![]() ![]() “I kind of describe Malcolm and De’Marchoe’s letters as kind of scratches on a wall,” Cullen said. One of their pleas finally reached private investigator Eric Cullen in 2006. RELATED: How A Growing Land Dispute Between Montana Neighbors Led To One Man's Death “There’s no blame on my brother at all,” Scott told “Dateline: Secrets Uncovered.” “I definitely can’t hold him responsible for something I didn’t even do myself.”Īs the years passed behind bars, Carpenter and Scott were intent on proving their innocence and spent years writing letters to anyone they could think of that might help their case or recording videos with contraband cell phones begging President Obama and others to intervene in the case. When Atchinson heard of his brother’s conviction, he felt he had failed his brother “because he had followed in my footsteps” even though both men insisted they were innocent. It’s like time just suspended for a second,” Scott said of hearing the verdict. I didn’t have nothing to with it,'" Scott told "Dateline" correspondent Craig Melvin.Ĭarpenter also denied any role in the shooting, but both were later convicted and sentenced to life in prison plus an additional 170 years after Wilson agreed to testify in exchange for a lesser sentence. “I’m like, ‘Whoever, you know, is telling you this, they are obviously mistaken. Two other eyewitnesses also told police that Carpenter and Scott - who authorities believed had ties to the rival gang - had been the shooters that night.īoth men were arrested even though Scott insisted he didn’t do it. Wilson was arrested for being in possession of the gun but he insisted he had been hiding it for De’Marchoe Carpenter - a close friend of Scott’s who had been injured in another drive-by shooting less than a year earlier. When a detective visited Michael Wilson, a well-known member of a rival gang, he noticed a maroon sedan in Wilson’s driveway matching the description of the drive-by car and found a gun that would later be matched through ballistics to Summer’s death. On September 10, 1994, 19-year-old mother Karen Summers was struck down in a driveby shooting while hanging out with friends, some of whom had been known gang members. Scott was just 13 years old, but what he didn’t know then was that his life would follow an eerily similar path just a few years later. The next year, he was convicted and sentenced to life in prison. His close friend Ben King also told police in an interrogation room that Atchinson had killed Lane.Ītchinson - who continued to maintain his innocence - was arrested and charged with murder. Without much to go on, the murder case quickly went cold until an eyewitness came forward six months later to say Atchinson had been the shooter. The victim was later identified as 29-year-old James Lane, a small-time drug dealer, who had been shot in the chest and robbed. “He was still breathing and I was like, ‘Man, somebody call an ambulance for him.’” “I looked to where the shot came from and I seen the dude fall and as we got right there, I looked and seen his chest was still moving,” Atchinson recalled. “My momma will tell me, ‘You know he’s crazy about you,’ you know, ‘He do everything you do.’”Ītchinson served as mentor for his younger brother, encouraging him to focus on sports and stay off the streets, but the two brothers were suddenly pulled apart in 1990 after Atchinson said he had been driving through an area of the city and heard a loud gunshot. “We have a beautiful relationship,” Atchinson said of the pair’s bond. ![]() Growing up in a poverty-stricken neighborhood on the north side of Tulsa, Oklahoma, Scott and his older brother had always been close. “You made a horrible mistake and the fact that it happened twice in the same family - there are no words.” “The system doesn’t want to acknowledge that they made a mistake, but you made a mistake,” Tiffany Murphy, the former director of the Oklahoma Innocence Project, told “Dateline: Secrets Uncovered,” airing Wednesdays at 8/7c on Oxygen. Scott and his older brother Corey Atchinson were each convicted of separate murders in the 1990s and spent decades behind bars, before each was exonerated in a disturbing case of justice gone wrong. Watch Dateline: Secrets Uncovered Peacock and the Oxygen App.
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