By Zachary Margulis-Ohnuma
Antonio Yarbough, just three months out of prison for a triple homicide he did not commit, paid his respects to the murder victims on Mother’s Day. As reported in the New York Daily News, Tony laid two bouquets on the graves of his mom, Annie Yarbough, and his sister, Chavonn Barnes, at a cemetery in New Jersey. The graves are unmarked but the manager of the graveyard reached out to Tony today to tell him an anonymous donor had come forward to provide gravestones for the sites. Annie and Chavonn were murdered along with a 12-year-old friend of Chavonn’s in June 1992. Police coerced false confessions out of Tony and his 15-year-old friend Sharrif Wilson. Then the real killer went on to kill again seven years later, leaving behind his DNA in the body of a woman killed in a stairwell in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. Sharrif recanted before and after his testimony against Tony, then passed a lie detector test early this year. In 2008, the ZMO Law PLLC took up Tony’s case, moving the Brooklyn Supreme Court over a period of nearly four years before the new Brooklyn District Attorney, Kenneth Thompson, agreed that the case should be dismissed and Tony and Sharrif were freed on February 6, 2014. Yesterday was Tony’s first Mother’s Day as a free man in 22 years.