Queens DA clears two men of murder, citing ‘new’ cell technology
It took Queens prosecutors four years to realize what Barry Hall and Pharaoh Ferguson always knew: They weren’t at the scene of a 2018 murder.
Ferguson, 49, and Hall, 52, walked out of Queens Supreme Court last week frustrated but vindicated after three years on Rikers Island and one year on house arrest with ankle monitors as they fought charges for the fatal shooting of a workout trainer sitting in a Mercedes SUV.
Prosecutors with the Queens District Attorney’s Office finally moved to dismiss the case on Wednesday, citing “advancements in technology” at the NYPD that gave them access to new information on the men’s cellphones that was “not necessarily accessible” in 2018.
The information, prosecutors said, seemed to confirm Ferguson and Hall’s alibis that they were in Brooklyn at the time of the Jan. 28., 2018 shooting of Sherwood Beverly in Ozone Park. Three other people in the SUV were wounded in the ambush.
The Queens DA declined to answer questions about the new technological advancements. Cell site location data has been used as evidence in criminal investigations for years. A 2011 robbery case in Detroit involving cell site data resulted in a Supreme Court ruling in 2017.
The NYPD said it would not comment on the case.
The exonerated men insist there is nothing “new” proving their innocence.
“I’m happy to be free and to get my life back,” said Hall, who runs a youth football league. “But it’s an insult to our intelligence to say they didn’t have this technology in 2018. They had cellphone pings and towers for these last 15 or 20 years.”
“We stayed 36 months on Rikers Island,” Ferguson added. “They knew since 2018 we were innocent.”
Ferguson said he was at home with his fiancée and her daughter at the time of the murder. While he told detectives that video surveillance from his apartment building would show him entering the building the night of the crime and not leaving until the following morning, cops never retrieved the footage, his attorney, Damien Brown, said.
Hall, meanwhile, returned to his home in Brooklyn after grabbing food from a White Castle around 4:20 a.m. — before the early morning shooting, he and his wife said.
Both were accused of firing at the SUV. A criminal complaint did not explain an alleged motive.
The men plan to sue the city over the years spent behind bars, said Ferguson’s civil attorney Cary London.
“I don’t hang out in Queens, I do not do drugs, and I am not in a gang,” Ferguson told authorities when he was arrested, according to court papers. He previously served time in state prison in the 1990s for grand larceny and robbery.
During the hearing, Assistant District Attorney Kenneth Zawistowski asked Judge Kenneth Holder to dismiss the charges, explaining that Hall and Ferguson were likely not at the scene of the crime — though surviving eyewitnesses identified them as the killers.
“While the witnesses who identified the defendants have not wavered or retracted their testimony, new information has been discovered which undermines our confidence in the accuracy of the identifications of the defendants as the perpetrators of the shooting,” Zawistowski said.
Specific “geolocation information from the phones” helped crack the case, said a spokesman for the Queens DA’s office.
Efforts to reach the family of the slain victim, who lived in Brownsville, had two kids and worked at a gym, were unsuccessful.
The former Investigations Division Chief of the Queens DA, Peter Crusco, was baffled as to why existing technology would not have revealed the now-exonerated suspects were in a different borough at the time of the killing.
“Why did it take three years to identify the appropriate cell phone towers and triangulate, if prosecutors knew from the defense alibi that they claimed they were in Brooklyn when the Queens shootings occurred?” asked Crusco.
