‘The target was on him’
Victim’s mother blames his death on ex-homicide detective charged with lying
All the way to the crime scene, Gena Cottrell couldn’t believe it was her son who was dead on the floor.
Only when she stood in the cold rain at Cliff’s Bar and Grill in Homewood, peered into the doorway and saw her son’s legs did she understand.
She wanted to go in and hold him, wanted to know whether his face was intact.
Pittsburgh homicide Detective Margaret “Peg” Sherwood met her there that night, Sept. 21, 2014, and gently told her she couldn’t enter the crime scene. Ms. Sherwood said she knew 23year-old Corey Clark, he was a good young man, and she was so sorry this happened.
“And she said, ‘We’re going to find the person who did this to your son,’” said Ms. Cottrell, 60, of Penn Hills.
Ms. Cottrell trusted that the detective would find the person responsible for Clark’s death. But last week, that trust turned
to anger after news broke that Ms. Sherwood, 51, of Brookline, faces nine criminal charges alleging she lied and faked reports while investigating two homicides and a domestic violence case. Ms. Sherwood retired from the department in June.
Now, Ms. Cottrell knows Ms. Sherwood charged her son with a killing despite evidence that proved his innocence.
And now, Ms. Cottrell holds Ms. Sherwood responsible for Clark’s unsolved death.
“She’s to blame,” Ms. Cottrell said Tuesday. “She is the cause of my son being murdered.”
Police Chief Scott Schubert hasn’t commented since Ms. Sherwood was indicted by a state grand jury last month, and city officials have said only that they are cooperating with the investigation by the state Attorney General’s office.
Even at the crime scene that night, Ms. Cottrell believed she knew why her son was killed. Six months earlier, on March 1, 2014, he’d warned her that rumors were swirling: Mom, I’m going to be blamed for something, and I just want you to know I didn’t do it.
Three days later Clark was charged with killing 27-yearold Vincent Holt of Homewood, accused of shooting him11 times inside a bar, The Rendezvous Phase III, and wounding four other people. A relative saw Clark on a TV newscast and alerted Ms. Cottrell, who collapsed.
But Clark was innocent. A month later the charges were withdrawn.
The grand jury investigating Ms. Sherwood said surveillance video from the bar clearly showed Clark standing next to the shooter; Clark’s attorney, Kenneth Haber, said the video showed his client grabbing a woman and ducking for cover when the shots were fired. Clark was exonerated, and police arrested another man in the slaying.
But it was too late for Clark, his mother said.
“The target was on him by then,” she said.
A week after he was released from jail in early September 2014, some men stopped Clark on the street, asked if he carried a gun. No, he told them. You better get one, they said, because somebody is looking for you. They broughtup Mr. Holt’s name.
A week after that, a masked gunman carrying a rifle entered Cliff’s Bar and Grill on North Lang Avenue and killed Clark.
So that night at the scene of her son’s death, his mother believed she knew why he was killed. But she had no idea, when she met Ms. Sherwood outside Cliff’s, that she was the detective who had wrongly charged Clark.
“I don’t understand,” Ms. Cottrell said, “why someone with that kind of power would accuse an innocent young man.”
Ms. Sherwood filed a criminal complaint that charged Clark with Mr. Holt’s homicide and related offenses on March 3, 2014, two days after Mr. Holt was killed — but court documents show that she relied on unnamed witnesses and parole officers who couldn’t positively identify Clark.
According to the grand jury presentment, Ms. Sherwood told a prosecutor that two probation officers viewed still surveillance images of the shooter and identified the man as Clark.
But both parole officers said they were never sure the man in the photos was Clark. One officer said she told her supervisor “there was no way in the world” she could say Clark was the man in the images, according to the presentment.
Both parole agents said Ms. Sherwood did not tell them about the surveillance video from the bar until after Clark’s charges were dismissed. When they then watched the video, they immediately saw that Clark was standing beside the shooter, according to the presentment.
The district attorney’s office dropped the charges against Clark after viewing the video and identifying the shooter as Cornell Poindexter, who subsequently pleaded guilty to third-degree murder and was sentenced to 15 to 30 years in prison.
Ms. Sherwood’s attorney, Pat Thomassey, said last week that she did nothing wrong and she intends to fight the charges, all misdemeanors. He did not return a request for comment for this story.
Ms. Sherwood is accused of wrongdoing in two additional cases. One is a homicide investigation that began March 24, 2014, when Rasheed Strader was shot in Troy Hill. The Allegheny County District Attorney’s office charged one man with homicide but did not charge a second suspect because of Ms. Sherwood’s handling of the investigation, according to the presentment.
Thomia Kinsel, Mr. Strader’s mother, said Tuesday she was shocked and angry when she learned of the allegations against Ms. Sherwood.
“You’re just going to let a murderer walk away,” she said.
She discussed the case with police this week, she said, and was told they need “brand new evidence” to charge the second suspect.
“It’s been four years,” she said, “what kind of new evidence are you going to get?”
City officials have remained largely silent on the allegations against Ms. Sherwood. A spokesman for District Attorney Stephen A. Zappala Jr. said the office reviewed Ms. Sherwood’s other cases and found nothing to “impact the integrity of any current or previous prosecution.” Public Safety Director Wendell Hissrich said Wednesday there is no indication Ms. Sherwood’s charges point to a more systemic problem in the homicide unit, but added he can’t say what the state AG’s office is looking at.
Joe Grace, a spokesman for that office, would not say whether the office is investigating beyond Ms. Sherwood, who has not been charged with any crimes directly related to Clark’s death.
Ms. Cottrell would like to see that happen next.
“This is not just a little lie,” she said. “This is something that took his life.”
After Clark was cleared on the homicide charges, he spent six months in prison because he’d violated his parole by being at the bar that night. Before the arrest, he was about halfway through a course to learn how to drive tractor-trailers. He hoped to save up enough to buy his own rig.
The prison where he was incarcerated for the probation violation was more than an hour from Pittsburgh; she drove up to get him when he was released in early September 2014.
She brought him home, and he re-enrolled in the truck driving courses, eager to finish and hit the road, eager to get on with his life.