By Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma
Twelve years ago today, the Brooklyn District Attorney’s office finally got something right.
I speak to Antonio Yarbough every February 6 — usually on his birthday, too, which is February 14, and on the day it happened, June 18, but always on February 6. That was the best day of my career, February 6, 2014, the day Tony and his co-defendant Sharrif Wilson were set free in Kings County Supreme Court.
This year is the first without Tony. He died last March at the tragically young age of 51. He could only enjoy his freedom for eleven years. I will always believe that the cause of death was the atrocious treatment he received as a young man at Attica Correctional Facility. His dear friend, Eric Barden, who also spent time at Attica, died just a few weeks earlier. Tony was too sick to go to Eric’s funeral. Most painful of all, though, Sharrif was straight up murdered by the system that framed both of them. He died just a year after release, also of complications related to ill-treatment in prison.
Tony was convicted in 1994 for the horrific murders of his mother, Annie Yarbough, his 12-year-old sister, Chavonn Barnes, and Chavonn’s 12-year-old friend, Latasha Knox, who were killed in their Coney Island apartment in June 1992. Tony was 18 years old. His friend Sharrif was 15. The crime was unimaginably brutal, and Tony’s grief at the slaughter of his family was beyond anything most of us can comprehend.
The system did what it too often does in ugly cases like this, especially in the early 1990s, in the part of Coney Island with houseing projects away from the beach: it looked for the easiest answer, not the right one.
Poor, Black, and young, Tony and Sharrif were treated as suspects when they were actually victims. Brooklyn detectives did not bother with the hard work of finding out what actually happened. Instead, they leaned on two young boys with coercive tactics and built a prosecution around fabricated statements that never should have been trusted. Tony was convicted and sentenced to 75 years to life, despite there being no physical evidence tying him to the murders that destroyed his life.
What finally broke the case more than twelve years ago open wasn’t a confession, or a witness suddenly “remembering” something. It was DNA. Testing of scrapings from under Annie Yarbough’s fingernails excluded Tony and Sharrif — and pointed to someone else entirely.
That DNA matched material found inside the body of a murder victim in 1999 in a neighboring precinct. In other words, the real perpetrator, who was shown through DNA to have raped and killed again seven years later, walks free because NYPD detectives were too lazy, stupid, or racist to investigate the murders.
On February 6, 2014, with the consent of a new Bronx DA, the Supreme Court in Brooklyn vacated the convictions and the charges were dismissed. Tony and I and a crowd of supporters walked through sunny February chill to Junior’s for a slice of chesecake.
The New York Times covered the exoneration in the context of the Brooklyn DA’s conviction review process — the kind of coverage that helped push the system to keep doing the work as more and more wrongful convictions have been discovered in New York and around the country.
Much as February 6 affected Tony and Sharrif and their families, it changed the course of my career and my law practice. I have helped clients with two exonerations and a few other little wins here and there since but nothing will ever affect me like that day in Brooklyn, the day our team finally proved the big lie that was apparent to everyone decent who looked at the case.
This year is the first February 6 I won’t be talking to Tony.
There is, though, one more important thing still unfolding: for more than two years, award-winning filmmakers Gaylen Ross and Bob Richman have been filming Tony’s story, what he experienced, what he missed, and how he remade life after Attica. Filming is complete but the makers need of finishing funds so that the documentary can be completed and the film shown to the public. The footage I have seen is stunning, capturing the nuance of a tragic, difficult story of grief, survival, endurance, and what happens when a system decides that it is easier to convict a poor Black kid from Coney Island of murdering his own mother than it is to solve the crime.
Contact us for further information on how to make a tax deductible donation to help Gaylen and Bob finish the project.
Twelve years ago today, Tony came home. The first thing he said was that he had no time for bitterness.
I miss him. I think about him often. Today, I’ll think about the call I won’t get to make and how if he had no time for bitterness, no one else does, either.