Eight years in jail with no conviction: Emanuel Fair Files Lawsuit

Most of the people at the Halloween party at the Valley View Apartments didn’t remember Emanuel Fair’s name. In witness statements in his police file, a couple of people knew him by his first initial; a few people described him by his costume – a borrowed “construction worker” outfit. Most partygoers simply called him “” “the Black guy.”

Just hours after that party ended, in the early morning of Nov. 1, 2008, one of the hosts of the Halloween party — a 24-year-old software engineer and Indian immigrant named Arpana Jinaga — was beaten, sexually assaulted, and strangled to death in her home at the apartment complex. When lead Detective Brian Coats looked at photos of the party, he noticed Fair — “the only African American male at the party.”He described himself as looking like an “outsider,”A background check revealed that he had a criminal record and was facing a third-degree sexual assault charge. They soon zeroed in on him as their lead suspect, and after finding DNA of his at the crime scene, they charged him with Jinaga’s murder. On Oct. 30, 2010, he was placed in a holding cell in Seattle’s King County jail while he awaited trial.

He was held in that jail for eighteen years, seven months and fourteen days, without ever being convicted. With an insurmountable seven-figure bail hanging over him, he waited in a facility that was never meant for long-term stays – largely in isolation – and maintained his innocence every day.

Two trials were held against him. The 2017 trial was his first. It ended in a hung juror because one juror stated that Fair saw him when he looked into Fair after the trial. “a thug”With “tattoos on his hands.”The jury in his second trial found that neither the prosecutors nor detectives had presented a strong enough case against him. And he was freed from all charges.

Now, two years later, he’s suing everyone that had the power to put him in that cell. Fair sued the county, Redmond Police Department and Detective Coats just before the new year. His legal team has filed an expanded complaint this week. It includes ten pages more detailing the allegations and adding the prosecutor and other detectives involved in the investigation to the list. The suit contends that Fair never would have been in that cell — and certainly not for years — if he weren’t a Black man with a criminal record. The suit describes an investigation that took place. “so badly handled it can only be characterized as bizarre.”

Rolling Stone’s account of Fair’s case and the investigation into Jinaga’s murder is based on more than a thousand pages of case files and legal documents. They show that there was persuasive evidence against at least six other suspects that the detectives were investigating — none of whom were Black, and none of whom spent a day in jail for Jinaga’s murder. Fair’s lawsuit claims the detectives on the case “ignored and failed to gather evidence that did not align with their theory of the case.”Fair was also accused of being treated differently by the white suspects. “the treatment can only be viewed as racial discrimination.”

The case files show breaches of protocol that span from careless errors — such as not training their detectives to change gloves between DNA samples and not securing key locations of the crime scene — to calling in a famous psychic medium to weigh in on the case. Those protocol failures, the suit alleges, in concert with the detectives’ apparent racial discrimination, deprived Emanuel Fair of his civil rights, and denied Arpana Jinaga any chance at justice. Redmond Police Department declined comment on this story. “due to pending litigation.” King County, the Redmond Police Department, and Detective Brian Coats filed a response to Fair’s initial complaint, denying every claim. Detective Coats is now a Captain in the department.

“I’ve never seen a worse case,” says Corinne Sebren, one of Fair’s lawyers, who specializes in civil rights cases. “There’s very little justice left to salvage.” There is, however, a person trying to salvage a life interrupted, trying to return to life after a decade in purgatory, thanks to a legal system that still won’t concede it’s done anything wrong.

Since his release, Fair moved in with his aunt and uncle in Seattle’s Central District, into the house he lived in when he was a teenager. He’s stout but not tall, and at 38, his facial hair is salt and pepper now. “There’s no resolution for this case,”He says it. Rolling Stone, standing in the garden of the house his family’s lived in for almost 50 years. This lawsuit “is the closest thing to justice I can get.”

Jinaga and Fair shared a common interestOn Oct. 31, 2008, Jinaga was able to meet her for the first time. This was just hours before her tragic death. Jinaga hosted a Halloween party for multiple units at the Valley View apartments, a small suburb of Seattle called Redmond. The building was motel-style, so everyone’s front door faced the outside of the building, and for the party that night, four residents — including Jinaga — decorated their apartments and opened their doors.

At any given time, 40 or 50 people — mostly residents and their friends and family — were milling through the apartments. Fair was one of many friends-of residents who attended the party. Fair grew up in the Central District, an historically Black area in a predominantly white city. He’d been staying with a childhood friend, in the basement of his mom’s house, but needed a place to stay while his friend was out of town for the weekend. That’s how he ended up at Valley View: he was crashing for the weekend with Leslie Potts, a friend he’d met on MySpace years before. When he’d mentioned he needed a place to stay, Potts offered her couch.

Fair didn’t know anyone else at the complex, and had no idea, when he arrived, that a costume party was about to take over. A few of Potts’ neighbors helped him pull together a “construction worker”Outfit, including a hard cap, knee pads and protective glasses. Potts was also opening up her apartment to the party, so he assisted her in setting up.

The party began at 8 p.m. Drinks and snacks were set up outside and people moved around between balconies and apartments quite freely, according to witness statements. Most people at the party remembered Fair as relatively quiet — it was a close-knit group of neighbors, and he only knew Potts. Some people claimed that they spoke to Fair about his welding apprenticeship and the recent hip-hop productions he was proud of. He even showed an interest in one of his party-goers and asked for her number.

It was a party full of 20- and 30-somethings, and according to witness interviews, as the night wore on, it got predictably rowdy: there were a couple of drunken arguments between friends and roommates; one guy wouldn’t stop challenging all the larger men to arm wrestle, and accidentally bloodied Fair’s lip at one point. According to witness statements, the event was not unusual and everyone seemed happy. In the photos of the party, Jinaga’s smiling, and wearing a Little Red Ridinghood costume. She’s carrying around a glass of red wine in most of them, and posing in photos with the other partygoers — including one with Fair and Potts.

Dozens of guests passed through Jinaga’s apartment that night. Fair visited her apartment twice — once earlier in the night, and once around 1 a.m. to eat pizza. Fair was invited into Fair’s bedroom to show her something on her computer. He used her bathroom and made small talk, and by all accounts — including his — their interaction stopped there.

According to police interviews, Fair called it a night around 2:30 or 3 a.m., headed back to Potts’ apartment and watched some TV in the living room. Phone records show he made a handful of phone calls between 3 and 4 in the morning — some to a friend who was a former sex worker, and a few to Potts, leaving voicemails that sounded like pocket dials. Fair claims that he fell asleep in his living room at 9 or 10 the next day because it was too cold.

Jinaga went to bed about 3-4 a.m. when the party was over. Valley View’s resident was the last person to see Jinaga that evening. He said he saw a tall man in olive skin speaking to her outside her home at 3 a.m. Her next-door neighbor heard a growling sound coming from across the wall at 8 a.m. — which he attributed either to vomiting or sex — but when he heard water running through the pipes in their shared wall, he took that to be a sign that she was okay.

Fair was still staying at Potts’ apartment when Jinaga’s body was found two days later. According to police records, her father asked a family friend to check on her because, for several days in a row, she’d missed her daily call with her family back in India, and hadn’t shown up to work on Monday morning. Outside of her house, the friend met her neighbor. They knocked at her door, and it opened. Inside, Jinaga’s body was on her bedroom floor, naked, covered in a sheet. According to their statements to police, they didn’t approach her, or check to see if she was alive; they ran outside and called 911.

Detective Coats he said that the thing he’ll always remember about the crime scene was the overwhelming smell of bleach. There were bleach stains all over the carpet. Her body was covered in motor oils from the waist. Her fingers and fingernails had been cleaned with toilet bowl cleaner. Burn marks were evident on her body, making it appear that someone attempted to burn it.

Jinaga was gagged with ducttape. Her body was bruised and her teeth were — all signs that she’d put up a fight. Although her tampon was removed and was lying beside her, a rape test came back negative. Although there were no witnesses, Jinaga was found to have been sexually assaulted, and then strangled to death by the medical examiner.

Emanuel Fair was sent to County jail in the case. for almost nine years for this crime hinged on DNA: trace amounts found on Jinaga’s neck, her robe, and the duct tape used to restrain her.

About three weeks into their investigation, Coats landed on Emanuel. According to an interview with Coats by Michael Shaer — who retraced the steps of Coats’ investigation in his podcast, Suspect, and whose interviews helped inform Fair’s lawsuit — he spotted Fair for the first time in one man’s photos of the party. Coats claimed that he had noticed him because he was “the only African American male at the party”And looked like an “outsider.”

When he ran a background check, he found that Fair had a record – mostly juvenile offenses like possession of drugs and an unlicensed weapon. The charge that stood out was a 2003 third-degree rape. Fair had already entered an Alford plea, which meant that he accepted the plea agreement while still maintaining his innocence — a common tactic when you can’t afford to go to trial. For the charges, he was sentenced to three years imprisonment.

The following interview was conducted in 2016 before a pretrial hearing. Suspect Podcast. Coats was asked whether the prior conviction was important to his investigation. He said: “If you’ve done it before, you’ll do it again.”

At this point, the detectives had already conducted dozens of interviews with residents of Valley View, but according to police files, they’d had a hard time pinning down Fair. Potts told police that he was having trouble with his phone — but he was also still on parole for his previous conviction, and had an outstanding warrant for failing to update his address with his parole officer.

Whatever the outcome, the police seem to have used that warrant to their advantage. Rather than knocking on his door, like they did with the dozens of witnesses they’d interviewed in the previous three weeks, the detectives staked out Fair’s friend’s mom’s house in the Central District, where he’d been staying, in plain clothes and an unmarked car. Fair says that when he walked out of his house, the unmarked vehicle began to roll toward him. “I thought I was gonna die,” Fair tells Rolling Stone. “It was like the movies, coming down slow.”He claims that his police backup pointed their guns towards his chest and detectives shouted to him to calm down.

They cuffed him, put him in the back of the car, and started interviewing him on the 20 minute drive from Seattle to Redmond’s police station. He wasn’t read his rights, but according to the transcript of the interrogation, Fair did his best to answer their questions about the party. “It seemed like they needed my help,”He said. He was finally arrested for violating parole and was sent to prison for the rest.

They then ran his DNA. First, their lab found that his DNA matched a sample found on Jinaga’s robe that was found at the crime scene. Then, they discovered a match for a roll of ducttape that was used to attach Jinaga’s underwear to her mouth as a gag. And finally, they found a match to a tiny sliver of DNA — so small that it had to be sent to a specialized lab — on the front of Jinaga’s neck.

Fair remained in prison as detectives interrogated Fair three more times. Fair was interrogated three more times by detectives.

“This case was solved by forensic evidence,” the prosecution claimed in a 2016 court filing leading up to Fair’s first trial.

It’s true that there are no witnesses to the murder and no one ever confessed, so DNA was the strongest card in their hand. Fair was clearly identified by detectives who found DNA at the crime scene.

However, the crime scene was bustling with DNA as 50 people passed it in the time before Jinaga was killed. According to the lawsuit and police files, three DNA samples from the crime scene were matched to people in Jinaga’s life. A bruise on Jinaga’s wrist contained unidentified male DNA. Her removed tampon had three distinct profiles of unidentified male DNA.

In fact, police files show that there are multiple other men in Jinaga’s life that had as much, if not more, evidence against them — and several more that were never thoroughly investigated. According to the suit, Fair is the only difference between them and Fair.

The first was one of Jinaga’s neighbors, a white man in his twenties — the same neighbor who’d entered the apartment with Jinaga’s family friend — and an early prime suspect in the case. (Rolling StoneWe were unable to locate the neighbor. He has, however, denied any involvement in prior interviews. According to the lawsuit, his fingerprints were found inside the window of Jinaga’s apartment, and his DNA was found on the motor oil bottle and a portion of wet carpet at the crime scene. The lawsuit claims that a lighter found in Jinaga’s apartment contained a sticky substance with motor oil on it. However, investigators never got it. And according to police files, they found a list with pawnshop locations that was printed the day that Jinaga was killed (both Jinaga’s phone and digital camera were never recovered.) Investigators received statements from several residents that the man was interested Jinga. “[exhibit] jealous behavior,”According to the lawsuit, she talked with other men at the party.

The transcript of his police interview shows that he claimed that he heard noises coming from her apartment at 3:56 a.m. and called her around 10 a.m. But when police looked at his phone — he handed it over willingingly, during the interview — they noted that he had also called her at 2:56 a.m. and 3:02 a.m., just before the Jinaga’s estimated time of death. “Oh crap,” he responded, before insisting that he didn’t remember why he called her.

Perhaps the most interesting detail about the investigation into Jinaga is the fact that Jinaga drove two hours to the Canadian border to try and get there at 10:10 a.m. on the morning Jinaga was shot to death. “blow through”The gates were opened without the need for a passport. Detectives asked him why he didn’t have a passport. “explore.”

At the end of the interview, when investigators had started putting pressure on him, he asked investigators to turn off the recording, and he discussed something that can’t be found in the police record. (The neighbor’s answers were obtained from the police in a pre-trial interview. Suspect Podcast, Detective Coats simply stated, “I don’t recall.”)

Despite the apparent evidence against him, investigators let him leave the police station — with his Blackberry, which, according to police records, he subsequently scrubbed.

Jinaga’s neighbor wasn’t the only non-Black suspect in the investigation that appears to have been treated wildly differently than Fair: In a 2020 interview, one of the prosecutors said that they zeroed in on Fair because his DNA was found on objects that were specifically related to the murder, not the clean up, but according to Fair’s lawsuit, another Valley View resident’s DNA was found on the shoelace believed to have strangled Jinaga; she’d been a part of a local motorcycle group, and police records show that two members of the group had a history of sexual crimes, and one had been sexually harassing her; police also found DNA from a third biker, who she’d been sleeping with, on her costume, and on the sheet that was draped over her body. One other resident of the apartment building committed suicide just days following her death. However, his DNA was never connected to the crime scene.

The lawsuit doesn’t claim that any of these men were Jinaga’s killer. It says that the evidence that implicated them was crucial information to eventually charge Emanuel for first-degree murder. Fair was the only evidence presented by police to the prosecutors when they presented their case. “Under the law, ‘probable cause’ requires you to look at the whole picture,” says Ryan Dreveskracht, one of Fair’s lawyers. “You can’t leave out the fact that there was basically everyone else’s DNA at the scene, too. And they did.”

When presented with several other white suspects, single out the Black man at the party “can only be viewed as racial discrimination,” Fair’s lawsuit alleges.

The problems with the case don’t end with racial bias. Police files show mistakes that range from the simple to the absurd. According to police logs, in February 2010, Coats reached out to Allison DuBois — the “psychic”Who inspired the CBS television show Medium — asking if she could locate Jinaga’s missing camera and cell phone and if there was a witness out there that they hadn’t talked to yet.

Investigators made more mundane decisions that his lawyers say could have made the biggest impact on Fair’s case. As that 2016 court filing said, this case all comes down to forensic evidence, and Fair’s lawsuit alleges, investigators appear to have done little to preserve it. Court transcripts show that there was no policy in place that required detectives to change their gloves between collecting each DNA sample; and, the suit alleges, they didn’t secure the Valley View apartments’ dumpster, where key pieces of evidence were found, for three days after Jinaga’s body was discovered.

“There were so many mistakes in this investigation,”Dreveskracht, in addition being a civil rights lawyer is also an appointee to the Washington State Criminal Justice Training Commission. “It’s pretty clear that these officers weren’t adequately trained, and didn’t keep up with their training.” Ultimately, Fair’s lawsuit alleges, the investigators “employed a ‘gather the facts to fit the theory’ strategy,”Fair lost almost a decade in his life and Jinaga was robbed of justice.

When Rolling Stone asked prosecutors to comment on the accusations in Fair’s case, they shared their own recording of an interview that Suspect‘s Shaer did in 2020 with Erin Ehlert, one of the two prosecutors in Fair’the trial. She steadfastly stood by their decision to charge Fair in Jinaga’s murder. “In my heart,”She said: “I don’t have any question about anything that we did with regards to charging; that Emanuel Fair killed Arpana Jinaga.” In their email, the prosecutor’s office wrote: “We look forward to addressing these allegations in a public courtroom; we stand by our case.”

Fair, 38, is now trying to build.You can start a new life.For eight years, he’d gotten used to living an isolated life. He made his cell into a office in prison. “so I could act like I was out in the free world,”He said. He set up a desk where he could read USA Today, write letters, and review legal texts from his attorney. He drew portraits using toothpaste, coffee, and dye made from Skittles when he didn’t have access to art supplies. When his cell was too cold, he learned how to make gloves from his socks.

A recent auditKing County’s county jail system showed that Black inmates were significantly less likely to be kept in “restrictive housing”Fair was one of the few white inmates who survived. He was kept in isolation for six of those years — which meant he spent 23 hours a day in his cell. For the one hour he was allowed out, he’d take a shower, call his aunt, maybe talk to other inmates through their steel cell doors (he wasn’t allowed in the dayroom when other inmates were there). The county jail wasn’t built for long-term stays — typically not longer than a year — so he didn’t have access to any programming or education. “I was lucky for a while,”He says, “because I had a cell that looked out onto the highway, so I could watch the cars going by.”

He thought about his mom a lot: she’d died when he was 16 and she was 39. “I used to have a fear that I would die at 39, just like she did,” Fair says. While he waited for his trial, that clock ticked closer: he turned 30, then 35; his aunt started sending him newspaper clippings with family members’ obituaries. He had faith all the time. “I knew I was gonna get out,” Fair says. “I just didn’t think it would take that long.”

During his trial, his aunt and uncle showed up at the courthouse every day that his case was on the docket, even if he wasn’t going to be there. She says that his aunt brought lunch and snacks. “sat on those hard benches for hours.”They are described by her as “the worst years.” Living with them now, Fair is taking small steps toward building a life of his own. He’s getting used to eating at the kitchen table again. He worked part time as a security officer for a little while — the graveyard shift, so he didn’t have to be around people. And he prefers to avoid holidays, in part because he got used to not celebrating them when he was in jail, and in part because he doesn’t want to be around family that didn’t support him when he was behind bars. “I don’t want to pretend like it doesn’t affect me,”He said.

He has been living in strange systemic purgatory since his release. A man who was held for almost a decade and never convicted of any crime, but a man who was nearly 10 years old. Emanuel said that while he was locked up, he dreaded the prospect of being convicted. His lawyers state that Emanuel would have been better off in some ways if he had been convicted. “Let’s imagine that Emanuel was wrongfully convicted,” says Dreveskracht. “He would’ve spent a number of years in prison, but when he got out, he would be on parole. There would be people to help him get a job, to help him get his feet on the ground. Some very, very needed mental health care” — he suffers from depression, anxiety, and PTSD — “but because he wasn’t convicted, he’s got nothing.”

Even so, Fair says that he was reluctant to file this lawsuit at first, knowing that Jinaga’s family still hasn’t gotten justice: “there’s no resolution for this case, no resolution for her.”

This suit proved to be the only way to escape the almost 10 year-old cell in which he was locked up. “We can’t bring back those years,” says Dreveskracht. “All we can do is try to get some semblance of making Emanuel whole again.”

“I’m out,” Fair says, “but I’m not free.”