Decedent Was Jailed When Sprint Hid Call Records That Would Have Freed Him: Complaint

Shalace Williams, administratrix of the estate of the late Darryl Williams, seeks compensatory and punitive damages against T-Mobile for Sprint’s negligent failure, while it was still an independent company, to comply with a criminal investigation that forced Daryl Williams to spend seven years in prison for a February 2013 robbery he didn’t commit, said her complaint Friday (docket 1:24-cv-02732) in U.S. District Court for Eastern New York in Brooklyn. T-Mobile completed its Sprint buy in 2020. In the February 2013 incident, four perpetrators, unknown to Williams, somehow got possession of his passcode for the Stop and Stor storage unit he rented in Middle Village, Queens, said the complaint. They then abducted and robbed a Stop and Stor employee and locked him inside that storage unit, it said. When police investigated, they arrested Williams for the crime because the storage unit was in his name, though he insisted he was at home in Brooklyn, more than 12 miles away, on his cellphone with his landlord, when the crime was being committed, said the complaint. Beginning in May 2013, the Queens district attorney and Williams’ Legal Aid lawyer both repeatedly subpoenaed Williams’ Sprint cellphone records, including cellsite data, to attempt to verify his claims of innocence, it said. Sprint repeatedly responded that the cellsite data had been destroyed, it said. The conviction ultimately was reversed and nullified, but only after Sprint finally produced the cellsite records of the February 2013 call that were in its “custody and control” the whole time, after years of denying that those records existed, it said. Had Sprint provided accurate information to the Legal Aid Society and the Queens DA, “those records would have proved plaintiff-decedent’s innocence without question,” said the complaint. Williams “did not by his own conduct cause or bring about his conviction,” it said. His conviction was caused by Sprint’s failure “to properly comply with the investigation” and produce Williams’ cellsite data “in response to multiple subpoenas,” it said.