The Suffolk County District Attorney's office has filed paperwork to end the prosecution of Kevin Williams for the murder of Jose Williams at a Washington Street gas station last month.
The filing of a nolle prosequi declaration today comes a week after the Suffolk County District Attorney's office asked a judge to release Williams on his own recognizance. In a statement, DA John Pappas said:
We don’t force the evidence to fit the case. We follow the facts wherever they lead, and today they led us to this decision. The investigation remains open, it remains active, and it remains a priority for us.
Jose Williams, 68, was found fatally shot at the Fabian gas station around 11:30 p.m. on Oct. 5.
At Kevin Williams's arraignment a few days later, his lawyer argued Williams was innocent and said he had no motive: He'd just gotten paid at his job at a Taunton Jiffy Lube and he was getting ready to help his family move from Dorchester to the South Shore the next morning.
The DA's office today blamed Kevin Williams's attorney, Aviva Jeruchim, for part of the delay in dropping the charges:
Prosecutors said Williams’ arrest was supported by a detailed description of the assailant by an independent percipient witness at the scene; a positive identification of Williams as the gunman; and corroborating video footage – circumstances that clearly supported probable cause for the initial charges. In the weeks that followed, detectives continued to seek and gather evidence from multiple sources, and prosecutors fought in court to obtain potentially exculpatory evidence from Williams’ attorney and were forced to send grand jury subpoenas in order to obtain alibi testimony.
Kevin Williams's family had planned a press conference outside Dorchester Municipal Court for Monday - the date originally set for his next court hearing - to press for a formal apology for the charges.
The Dorchester Reporter reported on Wednesday that a family spokesman - former Boston NAACP president Michael Curry - had blasted what he called a false arrest that resulted from "blatant racial profiling:"
This was simply a rush by the Boston Police to arrest someone for this horrific crime. We waited patiently for close to five weeks for the BPD and the Suffolk County DA’s Office to get this one right, while they had a young African American man with no history of violent crimes, no propensity to commit such an act, and with tremendous promise sitting in jail - traumatized by a system that appeared deaf, dumb and blind to his innocence.