Man who was innocently imprisoned for 22 years for double murder holds no grudge: “It saved my life”

In the early hours of Thursday, September 10, 1992, Elijah and Salhaddin Harris are sitting in a park in the Bronx, a borough of New York. They are having a late-night snack when a gunman suddenly appears and opens fire. The brothers don’t stand a chance and die.

No one in the neighborhood is surprised by the violence: it was a hotspot for gangsters and drug deals at the time. One of those gangsters is Calvin Buari, a drug dealer who sees the park as his territory. He is arrested and charged with the double murder. During the trial, several people stated that they saw him shoot.

50 years in prison

The prosecutor offers Buari a deal: if he pleads guilty, he will only have to go to prison for three years. That sounds like a very light sentence for a double murder. Yet Buari doesn’t want to know anything about it. Ultimately, the judge sentences him to 50 years in prison. Why Buari refused the deal? He has nothing to do with the murders, he says. The evidence against him therefore appears to be dubious. The witnesses who pointed to him as the shooter are all rival drug dealers. According to the American Registry of Pardoned Persons, that’s all. There is no other evidence against the convict.

The evidence against Buari appears dubious. The witnesses who pointed to him as the shooter are all rival drug dealers

Buari starts a fight for justice from his cell. In 2003 there seems to be a breakthrough: another drug dealer from the area confesses after a murder conviction that he also shot the Harris brothers. But then he retracts that confession. Buari’s battle then deteriorated for years, until three new witnesses emerged in 2017 (!).

Two of them identify the other drug dealer as the shooter. The third states that he was at Buari, a little further away, at the time of the shooting. She would not have known of Buari’s conviction until she saw a news report years later. The case comes back to court and on May 8, 2017, Buari was acquitted after 22 years in prison. (Read more below the photo)

No grudges

“I will never forget the moment I walked out of prison,” he now tells CNN. “I had been incarcerated since I was 24 and suddenly prison was no longer my destiny.” Since his release, Buari has stayed on the straight and narrow. He founded a company that transports people to and from prison to visit family or loved ones. The “Uber for prison visits”, as he calls it.

“I will never forget the moment I walked out of prison. I had been incarcerated since I was 24 and suddenly prison was no longer my destiny”

Calvin Buari

Released prisoner

Although he spent years of his life unjustly behind bars, Buari does not look back with resentment. In fact, if he hadn’t been sent to prison, he wouldn’t be alive because of his criminal life. “Prison saved my life. Beforehand I was like a caterpillar. In prison I had to turn my life around and be more productive. I had to see the potential in myself. That was my phase as a doll. Now that I’m free, I feel like I’m in my butterfly phase.”

Millions

The pain of the lost years will also be somewhat alleviated by the millions in compensation Buari received. In 2020, he settled with the state of New York for $3.75 million. A year later, he received another $4 million in damages from the city of New York. The man invested the money in real estate, among other things, but also in his company, which now has several drivers.

Buari emphasizes that his journey to redemption, however, has only just begun. He still has a lot to make up for his criminal past, it sounds.