Aug 05, 2020 — It’s been nearly four years since Nick Hillary was found not guilty in the murder of 12 year-old Garrett Phillips in Potsdam. The trial gripped the region. Now, Hillary is pursuing a lawsuit of his own, against the law enforcement officials who charged him with Garrett’s death.
Hillary claims police violated his civil rights, in part because he’s Black. The case resonates with new urgency amidst a nationwide reckoning over policing and race.
Oral "Nicholas" Hillary was acquitted of second-degree murder in 2016, after a bench trial in St. Lawrence County. Hillary filed his first civil rights lawsuit less than a year after the investigation began, and his second one, which includes prosecutors and additional law enforcement in 2017. The two cases have been consolidated, and Hillary's case should go to trial early next year. Photo: David Sommerstein
This story starts nine years ago when a twelve year old boy, Garrett Phillips, is found murdered in his Potsdam apartment. We still don’t know who killed him.
Garrett’s death devastated his family. It rocked the whole community. And it caught the nation’s attention, not only because it was the murder of a child, but because of the way North Country law enforcement quickly landed on one man as a suspect—Nick Hillary.
Here’s tape from a call the morning after Garrett’s death, between then-Lieutenant Police Chief of Potsdam Mark Murray, and lead investigator for the District Attorney’s office, Dan Manor:
DAN MANOR: Does the mother have a boyfriend?
MARK MURRAY: Yeah. Well, she did…
MANOR: ‘Cause, last night, my granddaughter got a call [...] that said this 12 year old boy had been killed by her mother’s boyfriend. Now where that came from I have no idea.
MURRAY: Yep, that’s the rumor [...] That’s what we’re looking at…
Garrett’s mother actually had two former boyfriends who we know were potential suspects at one time.
Claims under the 14th and 4th amendments
There’s Nick Hillary—he’s a St. Lawrence University alum, a star of their championship soccer team. At the time of Garrett’s death, he’d been living in Potsdam for years with his kids, building a career as a soccer coach at Clarkson University. He was in the neighborhood when Garrett Phillips died.
The other ex-boyfriend, and suspect, was John Jones. He’s white, and a deputy sheriff for St. Lawrence County. He also was in the neighborhood at the time of the crime.
But the investigation zeroed in on Nick Hillary, not John Jones. Hillary claims that’s because of his race. And this is at the heart of his lawsuit against Potsdam and St. Lawrence County law enforcement officials—that from the very beginning, because Hillary is Black, they deprived him of his right to equal protection under the law.
We can compare two of the earliest moments in the investigation—one with Hillary, one with Jones.
John Jones (in green jacket), sitting in Potsdam Police headquarters with Tandy Cyrus, Garrett's mother, Mark Murray (behind desk), Dan Manor (back) and other law enforcement the morning after Garrett's death.
Nick Hillary being strip searched without a warrant in Potsdam Police headquarters two days after Garrett's death.
Two days after Garrett dies, the police show up at Nick Hillary’s house to take him in for questioning. They have no warrant, but Hillary complies. A couple of hours into questioning Hillary, he has to go to work—but the police don’t let him leave.
Instead, still without any arrest or search warrant, police take his car keys and cell phone away, tell Hillary to strip naked, and take photographs of him, for hours more.
A search warrant comes later that day. Hillary spoke a bit about that experience, with NCPR in 2015.
"The treatment that I received, humans should not be treated like that."
Now let’s compare what Hillary experienced with what happened to deputy sheriff John Jones, also an ex-boyfriend who, like Hillary, was a couple blocks away at the time of the murder.
But unlike Hillary, John Jones was allowed in Garrett’s hospital room the night of his death. And the next morning, the same morning of the phone call mentioned earlier, Jones was down at police headquarters. But instead of being questioned, he was sitting in a huddle with a whole circle of law enforcement officers, holding Garrett’s mother’s hand, listening to them start to piece out the investigation—
—including the plans to focus on Nick Hillary. And that circle of law enforcement officers that morning, that’s most of the people who Nick Hillary is suing—including John Jones, Mark Murray, then-Potsdam Chief of Police Ed Tischler (and by extention the whole department, and the and village of Potsdam). Also former District Attorney Mary Rain, who ran for office on a promise of putting Nick Hillary in prison for the murder.
We reached out to Potsdam’s attorney, but he isn’t commenting on the case. Neither is Mark Murray, who’s since been promoted to Potsdam Chief of Police.
Law enforcement officials defend their actions
But in the past, Murray’s defended the way he and his team handled the investigation. In an HBO documentary about the case, Murray defends the choice to have John Jones in the room that morning with Garrett’s mom:
“She wanted that, and that was accommodated. To do it over again, probably would have done it differently, but definitely didn’t affect the investigation in my opinion."
And regarding the choice to strip search Hillary, he says:
MURRAY: I don’t normally do strip search, this was NY state FIU [Forensi, who normally do searches of people’s persons and this was normal procedure, trying to document injuries pursuant to the murder of a 12-year-old boy. There were other people that were photographed nude as well, and I pointed that out in the deposition, but—
HBO producer: —who else was photographed nude?
MURRAY: Garrett Phillips was.
It took years for these law enforcement officials to even arrest Nick Hillary, and years more for the murder case to go to trial. And in the meantime, Nick Hillary was living in this small, mostly white community, where rumors spread fast.
Defamation, conspriacy, retaliation claims
A kind of unofficial jury convened on North Country streets and back porches. Garrett’s uncle Brian Phillips launched a campaign demanding “Justice for Garrett,” distributing lawn signs and flyers all over the county and the state. Phillips was and continues to be outspoken about his feeling that Nick Hillary is guilty.
“Everybody that knows me knows what goes through my head and who I believe,” Phillips says. “That’s not gonna change.”
Garrett Phillips was murdered in his mother's apartment in 2011. After Nick Hillary was found not guilty in 2016, Potsdam police said they would not continue the investigation. St. Lawrence County district attorney Gary Pasqua says the case remains open. Photo courtesy of HBO
Amidst this “Justice for Garrett” campaign, and swirling rumors, Hillary’s life unraveled: he got fired from his job, his landlord asked him and his kids to move out, his kids were bullied by schoolmates saying their father is a killer.
“It’s an uncomfortable experience to be in and out in the community. It’s a show,” Hillary told NCPR a year before the murder case went to trial.
“You’re inside the grocery store trying to focus on your shopping list, but you have to be dealing with people passing and pointing and whispering conversations. People ostracizing you, people in the past who would say ‘hi’ and ‘bye,’ are pretty much ignoring me as if I’m not even there.”
This all goes into Hillary’s civil rights lawsuit against Potsdam and St. Lawrence County police and prosecutors: he claims that not only did they work together to deprive him of his constitutional rights, they destroyed his reputation in the community.
People have organized Black Lives Matter marches across the North Country in recent months, including this one in Plattsburgh in May. Photo: Emily Russell
The fact that a lawsuit like this is even possible dates back to a statute from the 1800s, and another moment in history when the country was confronting how people of color were treated in the justice system. It’s actually known as “the Ku Klux Klan Act,” one of a few big civil rights acts Congress passed after the Civil War. It was written to protect African Americans from violence and vigilante groups like the KKK.
Which brings us to today’s conversation about policing and race, how differently people of color and white people experience the justice system, and how Nick Hillary’s case fits into that narrative.
On the day in 2016 when Hillary walked out of the St. Lawrence County courthouse a free man after his not-guilty verdict, one of his lawyers, Norm Siegel spoke on the lawn outside, and said something that could easily have been said today at the protests over George Floyd’s death:
“You can’t close your eyes to race in New York, and in America. Whether it’s Charleston, whether it’s Tulsa, whether it’s Ferguson, whether it’s Staten Island. There is a serious problem, especially police vis-a-vis men of color.”
The Black Lives Matter movement and this push for police accountability has drawn thousands of people to the streets across the North Country just in the last couple months. Some members of the community hold up Hillary’s civil rights case as an example of what needs to change.
Including Jen Baxtron of Potsdam, who’s Black, has been organizing some of those rallies. “When my son goes, out, I fear every single time he goes out,” Baxtron says.
“Because God forbid, him and his friends get pulled over, or, something happens to somebody and his name is thrown in it. Is he gonna be treated the way Nick Hillary was? And these are the people that we’re supposed to call on? These are the people that we’re supposed to trust?”
And while Potsdam Chief of Police Mark Murray wouldn’t comment on Hillary’s case, he says he’s taking this broader moment of reckoning seriously—he was at one Black Lives Matter march in Potsdam that Baxtron organized.
“I definitely stand in firm support and solidarity with my community, the Potsdam community, which includes all age demographics, race demographics, genders,” Murray says. “Potsdam is a unique place for sure, and the place I was born and raised and continue to raise my family, so—I’d like my actions to speak for themselves, not, you know, any soundbite.”
Hillary filed his first civil rights lawsuit less than a year after the investigation began. He filed a second one, which includes prosecutors and additional law enforcement in 2017, and attorneys on both sides have until October to wrap up the "discovery phase" of the second case. The two cases are being consolidated, and should reach a jury trial in the Northern District Court of New York early next year.
There’s a lot at stake as Nick Hillary’s civil lawsuit trial approaches. For Potsdam and St. Lawrence County, it’s liability and money. But also credibility at a time when police are facing more scrutiny than ever.
For Nick Hillary, he’s said it’s a chance to shine a light on his experience in the justice system and a chance to recoup some of his financial losses over the better part of a decade—his career, reputation, massive legal fees. He’s said it remains a struggle piecing back together a life, for himself and his kids.
And meanwhile the question of who killed Garrett Phillips still remains a mystery.
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