Green Sweats + White Stripes = 5 Months Of His Life

Lionel Franks and his mom, Nikki Danner

By rights, Lionel Franks should have graduated from high school in June, near the top of his class. By rights, he already should have started his freshman year at Lincoln University, studying culinary arts. By rights, he should have been anywhere but in jail for five of the most important months of his teenage life, accused of shooting a man 12 times on a North Philadelphia street.

Franks' bad-dream detour into the city's criminal-justice system began on April 9, 2010, a Friday mostly spent touring the Lincoln campus in rural Chester County. Back home in his Nicetown neighborhood by mid-afternoon, he changed into an Adidas sweat suit, green with white stripes down the pants and sleeves, and went shopping for sneakers at a sporting goods store on Germantown Avenue.

Minutes into the return trip, Franks was swarmed by police. A man had just been gunned down 12 blocks away, they told him, and two witnesses had identified him as the shooter. Franks showed the officers his bag from Olympia Sports and his new shoes. "You got the wrong guy!" he protested as they cuffed him. Even as the Philadelphia District Attorney's Office began building its attempted-murder case against Franks, the evidence was shrinking.

The witnesses, it turned out, hadn't seen the gunman's face, only a black male in green sweats with white stripes down the pants and sleeves. The victim, having taken eight shots to the head and neck alone, couldn't remember anything. A store surveillance camera provided Franks with an alibi nearly down to the minute. But, the 18-year-old would stay behind bars through August, captive to a pair of tiny blood spots and the grindingly slow wheels of justice in an overcrowded court system. If not for a prosecutor with doubts about Franks' guilt, he might still be there.

Franks had no prom or senior trip, no cap and gown, no commencement. This high school senior's rite of passage included strip searches, mug shots, fingerprints, and a prisoner number at the Curran-Fromhold Correctional Facility in Northeast Philadelphia. He was put in a cell with three other men on a tense, sometimes violent block, where he watched a fight end in a fatal stabbing. "I just tried to keep to myself and stay away from all the negativity", he said. He had his Christian faith, the Bible, a sports magazine (he was a shooting guard on the school basketball team), and his family's visits and letters to fortify him.

A few days after his arrest, Celeste Lewis went to see the grandson she still calls by his childhood nickname, "Doodie," and was frightened for him. "He looked lost, like a lamb in the midst of wolves", she recalled. His bail was initially set at $500,000, not unusual in an attempted murder, and then reduced to $250,000. Of course, that didn't matter because his mother couldn't come up with the 10% necessary to free him.

Single and raising four boys (Franks, a 12-year-old, and 11-year-old twins), Nikki Danner was struggling in a rented rowhouse on 17th Street near Bristol Street. She had been a home health-care aide for seven years and had the support of her mother and stepfather, but she had to quit last year when the twins were diagnosed with autism. "Sometimes, it's tough to know how we get by", Danner said. Now she needed a lawyer.

A woman in her church suggested her uncle, Mark S. Keenheel, who had a small practice in Germantown. Then, the struggling congregation, called Touch Your World International, came up with $3,500 to help pay him. Keenheel said he believed his new client's story. "This was a good kid", he said.

Franks had one brush with the law, in 2007 when he was 15 years old. It sprang from an argument over a shared "neighborhood bike." He was accused of stealing it, an allegation he denied. But to quickly resolve the Juvenile Court case, he completed a summary-offense "diversionary program" for first offenders.

The judge also approved a recommendation that Franks be transferred from Simon Gratz High School in Nicetown to Delaware Valley High School in East Falls. A private alternative school founded in 1969, DVHS takes students at risk of dropping out and following the lure of the streets. Franks, though, was not a typical candidate. His mother described him as "a homebody" who didn't know the streets. DVHS was the best thing that ever happened to us."

Students are held to strict academic standards and codes of conduct and 93% of them graduate. Franks had a 3.85 grade-point average. He would be the first male in four generations of Danner's family to finish high school, let alone go to college. He had taken three DVHS-sponsored campus tours, but the fourth, to Lincoln, was the clincher. He liked the green environs, the presentations to prospective students, the courses of study.

April 9, 2010 was an exciting day for him, Danner recalled. When he got back, she gave him money for sneakers. Shortly before 5:00pm, the call came from police: Franks was in custody and identified as a shooting suspect who fled in a black car. Danner exclaimed, "My son doesn't know how to drive!" She hung up, and then cried hysterically.

The victim of the shooting was Robert Bryant, 22 years old, and this much is known about the incident: About 4:20pm a black male in green sweats walked up to Bryant on 17th Street, just above Venango Street, and shot him a dozen times. Two people, including an off-duty police officer, said they had seen the gunman run to a small black car and get into the passenger seat.

Police arrived at the scene at 4:26pm, got the moaning Bryant into a patrol car, and rushed him to nearby Temple University Hospital. At 4:30pm, about 12 blocks away, a Temple police officer spotted three African American males walking along 13th Street near Tioga Street. One wore green sweats, matching the description on the police radio. "All these police started shooting out from everywhere," Franks recalled. They ordered his friends to "keep on moving" and arrested him.

At the 35th Police District, at Broad Street and Champlost Avenue, detectives gave Franks more bad news: On the instep of each of his sneakers was a small brown spot. Chemical tests could quickly determine whether the stains were blood. Identifying whose blood would require DNA tests. Those results would be back from the police lab in three months... maybe.

From the start, attorney Keenheel believed he had one strong piece of evidence that Franks was innocent and it was security-camera video from Olympia Sports. He was shown entering the store at 4:20:50pm, the time Bryant was being shot eight blocks from the store. At 4:26:33pm, he walked out of the store with a bag, which was the same time officers were arriving at the crime scene.

Five days after the shooting, two police detectives went to Olympia Sports to check the accuracy of the camera's clock against the police radio time. The disparity was 2 minutes, 12 seconds. That was not enough time for Franks to have run from the shooting to the store, across Broad Street at rush hour. "He'd have to be Superman," Keenheel said. But according to witnesses, the gunman got into a waiting car, which police contended could have covered eight blocks in that time.

On April 26, 2010, Franks was released from prison for a preliminary hearing, which by law must be assigned within 14 days of arrest. But in Philadelphia courts, awash in criminal cases, first hearings are almost always postponed. This one was postponed to May 13, 2010. When May 13th arrived, the hearing was postponed again. The victim was still unconscious.

Finally, on May 25, 2010, Municipal Judge Craig M. Washington held Franks for trial on attempted-murder and related charges. Chemical tests had shown the spots on his sneakers were human blood, Assistant District Attorney Bridget McVan reported. "This case is as serious as it gets," she argued, calling the shooting "an execution."

Keenheel retorted that nothing indicated Bryant and Franks had ever met, or even had mutual acquaintances. "You would think if it was an attempted execution, there would be a personal beef between these people", he said. Armed with six reference letters from DVHS staff praising Franks, Keenheel argued strenuously for another bail reduction or electronically monitored house arrest so Franks could finish high school. The judge said, "No, there are killers that walk among us! Are you kidding? They're on college campuses, too!"

Two more months passed before Franks' first pre-trial conference at the Criminal Justice Center. Common Pleas Court Judge Karen Shreeves-Johns and the lawyers would discuss readying the case for trial. By then, it had been assigned to Assistant District Attorney William Davis. A prosecutor in the major crimes unit, he thought Franks' arrest was appropriate given the initial evidence and the nature of the crime. Still, Franks did not fit the profile of the street-gang executioner believed to have shot Bryant and that bothered Davis. "I knew this was not going to be a guilty/not-guilty case. It was going to be guilty or innocent", he said.

Davis asked the police forensics lab to put aside all tests in the Franks case, save for the one that would be definitive: DNA from the blood on the sneakers. "The standard for DNA testing is three months," he said. "I really pushed, and got it down to weeks." On August 31, 2010, Franks was taken from prison to the Criminal Justice Center for another pre-trial conference. But this time, Keenheel had good news... Franks was going home.

Franks was back home by dinner time that night. His mother put out pizza, hot wings, and all the food he was denied during his time in prison. He has caught some good breaks since then, Danner said. Administrators at Delaware Valley High School said that even though he hadn't finished his senior year, his grades would still earn him a diploma. She's hoping he will be allowed to take part in the 2011 commencement.

As for Lincoln, "I want to be there as soon as possible," said Franks, who is looking for a job in the interim. In an interview soon after his release, he was amazingly affable, laughing easily, and showing no bitterness. "He's always been like that," said Danner. But she worries that he is holding back about his prison experience and assuring her with "I'm fine" when he isn't really.

Franks recalled the good people he met in prison: A Christian correctional officer and some inmates who, knowing he was religious, gave him their passes for prayer and chapel time. And, of course, there were the tragic people destined to spend their lives there. He said, "It was a crazy experience. Never again."

So, the question still remains: Who shot Robert Bryant? The case is open, but pursuing it won't be easy because the trails have grown cold, prosecutor Davis acknowledged. And, despite the lingering impact of his wounds, Bryant has been less than cooperative when asked who might have wanted him dead. The search for the gunman in the green sweats, with white stripes down the pants and sleeves, still goes on...

FYI: This article appeared in the Philadelphia Daily News on September 27, 2010.