Slain Baltimore Police Detective Troy Chesley and convicted cop-killer Brandon Grimes started life in much the same way, says Chesley’s mother, Joyce Chesley.
Both were brought up and educated in Baltimore’s public schools. Both were raised without fathers to provide guidance.
But, along the way, Troy Chesley dedicated himself to the citizens of Baltimore, becoming a police officer — while Grimes chose a life of crime, accumulating 17 arrests on a variety of charges, before he was convicted of gunning down the off-duty detective during a botched robbery.
“It’s not fair what you’ve done to me — or anybody else,” Joyce Chesley said Wednesday, crying on the witness stand and holding up a picture of her dead son for Grimes to see. “You should have been put away a long time ago — a long time ago.”
Baltimore City Circuit Judge Timothy Doory agreed with the grieving mother, and sentencing 23-year-old Grimes to life in prison without the possibility of parole for the first-degree murder of Chesley on Jan. 9, 2007.
“This case calls out for punishment,” said Doory, who called Grimes a “cruel and cowardly killer.”
The judge also denounced Grimes’ changing explanations of what happened that night: First, he claimed to be a robbery victim; then he said he was shot on Carey Street; and finally he told jurors he was the victim of a random shooting on Fairfax Road, where Chesley was killed.
“It was a web of lies totally rejected by everyone,” Doory said.
Like his mother, Leroy Pinder also teared up on the witness stand when speaking of his brother.
“He was more than my brother,” Pinder said of Troy Chesley. “He was my friend and protector.”
Throughout the hearing, Grimes sat stone-faced. When given the opportunity to speak, he declined to do so.
Grimes’ uncle, Gerald McCall, 38, said his nephew was not the “monster” described in court.
“Everything is stacked against this young man,” he said.
Before the sentencing, defense attorney Roland Walker had attempted to get Grimes a new trial, arguing that the city police’s DNA lab contained contaminated evidence.
“We know the crime laboratory was totally screwed up,” he said. “… They hid it from us.”
But Rana Santos, the lab’s DNA technical leader, testified that the “contaminations” in which staff members’ DNA was accidentally left on crime-scene evidence does not affect any cases, because the suspects’ DNA can be distinguished from the staff members’.
“They’re human beings handling the evidence,” she said. “… Just breathing in a room handling the evidence can leave samples to contribute to the DNA.”
Doory said he did not even view the staff members’ DNA as contamination.
“One cannot avoid the conclusion the defendant was in fact the agent of death in this case.”
