I don't think any of you has reasearched the case to any serious degree, but I won't push it.
Greenbits, I don't have any connection neither to lawyers nor to anybody else in this case. It strikes me as odd that people can look at the evidence and see him as guilty, and I'm trying to figure out where the disconnect is. If you will tell me the single piece of evidence that you consider most damning I'll address it.
Here is a brief outline and timeline of the case to provide a quick overview for anybody interested.
If you have questions about any specific item, or if you think I have presented something inaccurately or incompletely, or anything else, say so.
This isn't meant to be an exhaustive review of the case, a person can sort through past posts and news articles if they want more info, or ask. I'm not Mr Personality and do not have a pleasant discussion style, but if a person is interested in defending the interests of the victim or victims in this case they should focus on facts and not be put off by personalities.
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In chronological sequence/
1) The mother of the child goes to an afternoon dental appointment. The word 'afternoon' is important. It was an afternoon dental appointment, not a morning appointment.
2) The accused has never taken the bus to his uncle's house before. His uncle has given him instructions on which bus to take, but this is his first time making that trip. The trip was planned beforehand. This is supported by several pieces of evidence./
3) Met leaves the apartment no later than 2:37. In other words, if he knew the busses well and caught the last possible bus at each connection, he could have left as late as 237pm, but most likely left some time before that.
4) The mother returns from the dental appointment and the child is not at home. Eventually she contacts an aid worker and later they contact police to ask for help searching.
5) The initial report says the child was last seen around 215pm. Later this would be pushed back to perhaps 2pm or earlier by prosecutors.
6) The police initially were hesitant to take the case seriously, it is common for kids to wander and almost all missing children cases are resolved without needing a massive search. It is common practice in all areas to take a grain of salt when a person says their kid has not been home in a few hours and they need police to search. In this case, in retrospect, the search should have started sooner, but it didn't.
7) The child is known to frequent certain specific places. She has a few friends and also goes to apartment #472 where 5 young male Burmese live. The father went to each place she was known to go and asked for help and/or information around 7pm day 1. The roommates were home at that time and did answer the door and said they did not know where the child was.
Esar Met had given the phone number of his uncle to several people and one of them called him and asked if he knew where the child was. He told the person that he did not know, but he remarked that it was a small apartment complex and she was probably out playing.
9) Later the police organized several successive searches of the apartment complex. From the first search conducted by the police, to the last around 10pm day 2, there was only one apartment in the entire complex that did not seem to have anybody to answer the door. Three separate times the police knocked aggressively on the door of the apartment where the 4 roommates were, and each time the roommates did not answer. The police were aware that the child did visit this apartment, and they were aware that several young males lived there, but for unknown reasons they did not get a response at that apartment alone.
10) At roughly 10pm day 2, 4 fbi agents went to the apartment where the four roommates had been not answering the door. They knocked for a while and eventually got an answer and entered and found the body.
11) In the apartment were 5 people, the four roommates and one other person. All five were taken to the police station, briefly questioned, and set free. These five belong to the Karen ethnic group and are openly hostile towards Esar Met because he is from a different group. It is safe to say they may also have criticized the child for interacting with somebody from his ethnic group.
12) The body was found in the basement shower of the 3 story apartment. The basement was where Met lived, the four others lived in the top floor.
13) The body was still in rigor mortis 30 hours after Met had left, the body was still wet as well as if somebody tried to wash it, and it may have been 'posed' in such a way to suggest a sexual crime. There was a lot of blood everywhere including large blood stains on the downstairs floor, a large bloodstain on the downstairs wall, indicating the body had been thrown against the wall with force. There was a large plastic bag near the body with a lot of blood and assorted smaller amounts of blood in various other locations.
14) The body had been extremely abused. Many organs were damaged, there was a hole in the heart and the eyes were bloodshot from strangulation. There is little doubt the child died either while the killer was present or very shortly after.
15) There seems to be an indication in the police report that the initial impression of a medical examiner was that an object had been used to give the appearance of a rape, and a person was sent to the crime scene specifically to look for such an object. The implication being that somebody wanted it to appear as if the child had been raped.
16) At roughly the same time as the crime occured there was some ethnic tension in Burma, where all the parties involved are from. In Burma there have been a number of cases of people trying to incite ethnic violence by creating a 'false rape', in other words a person from ethnic group a says that a person from ethnic group b commited a rape of a woman from ethnic group a. Again and again these types of accusations in Burma have sparked widespread violence, and more often than not later investigation shows the accusation to have been made only to incite ethnic violence, and not based on fact. It is a sort of unique aspect of ethnic disturbance in Burma that riots almost always start like that and in fact there was such a case about the time this incident occured in Salt Lake.
17) The four roommates received a friendly interrogation from police. Despite obvious red flags in their actions and videotaped testimony, they were quickly judged innocent and sent home. They indicated that there might be reason to suspect their roommate Mr Met.
18) Police were told where Met was and called the uncle's house and said they would come over to speak to him. He agreed and waited for police to arrive.
19) When police arrived, instead of knocking they broke down the door and knocked down Met and some of his family members. Police then told the media that he had tried to escape when they arrived, which was not true.
20) He was then brought to a police station and told that he had to confess. He responded by providing an account of his actions that was verifiable and consistent with facts, but the police declined to accept his story. His story seems to have been truthful and he was initially fully cooperative. His roommates stories do not seem quite as fact based and there are indications their stories should have been scrutinized.
21) While the search was under way on day two, numerous local people of influence, including Governor Huntsman, were involved in the case publicly. After the body was found there was a lot of criticism of the investigation, since two years previously, less than a mile away, almost the exact same crime had been commited. Police announced quickly that, as with the previous case, they had captured a suspect and gotten a confession. The case, they said, was closed.
22) As evidence from the crime scene was being examined it quickly became apparent that there were problems. An expert from almost any field could look at the case from their field of expertise and find something about the case that wasn't quite right. Nevertheless the prosecution tried to collect evidence and prepare a case.
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Of course after several years of building a case the prosecution eventually was forced to go to trial. The stakes were huge. If Met were not proven guilty then there would be questions about when the child died. If the child was still alive several hours after Met left the apartment it would have implications that could be expected to damage numerous careers.
There does not appear to be any indication that Met commited this crime. There are indications that some of the evidence may have received an 'assist' to aid the prosecution, but even if you accept all of the evidence at face value, the evidence does not point to his being the killer.
There are indications that a number of people in Salt Lake are uncomfortable with the case and recognize that it may not have been proper. It's possible that the initial defense team may have deliberately not called any witnesses and not mounted any defense specifically because they calculated they would lose in the short term for political reasons, but wanted to leave something in Met's corner for future use...
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... edit to add
Worth adding that there were two investigations of this crime. The police conducted an investigation whose purpose was to portray themselves as having acted well, without regard for the facts. A second investigation was informally evident. The police may not have been watching the apartment during the time that the roommates were not answering the door, but somebody was. Notice that just as the fbi arrived so did another person from that community. Also note that after the trial all of the roommates were evicted from the apartment...
Greenbits, the whole point of researching the case is not to find some crooked loophole, it is to find out if he is the killer. A person who looks at the evidence in a glancing way, without examining any of it will tend to accept on faith i.e., trust those who presented the evidence that it indicates guilt.
The question I'm asking is not "Does somebody say this evidence indicates guilt"? rather the question is "Does the evidence actually indicate guilt?".
If somebody says that an orange is a potato chip, that is fine. If a lot of people start believing it though it seems like it should be an indicator of a problem. So you point to the orange and say "Is that really a potato chip?" and nobody questions that the orange is a potato chip. Normally I would say "fine, the orange is a potato chip". In this case though the mass hallucination or whatever seems to be costing an innocent person their freedom.
Is it possible that he is guilty? Anything is possible.
Is there any evidence that he is guilty? I've researched the case a bit and have not seen any yet. The only issue that stands out is his comment about the shoes, but even that, the only possible indicator of guilt that I have seen, has a possible explanation and would be problematic as evidence against him.
Is there at least as much evidence pointing elsewhere? There is.
Since you were gentleman enough to say you think he is probably guilty, please state the one piece of evidence that seems strongest.