info to myself was best because if the notations became public, I wanted him to be caught off-guard by them. My hope was that maybe then he’d slip up and incriminate himself. Little did I know, TheBlaze had unknowingly done that legwork for me. With the mere mention of our conversation, Urick immediately downplayed it and pegged himself into a five-minute conversation with me. In my opinion, this greatly shows to what length he does not remember our conversation correctly.

People have often said that my notes don’t prove a thing. However, to me they prove a lot. As you can see from looking at them, some of the notations are direct quotes and some of the notations are paraphrases. Most of what is written in the notations is what could be construed as public knowledge. Jay was a witness, there were cell phone records, etc. However, there is one big piece of information in the notations that was not public knowledge in 1999, 2000 or 2010 for that matter—something that no one outside of myself, Phillip, Gary and Ali would (until now) deem suspicious. In Kevin Urick’s Intercept interview dated January 7th, 2015, it can be noted that the article stated the following:

“Early on in the case, Urick said, the defense sent a disclosure to the state saying it had more than eighty witnesses who would testify about Adnan’s whereabouts on the day he allegedly killed Hae and buried her body. But when the defense found out that the cellphone records showed that Adnan was nowhere near the mosque, it killed that alibi and those witnesses were never called to testify at the trial, according to Urick.”

The thing that’s interesting about this statement to me is that in the article it is says that Kevin Urick uses the description “eighty witnesses” to describe the individuals not used as alibis for Adnan Syed (in October of 1999.) Ironically, the first phone conversation that I had with my lawyer’s legal associate Ali took place on December 20th, 2014—eighteen days before Urick’s Intercept interview. In that conversation with Ali, I told her about finding the notes. I read to her everything from the page including the following notation:

“Bunch of witnesses ready to testify that he was at mosque [but they] backed down after cell records [disclosed].”

Now I know that I can’t really prove that this happened. The closest that I’ve come is finding an email to my lawyer on January 12th where I talk about having told Ali eighteen days before the Intercept interview. So I can understand if you don’t believe me, but what about Ali? It’s one weird thing that I knew of the mere existence of these witnesses. Remember, these people never testified at trial and I never followed the trial anyway. It was another weird thing considering this now publicly disclosed document was not even available on the Internet at the time of my discussion with Ali. The most damning part (to me and my legal team) is the fact that I told Ali that I remembered Kevin Urick telling me there were “eighty people” who the defense never called as alibis.

Now I ask you this: how in the hell would I know that there were specifically “eighty people” who never testified in court? It’s not likely that I would have been privy to any information discussed between the prosecution and the defense back at the time of Adnan’s trial. Also, how in the hell would I know about it almost a whole month before Kevin Urick disclosed that information in his interview on January 7th? Finally, don’t you find it a little odd that in that same article Urick claims that our phone conversation lasted only five minutes and that he never offered any trial information to me outside of stating that the prosecution indeed had a strong case? I beseech you (I’m kidding), but does that not sound like bullshit to you?! I’m just happy that Urick’s narrative didn’t succeed this time around. I’ve never met Kevin Urick and my hope is that I never do. Whatever his motivations and intentions were, it is my opinion that the truth was resilient and the truth prevailed.

CHAPTER SEVEN

LIFE AFTER/DURING SERIAL

This entire experience has been quite bizarre. Frankly it continues to get more surreal by the day. Sometimes it feels like a dream. Like something that is not really happening to me, but to someone else and I’m watching. One day you’re a kid waiting for a ride in the library and the next you’re on national television. I think one fact that helped me to retain some anonymity for such a long time is the fact that Asia McClain is now my maiden name. Per my request all parties involved kept the mention of my married name out of the media as long as they could. It literally was not until 2016, just weeks before the post-conviction hearing, did I tell anyone involved that my name is Asia Chapman. I’m sure they knew beforehand, but nobody ever spoke of it. In that regard everyone was very respectful of my privacy. Continuing to be referred to by my maiden name was a double-edged sword. Often times I felt like it has created a sense of dissociation from this case that often made things feel even more surreal. At times it felt like Asia McClain was a whole other person. As you can imagine, sometimes that made it harder to grasp the reality of why I felt certain emotions.

It’s my belief that when you get married and take on your spouse’s name that you do become someone different. You may not realize it at first, but you are starting a personal journey that will inevitably change more than your signature. I was married in 2009 and since then my husband and I have both grown to become better people. Every time I read my maiden name on the Internet, the person that I think about seems further and further away from the person that I am today. I don’t consider infamy to be prize-worthy. Especially in today’s age of Internet stalkers, bloggers and online comment threads. A few close friends who know the situation often ask what it’s like and the best word I can use to describe it is bizarre.

It’s bizarre to be internationally known for telling the truth. It’s bizarre to have to scrub your personal contact information from the Internet every other week. It’s bizarre not to know if some paparazzi person is going to jump out of your bushes and try to snap a current photo of you. It’s bizarre to know that I’m a part of a Wikipedia entry or that my teenage letters to a classmate from over a decade ago are plastered all over the Internet. It’s bizarre to know that millions of people that I don’t know and have never met have such strong opinions about my character, my intelligence and my motives. That they are all either praising or judging me. I could go on for days about the bizarre aspects of this experience.

It’s hard sometimes to wrap my head around the fact that I have to go above and beyond just to do the right thing. Really makes you wonder about the world that we live in nowadays. A totally objective, honest person can come forward with some truthful information, and be totally cut down by prosecutors and the naysayers of social media. It’s truly sad when you think about it. I knew something was not right when the discussion of whether I needed character witnesses came up.

The nature of being cross-examined is something that I had to prepare myself for. I had to cultivate the intestinal fortitude to subject myself to and survive accusations and biased scrutiny. I had to mentally be prepared for possibly asinine accusations and offensive character smashing. It is as if I had to be willing to enter into the boxing ring unaware of my opponent’s strength, tactics and strategies. That in itself was the most intimidating part. That is the fear that I had to overcome the most.

I will admit, there are a couple of other grievances that I had about the SERIAL podcast. The first is that the timeline of Sarah’s evidentiary findings are somewhat jumbled up. For instance, in the podcast Sarah makes it seem as if she located Derrick and Jerrod prior to speaking with me. This is simply not true. In actuality, the first day I spoke with Sarah, she asked if I knew how to locate the two. In addition to sending her links that I had found for the Facebook profiles of both Jay Wilds and Jenn Pusateri, I sent Jerrod a message on Facebook and gave Sarah the location of Jerrod’s Baltimore-based business. I believe it was sometime in April that Sarah located and interviewed Jerrod. That same day in January, I’d also given Sarah the house location for Derrick’s mother. I gave her the names of all of Derrick’s previous employers and a month later in February, she was able to reach him for his interview.

It wasn’t until after the 2016 post-conviction hearing that I was able to speak with Derrick in person. The first thing I asked him was if he really didn’t remember seeing Adnan in the library. Unfortunately, Derrick really doesn’t remember seeing him now, but he trusts that if I said it happened, then it happened.

As far as Jerrod goes, he has yet to speak to me since our Facebook conversation in July of 2011. In any case, Derrick was both astonished and embarrassed to learn his interview with Sarah Koenig was featured in an internationally broadcasted podcast. He is not tech savvy in the slightest and tends to stay “off grid” (doesn’t use Internet, email, etc.) a lot. As a result, he didn’t even know what a podcast was. Apparently he had also made the same assumption about Sarah’s recording desires as I had in 2014. Until I told him, he had never heard about SERIAL before. After I told him about it he was fascinated and said that he was going to check it out. He later reported that he was having technical issues and couldn’t get the audio to play. Go figure.

The other bone that I have to pick with the SERIAL team is in regard to another editing decision. It really burns my biscuits that they completely edited Sarah’s conversation with Jerrod. In the podcast interview they caught Jerrod making a funny joke in reference to my name. We all know the joke. It’s the one where Jerrod says:

“I have no idea. Asia McClain? Is that a person or a book?”

Now I confirmed from Sarah that Jerrod did know who I was, but the editing team loved the joke so much that they decided to go with it. I can understand the humor in it, but I think it would have been a better choice to relay the fact that Jerrod did remember me. He was just not able to remember January 13th, 1999. When I first heard the joke, it really pissed me off. I think the thing that pisses me off the most about it was that I was Derrick’s girlfriend for about three years, during and after high school. I saw Jerrod several times a week if not almost every day. To me, I initially thought Jerrod had lied to Sarah about not remembering me. The comment highly confused me because just two and a half years prior to interviewing with Sarah, I had found Jerrod through a mutual friend on Facebook. I sent him a message and we had an extensive conversation. In the conversation Jerrod confirmed that he knew exactly who I was. I told him to say hello to Derrick for me. I told him about my family and where I was living. Jerrod responded by telling me about his business and that he was still single, but looking for that “special lady.” Jerrod even said that he still saw Derrick about once a week and that he would tell him hello for me. So the fact that I thought Jerrod was now playing dumb, two and a half years later, made me feel very cross with him. It made me question whether Jerrod was avoiding telling the truth for some reason. It also made me question if he was lying about his memory of January 13th, 1999.

Back in 1999 when Adnan was arrested, both Derrick and Jerrod confirmed with me that they remembered seeing Adnan with me the library on January 13th, 1999. After Adnan’s arrest I remember having a conversation in which I said to them, “Hey, do you guys remember that guy that I was talking to in the public library the day you picked me up at school?” They both responded, “Yeah.” I then said, “Well, he just got arrested for killing his ex-girlfriend.” They both responded by saying, “Damn! For real?!”

I never told them that Adnan was suspected of killing Hae that same day, because at the time I didn’t wholeheartedly believe that to be the case. So fast-forward to me listening to the SERIAL podcast in 2014 and hearing them both say the opposite. My anger and suspicion got to the point where I typed up a long message to Sarah explaining that Jerrod was a liar and that he knew exactly who I was. I got on my cell phone and took a screenshot of the Facebook conversation that I had with Jerrod. I attached it to the email and right before I was about to send it I stopped. I stopped because I realized how petty my email sounded, so instead I picked up the phone and gave Sarah a call. We talked about a few things—nothing important—and then I casually mentioned the part about Jerrod in the podcast. Right as I was attempting to tell her that I had contacted Jerrod in 2011, she stopped me. With laughter in her voice she said something to the effect of, “Yeah, we kind of edited it that way. We thought it was kind of funny so we kept it. Later on in the conversation, he did come around and eventually admitted that he did know who you were.” I just thank God that I expressed my frustration with Sarah before approaching Jerrod with my accusations! Now don’t get me wrong; like I said, I can totally see the humor in that part of the podcast. However as “Asia McClain” it became somewhat insulting. I think if nothing else, they should have come out with the truth later (as to not disturb the moment of the humor) I only say this because it caused me to become the brunt of endless Internet ridicule.

“Was she that forgettable in high school?” (spinning the “Adnan crush” and case insertion theories)

“Asia McClain, that’s not really a person, that’s a TV show!”

“No wonder Adnan couldn’t even remember talking to her in the library that day! Jerrod is Asia’s ex-boyfriend’s best friend and he couldn’t even remember her!”

I have pretty thick skin, but I still hate comments like those. They are belittling and during the beginning, there was a time when they hurt my feelings.

Let’s take a moment to put a few things into perspective here. I wasn’t aware that Sarah would be using the recording for her podcast. I wasn’t aware that my answers would be taken so literally. As a result, I allowed myself to speculate, when I really should not have.

Asia McClain: “…I remember that day, because that was the day that it snowed.”

Sarah Koenig: “Were there snow days after that, do you remember?”

Asia McClain: “I want to say there was, because
I think
that was ‘
like’
the first snow of the year. I wouldn’t have even remembered if it hadn’t have been for the ‘snow.’ And the whole—I just remember being so pissed about Derek being late and then getting ‘snowed in’ at his house. And it was the first snow of that year.”

My comments to Sarah about January 13th’s weather were intended as a candid guess about the type of weather that caused our two-day school closing (in 1999). In addition, it was the best guess of a person fifteen years after the fact. It wasn’t meant to be taken as testimony and I was never certain about it enough to offer it as testimony. Thus why in my 2015 affidavit I clarified my language, in an attempt to be as accurate as possible about what it was that I actually remembered. In terms of my interview with Sarah, I think the more important issue that I am absolutely certain of is that the bad weather resulted in two days of school closings. The other funny thing about that statement is that there is a part where there lies a lost thought.

“…And the whole— …”

Had I actually finished my thought in that sentence, that lost thought would have sounded more like this:

“…And the whole fact that I remember thinking that’s why they [the police] found Hae in a shallow grave! The ground was too frozen to dig the grave!”

I don’t know if that addition would have made any difference in people’s opinion. My “guestimation” about whether it was snow or ice is debatable and to some, flat out wrong. It apparently wasn’t the first snow of the year, so I was wrong there. Perhaps those two days that school was closed were the first “snow days” of 1999? I’m not 100 percent sure, but then again, this is me trying to recall the weather conditions over fifteen years after the fact. What I can tell you is that in 1999, I specifically remember seeing and speaking to Adnan Syed in that library. After his arrest, I do remember making a correlation between the weather, Hae’s shallow grave, that day being the last time Hae or Adnan had crossed my mind (before her disappearance) and having two snow days off from school. I remember that along with feeling neglected, then angry, then smitten with Derrick (yes, all in the course of one day. Hello, I was a teenage girl!), and that all of these things are a result of what I experienced on January 13th, 1999.

While we’re discussing the weather, let me clarify another thing. I never said I spent the night at my then-boyfriend’s house on the night of January 13th. I believe that was Rabia Chaudry who said that in the podcast. I did use the words “snowed in” but where I’m from, that doesn’t indicate a specific amount of time. I never intended for anyone to think I was implying that I had spent the night at Derrick’s house. By no means did the weather cause me to get stuck at Derrick’s house overnight. I was merely there past my typically allowed curfew, and therefore I had to call my mom for an extension. The weather merely served as the reasoning behind that. As I stated in court, my mom “bought it,” so I was able to squeeze in a little more time with my boyfriend. This notion that as a teenager, I somehow was allowed to sleep over my boyfriend’s house is so ridiculous! I don’t know what kind of mothers you guys have and what kind of mother you think I have, but that would never be allowed. My mom would not be having that—at all. My mom didn’t know Derrick’s mother or how well supervised we were. She would have never been comfortable with an overnight scenario! Derrick lived a good ten-minute drive (or thirty to forty-five-minute walk) from my house. I’d venture to say that worst-case scenario, my mother would have come to pick me up herself. Really worst-case scenario, she would have told me to get my ass outside and start walking! The truth is that I simply used the weather as an excuse to barter more time at Derrick’s house. I don’t recall what the time was when I finally got home, but I know it was very late because I remember being both extremely sleepy and happy that school was closed when I awoke that morning.