A teen wrongly implicated in a deadly shooting at a Philadelphia SEPTA station has been exonerated, officials said. Zaire Wilson, 16, was arrested in connection to the January 11 shooting, but video evidence from SEPTA has since cleared his name. Wilson's liberation comes after authorities reviewed surveillance footage that contradicted previous assumptions of his involvement in the death of 16-year-old Tyshaun Welles. According to FOX 29, the young man was ordered to be released from custody following the discovery.
Initially, Wilson faced a grim prospect of a long prison sentence, as public opinion weighed heavily against him. "People was saying I was gonna go down, do 15-20 years for something I ain’t do. I kept saying I was innocent, I ain’t do it, I had nothing to do with it. Nobody listened to me until I got to the youth study center," Wilson stated in an interview with NBC Philadelphia. His presence at the youth study center, a place for temporary detainment of minors under judicial consideration, served as a cold echo chamber for his fervent claims of innocence until the video surfaced.
Quadir Humphrey, 18, was also arrested in the aftermath of the January shooting, but it is now understood that he acted alone. The court was told that Humphrey allegedly pulled out a gun and fired into a crowd at the 15th Street station platform, fatally hitting Welles. After reviewing additional information and SEPTA surveillance footage, investigators determined that Wilson was not connected to the crime. "Every time I kept going to a court date, kept saying we don’t have the video. So why am I here? They didn’t have nothing on me. I had nothing to do with it," Wilson explained, as recounted in the NBC report.
Humphrey now faces charges of murder among other related offenses. The prompt dismissal of charges against Wilson pointed to swift action within the criminal justice system, as District Attorney Larry Krasner emphasized the expedited process to correct the wrongful detention. "After an ongoing investigation made clear that a 16-year-old was in custody for a crime he did not commit, Assistant District Attorney Anthony Voci acted quickly to alert DA's Office supervisors, Municipal Court leadership, and the Juvenile Justice Services Center to ensure that Zaire Wilson was released and reunited with his family within 36 hours," Krasner said in a statement obtained by CBS News Philadelphia.
