Breaking Free

By Faithful Okoye

Dewey Bozella was 9 years old when he watched his father beat his mother to death. Nine years and several foster homes later, he was accused of murder and eventually spent 26 years in prison for a crime he did not commit.

With the help of the Innocence Project and a powerful law firm, Bozella was acquitted, awarded the ESPY Arthur Ashe Award for Courage and won his first boxing pro fight at 52.

During an ACCENT event on Feb. 2, Bozella shared his life story: an upward climb from a troubled childhood and 26 years behind bars to an acclaimed professional boxing career.

A Life of Fear

“My story begins when I was 9 years old,” Bozella said. “I didn’t know where my life was going because at the age of 9 I watched my father beat my mother to death.”

It happened on a summer day, Bozella said. His father came back from work, and 9-year-old Bozella heard noise and commotion. He entered the house and found his father attacking his mother. He did what he could as a 9-year-old and grabbed his father’s leg, trying to pull him away, but his father “threw him across the room like [he] was a rag.”

After his mother’s death, Bozella went to foster and group homes where he would always ask, “Where are my brothers?” His mother had asked him to make sure he took care of his siblings. And so every time they put him in a group home, he ran away to find them.

About a year later, the state placed him in a home with his brothers. This was good for a while, he said. He went to high school and was so smart that he skipped a grade, going straight from the 8th grade to the 10th grade.

But something happened along the way. When he got into high school, he really wanted to be accepted by his friends, he said. He started hanging out with the “wrong people,” stopped listening to his foster parents and got into smoking and drinking. And finally, he dropped out of school.

“I’m thinking I’m getting even with society by doing the things that I’m doing because I’m a foster child,” he said. “And all I did was hurt myself.”

Around the age of 17, Bozella said he got into a fight with a boy named Stanley Jackson.

“I beat him up,” he said. “Guess what happened? He didn’t come after me. He came after my brother… All because of my reactions. All because of the things that I did.”

Jackson murdered his brother, stabbing him in the chest.

Bozella’s older brother eventually invited him upstate New York to a city called Poughkeepsie to avoid more trouble. But he said he brought his New York attitude with him.

“And next thing I know, four months later — not even a year! Four months! — I’m involved in a murder.”

Bozella was wrongfully charged for the murder of a 92-year-old woman.

The Murder

On June 14, 1977, 92-year-old Emma Crapser was killed after she returned home from her Poughkeepsie’s church. The apartment had been ransacked. Her invaders tied her, beat her and killed her by shoving clothes and a blade down her throat, according to the 404 Decision case report on Bozella’s trial.

The police arrested then 18-year-old Bozella and placed him in a county jail for 28 days. He told the police they “got the wrong man.” After 28 days, he was released, and Bozella thought it was over. For about five and half years, nothing happened. He enrolled in a community college and participated in a boxing camp. But the case reopened, and he was arrested once again.

Bozella thought it would be like the first time.

“Ah, they ain’t got nothing on me,” he said. “I ain’t even worried about it.”

“How wrong I was,” he added. “The guy who I thought was my so-called friend — he’s testifying against me,” Bozella said.

Two witnesses testified against Bozella: Lamar Smith, who was caught in a burglary, and then 15-year-old Wayne Moseley, who according to Lamar Smith’s story to the police was Bozella’s accomplice. According to the case report, the District Attorney’s office had struck a deal with 15-year-old Moseley that if he would testify against Bozella, he would be released from prison.

There was no other evidence except their testimony to prove Bozella’s guilt.

Similar Assaults And Evidence Buried

About the same time, a similar case with another elderly woman occurred. An 82-year-old woman around the same Poughkeepsie region was murdered in her home with something stuffed into her mouth just like the woman in Bozella’s case. After a police investigation, a man named Donald Wise was determined to be the killer.

A few weeks later, according to the case report, Donald Wise; his brother, Anthony Wise; and Saul Holland also attacked three elderly sisters. One of the sisters testified that her attacker threw something on her face “and tried to stuff something down her throat.”

The police and an assistant district attorney interviewed Holland, and he told police that Anthony Wise had told him not to be bothered because he and his brother “did one of these jobs here before” and “had gotten away.”

According to the case report, the detective replied to Holland, “Okay. Well I don’t want to get into that because we’re liable to get confused.”

Anthony Wise’s girlfriend had told the police that Donald Wise was the one who killed Crapser. The police would later match the fingerprints on Crapser’s bathroom door to Donald Wise’s fingerprint linking him to the murder.

Still, the tape and other evidence were not provided during Bozella’s trial case, and as a result, Bozella was given a sentence of 20 years to life.

“When they said guilty, I fell to the floor,” Bozella said. “When I fell to the floor, I cried like a baby. It wasn’t me! It wasn’t me! It wasn’t me!”

“It didn’t matter.”

In Prison – Experiences

He was taken to the Downstate Prison where the correction officer made him take off his clothes and sprayed a pesticide on him.

“And then they said, ‘You’re no longer Mr. Dewey Bozella,’” he said, impersonating the corrections officer. “’You’re 84AO172. When we ask you your number, you tell us your number.’”

Bozella’s anger toward the system grew.

“You call me an animal,” he said. “I’m gonna live like an animal.”

He was moved to the Sing Sing Correctional Facility, and during that time he decided to change his attitude, quit smoking and drinking and start over again. He started working on his GED diploma and eventually completed his bachelor’s and master’s degrees.

“I would have my Ph.D. if they would have let me,” he said, and the people in the audience laughed. “Because I realized that if I don’t have nothing to offer back to society, society has nothing to offer back to me.”

He joined a boxing team, and he became the Sing Sing boxing champion.

During his time in prison, he met his wife, Trena Bozella, when she was visiting her brother who was also incarcerated. Bozella helped take a photograph of her and her brother. Afterward, they started talking, and eventually became close and got married, spending more than 10 years separated before he would finally be released, Trena Bozella said.

In prison, he also met Stanley Jackson, the man who stabbed his brother to death.

“There’s the guy who murdered your brother,” Bozella said, referring to himself in second person. “You said that if you run into him you would kill him, you would take his head off. So there he is! Let me see how much you changed.”

“And I asked myself one question: At a time of adversity, can you live out what you say you’re about?”

He walked up to the man who killed his brother: “And I asked him one question: Why did you murder my brother?”

“And he answered, ‘I was 15 years old; it was something that just happened.’”

Bozella said he looked him in the eye, outstretched his hand and forgave him.

Retrial, Innocence Project & WilmerHale

Bozella got a second trial, but he said this trial was even worse than the first.

“It was so bad that the first guy who testified against me was testifying for me and said that he lied [initially].”

Bozella’s name was not cleared, and he was sentenced again. But before that, the prosecuting officer asked for him to make a deal: confess to the crime and have the possibility to go home on the spot. Bozella refused the offer and was sentenced again.

In 2006, he went to his first parole board where they asked him to share how he murdered the elderly woman. Again he refused to confess to something he did not do. The court added two years on his already 20-year-sentence. Another parole board and a third added a total of six years to his 20-year-sentence because he refused to admit.

He wrote Essence, 60 Minutes and other media organizations to help him in his case, but none would reply because of the gruesome nature of the case, Bozella said. The NAACP got involved but then walked away.

Bozella then learned about DNA testing and wrote to the Innocence Project, which eventually accepted his request after two years. He wrote to them every week until they replied.

Bozella said they told him, “Hey, listen! Don’t write us anymore… We’ve got you on the list.”

“For some strange and unknown reason, everything [DNA and other evidence] in my case was destroyed,” Bozella said. “You got to be kidding me.”

The Innocence Project couldn’t do anything more so they sent his case to a powerful law firm, WilmerHale, and its attorneys began digging for either missing files or living witnesses. Both were hard to find.

“They were ready to lose hope on my own case,” Bozella said.

Bozella asked the law firm to see the cop that arrested him because he recalled that the cop had threatened that he would get him. Bozella had a strong feeling about it, he said. So the attorneys went to the retired officer’s home.

The officer, opening up a bit, told the attorneys that he had kept Bozella’s personal file in his house, the only file he kept after he retired. The officer said that he felt that one day somebody will come to talk him about the case, and that’s why he kept it.

The new file and new-found evidence was the beginning of the case being overturned, Bozella said.

They found the tape of Holland telling the police and the district attorney that somebody else committed the crime. The evidence was brought before the judge, and the judge dismissed the case. On Oct. 28, 2009, Bozella was released.

He was awarded the Arthur Ashe Courage Award and proceeded to advance his boxing career, winning his first pro-boxing fight at 52. On the day of his fight, President Obama gave him a phone call wishing him luck.

In October 2011, he launched a foundation to help at-risk youth by teaching life skills through the discipline of boxing.

“Never let fear determine who you are,” Bozella told the crowd of all ages. “Never let where you come from determine where you’ll go.”

Thumbnail photo courtesy of the Dewey Bozella Foundation. Top photo courtesy of Scott Duncan.

Tags: boxing • Dewey Bozella • Innocence Project • justice