12 February 9-15, 2023 miaminewtimes.com | browardpalmbeach.com New Times | music | cafe | culture | Night+Day | News | letters | coNteNts | Month XX–Month XX, 2008 miaminewtimes.com MIAMI NEW TIMES | MUSIC | CAFE | FILM | ART | STAGE | NIGHT+DAY | METRO | RIPTIDE | LETTERS | CONTENTS | one in which she was assaulted. “She showed the spots that she claimed were her blood on the back seat and the hump she re- membered in the middle of the back seat,” reads a police report. “She identified it by color, grill, interior and by the small dent on the driver’s side of the door.” Neither Mia nor Nicholas recognized Graham, however. He was released and deployed to Korea shortly thereafter. The night Graham was seen flashing a po- lice cherry, he’d been with Donald Darling, a man “known in the south end as a mugger and a robber,” according to police. On the night of the rock pit attack, he had been in the Lucy Street bar with 26-year-old Mack Newsome. A witness said Newsome con- fided that he and Darling were going out to “get some white pussy” and if that witness told anyone, he’d stick an ice pick up his ass. The witness claimed Newsome said Laster was going with them. The witness was 17-year-old Wes Mitchell Davenport — whom Nicholas had identified the day af- ter the attack along with Thad- deus Burns. Further complicating the case, the man who’d found Mia walking in the rain and driven her home called police the day after. He said an 18-year-old named Norman Lee Hodges had told him he knew who the attackers were: Davenport and Burns. The files contain no infor- mation about Hodges’ identity or how he became involved in the case, but he, too, became a suspect. Documents state that he was “shown to Mia,” who did not recog- nize him. But a day later, Nicholas contacted police and said that “he now believes that perhaps his wife could identify Norman Hodges” as one of the attackers. She never did. Though it’s unclear how police settled on Laster and Bryant, they focused on no one else once Laster confessed. Yet 17 days before Laster’s trial began, two additional sus- pects appeared. On December 20, 1963, while Laster and Bryant were in jail awaiting trial, two young Black men attacked a white couple parked at a rock pit in nearby Naranja. According to two news reports, the attackers shone a flashlight into the car, ordered the couple to get out, and robbed them of $55. Then they locked the man in the trunk and raped the woman. Despite the striking similarities in the two crimes, Laster says he was never made aware of the incident. Rules of Evidence, which bar lawyers from mentioning other crimes at trial under most circumstances, likely prevented it from being discussed. No further information about that incident or the culprits appears to have been preserved. WITNESSES FOR THE DEFENSE? Despite the problems, Michael Zarowny didn’t call a single witness to testify in Last- er’s defense or to corroborate his contention that he was at the Lucy Street Bar at the time of the attack. Laster says his father had rounded up sev- eral people who were at the bar that night and introduced them to Philip Carlton and, later, to Zarowny. The witnesses, he says, were willing to corroborate his alibi. Laster claims he saw some of them sitting in a hallway outside the courtroom during a break in his trial, and when he asked why they didn’t come in to testify, they said Zarowny told them to come to court but never called on them. Similarly, Zarowny had called no witnesses in a high-profile murder case five years earlier, despite the willingness of several to testify. That defendant, who received a life sentence, was exonerated seven years later. Zarowny’s defense strategy mostly rested on Mia’s inability to identify Laster. It also re- lied on a lab report. Laster’s, Bryant’s, and Mia’s clothing, including their underwear, had been submitted to a police crime lab, along with the cloth cover from Bryant’s back seat. An analysis found no semen or blood on any of the items. Zarowny presented that report at trial and, Laster says, prodded Mia about whether she’d actually been raped — a common tactic at the time. Prosecutor Gerald Kogan coun- tered the findings by pointing out that the emission of semen isn’t a necessary compo- nent of rape. “Zarowny,” Laster says, “just seem like he weren’t even tryin’.” EVIDENCE What evidence, apart from Nicholas’ shifting identification, did the state have against Laster? Mia said she bit one of her attackers on the hand, and Laster had a scar on his wrist. The prosecutor, Laster says, pointed to it as physi- cal evidence of his guilt. But the scar had come from a school fight a year before the rock pit attack. “Boy had a knife and I tried to take the knife and he hit me across the wrist. I had to have stitches put in,” Laster says. “That ain’t nothing like no bite mark.” The Metro-Dade Police Department’s in- vestigative file didn’t mention any wounds when Laster was taken into custody. It only noted Mia’s assertion that she bit her attacker “on the back of his left hand.” Laster’s old scar, though, was on his “inner right wrist.” Today, that scar is still faintly visible. Despite all this — the prior injury, the wrong shape, the wrong location — the prosecutor kept bringing it up at trial. “I kept saying, ‘It’s old, it’s old,’” Laster says. On the stand, Laster addressed the most damning evidence: his confession. He’d confessed because of the police beat- ings, he said, and pointed to his four missing teeth. But the detective who’d led Laster’s in- terrogation, Larry Foreman, also took the stand and denied the accusation, claiming Laster’s teeth were missing at the time of arrest. Zarowny asked Foreman to submit to a lie- detector test, but the judge denied the re- quest, according to a report in the Miami News. In the end, it came down to the word of a Black juvenile delinquent against that of a white police officer. But what did Laster actually confess to that night at the station? According to the police transcript, he con- fessed that his friend Reid Bryant threw a rock through the victims’ windshield, but po- lice reports show that it was the driver’s-side window that was smashed. It shows he confessed that he raped Mia in her car at the rock pit, but Mia said she was driven away in the attackers’ car and as- saulted at a different location. It shows that Laster said Bryant held Mia’s legs while he raped her, but Mia said the other man held her arms over her head. It shows that Laster said he left Bryant alone with Mia in the car, but Mia said she was never alone with the second attacker. What do these discrepancies mean? Did Laster intentionally muddy details to create doubt about the validity of the confes- sion later? Laster says he was frightened and confessed to the story detec- tives fed him. If he got any of the details “wrong,” no one said so. Nor was he asked to explain any wounds while giving that con- fession. If he’d had a fresh bite mark on his wrist, he points out, why wasn’t it on the record? “I was tired and hurtin’,” he says. “They told me I was gonna fry but could get some mercy with a confession and be out on parole in a few years. So I said what they told me to.” GUILTY, NOT GUILTY The defense rested on the third day. Jury deliberations lasted an hour and 45 minutes. The verdict: guilty with a recommendation of mercy. Under Florida law at the time, a guilty verdict meant an auto- matic death sentence. If seven out of 12 jurors recommended mercy, however, a judge could choose between death and a life sentence that included the possibility of parole. Three weeks later, Laster’s judge sentenced him to “hard labor for the re- mainder of [his] natural life.” A week after Laster’s sentencing, Reid Bryant went to trial. The media didn’t cover the four-day proceedings, and no transcript is available. A single, 152-word article appeared in the Miami Herald on February 14, 1964, a day after the trial ended. Bryant’s attorney, the gifted Philip Carl- ton, had come prepared. According to a state- ment he gave the Herald, Carlton calculated that his fee amounted to 25 cents an hour. Bryant was acquitted. This is part one of a two-part story. Next week: “Part Two: Hard Time.” To read both parts of this story online, complete with additional contemporaneous documents and a video interview with Boast Laster, visit miaminewtimes.com. [email protected] No Way Out from p10 The descriptions the victim gave police didn’t match Laster or his codefendant, Reid Bryant.
