Who is Keith Warren, and what happened to him? In this episode, we’ll dig into what went wrong with his case, some of the possible reasons why, and examine how the legacy of Keith’s case and its mishandling continues in today’s criminal justice system. This podcast includes graphic discussion of a violent death. Listener discretion is advised.
Who is Keith Warren, and what happened to him? In this episode, we’ll dig into what went wrong with his case, some of the possible reasons why, and examine how the legacy of Keith’s case and its mishandling continues in today’s criminal justice system. We’ll wrap with an interview with Avril Speaks, the Showrunner and Director of Uprooted, the TV series, to talk more about the Keith Warren case and the process of making the documentary.
This podcast includes graphic discussion of a violent death. Listener discretion is advised.
The “Uprooted" podcast is the companion to the new discovery+ series “Uprooted,” streaming exclusively on discovery+. Go to discoveryplus.com/uprooted to start your 7-day free trial today.
Find episode transcripts here:https://uprooted.simplecast.com/episodes/ep1-setting-the-scene
Speaker 1:
News seven's I-Team has uncovered shocking new evidence in connection with the hanging death of a Montgomery county youth police say it was suicide. The family says it was a lynching.
Speaker 2:
The evidence raises serious questions about how thorough police were in their investigation.
Speaker 3:
Two more forensic experts have now weighed in to say the Montgomery county police botched an investigation into what could have been a lynching in that county.
Alicia Garza:
On July 31st, 1986, Keith Warren was found dead hanging from a tree. He was a 19 year old black man, only weeks away from starting his freshman year of college. Keith Warren's death would set off a chain of events that is still taking place even now. A family search for answers, decades of stonewalling from the police and an ongoing battle for accountability and justice.
Alicia Garza:
I'm Alicia Garza, organizer and co-founder of black lives matter. And this is uprooted the companion to the discovery plus series of the same name over the course of six episodes. We will dive into the Keith Warren case, looking into Keith's life and death and addressing some of the systemic failures that have prevented him from getting justice. We will also sit down with experts, including activists, lawyers, filmmakers, and mental health professionals to discuss where these inequities still exist today and discuss the journey forward. In this episode, we'll begin by exploring what happened to Keith and where his investigation went wrong. We'll also talk about how the handling of his case is emblematic of a policing system with a long legacy of racism. It has yet to deal with later, we will hear from Avril Speaks the show-runner and director of Uprooted, the mini series, who will share a bit about her experience with Keith's case and the making of the documentary. This is uprooted. It was a hot day in July when Rodney Kendall was at the neighborhood clubhouse hanging out by the pool. That's when he got a request,
Rodney Kendall:
I was by the fence and just talking to friends and someone came down and asked me if I could identify a body
Alicia Garza:
At the time, Rodney figured it would be like, what he'd seen in the movies. There'd be a body bag. They'd open it up. He would make an ID. Instead, the police took Rodney out 20 to 30 yards behind the building, into a clearing within the woods.
Rodney Kendall:
When I walked up, the scene was not sealed off. I was escorted back to where Keith was. There was no, no tape, no nothing,
Alicia Garza:
But Keith wasn't in a body bag. He was hanging from a tree.
Rodney Kendall:
I remember I could, the noose was up really tight on his neck. His head was leaned to the side, but his mouth was open. And that's what I remember a lot, the bugs and the maggots in his mouth. I couldn't believe what I was saying. He, um, had a flannel shirt on, he had tennis shoes on, which he never saw Keith in tennis shoes.
Alicia Garza:
Rodney knew Keith from the neighborhood. They were around the same age and it was immediately clear to him that Keith had not done this to himself.
Rodney Kendall:
I can say 100% that I don't believe Keith committed suicide.
Alicia Garza:
It just didn't seem like something that Keith he knew could do.
Rodney Kendall:
I never saw Keith in a bad mood. I never saw Keith unhappy. Keith was a nice guy. He was always happy. Uh, joking around. I knew him. This isn't just, you know, me coming on the scene. And as a stranger, I knew him
Alicia Garza:
After Rodney, ID'd the body. He headed back to the clubhouse in a daze.
Rodney Kendall:
When I came out of the woods, the, uh, lot of the officers were standing around. They were talking about where they were going to lunch. And that shocked me as well, that, you know, somebody's back there in a tree. And you worried about what what's at. What's for lunch,
Alicia Garza:
Not one of the policemen there asked him for a statement.
Rodney Kendall:
No one came, no one ever came to talk to me. As far as a police officer's concern and the police don't give a damn
Alicia Garza:
Keith's body was found in the woods of Montgomery county, Maryland, a suburb just outside of Washington, DC.
Dell Walters:
You can't look at the Keith Warren story from your own lens, where you sit today, you have to look at what it was in 1986.
Alicia Garza:
Del Waters was the investigative reporter who first covered Keith's death.
Dell Walters:
And in 1986, Washington was different predominantly black Washington, DC, predominantly white suburbs.
Alicia Garza:
And these majority white suburbs, more and more black families were moving in
Dell Walters:
Montgomery County was, was changing. And did it go peacefully about as peacefully as it's going right now? You know, whenever America goes through a demographic shift there's trouble,
Alicia Garza:
But while trouble was brewing in the suburbs, the public's attention remained on DC and its problems.
Dell Walters:
It was on crack. It was on all the social ills of Washington DC. And that allowed the police departments in the suburbs to do things that we probably now know that they did, but couldn't prove we had actually been working on a story at that time about lynchings because they weren't that rare in this area. And it wasn't as long ago, as people would've thought, we started asking the questions that we believed at the time the police should be asking. Was it possible to lynch somebody in the suburbs of Washington
Alicia Garza:
At the time the KU Klux Klan was also known to have a presence in the area.
Dell Walters:
60 minutes did a piece on the prince George's county police department, the next county over as being one of the most racist counties in America. When it came to cops
Alicia Garza:
In neighborhoods with clear racial animosity, there are always unspoken rules. There are white areas where black kids know not to go. Lines they know not to cross, but Keith wasn't afraid to break some of those rules
Dell Walters:
Here. You had this young black kid dating white girls, and it was still taboo. At that time in that neighborhood,
Alicia Garza:
Keith was popular. He hung out mostly with white kids. They'd go to pep rallies together. They'd come over to his house and listen to U2 albums. It's safe to say that wasn't looked upon kindly in a racist town and it would later help explain why Dell Walters and others say the police failed to take his case seriously
Dell Walters:
And being black gives you a different lens. And that lens then says to you first, was this child lynched? Was it racist? Was there racism in the area at the time? Was there a klan? All the questions that we're asking right now are the first questions that black people would ask. And sometimes the last questions that white people would ask. And that's the difference.
Alicia Garza:
There were problems with the investigation, from the get go, Rodney who ID'd Keith's body. Wasn't the first to notice that things seemed amiss. Dallas Lip was the EMT who initially answered the call. The dispatch sent him to an address at the edge of the Georgian colonies neighborhood, telling him to look for a suicide by hanging.
Dallas Lip:
As soon as we got to the scene and we stopped, I started looking at the scene and right away, it struck me as not making sense for a suicide. The configuration of the rope that he was hanging on was very unusual.
Dallas Lip:
And as I'm sitting there looking at this, I'm just realizing that this is not a way anybody who's thinking about committing suicide is gonna configure a rope,
Alicia Garza:
But he didn't want to believe it.
Dallas Lip:
I was trying to sort of rationalize how he could have done this to himself. And I was talking to the other crew members that were there, people with experience. And I'm saying, can you see how he could have done this to himself? And they're like, no, not really.
Alicia Garza:
It was too late to provide life saving procedures. By the time they had arrived, Keith was already dead. When Dallas headed home that night, he couldn't get the scene out of his mind.
Dallas Lip:
So I watched the evening news around dinner time thinking, okay, maybe I'll see something. So I'm like flipping back and forth thinking it's gonna be like one of the first stories, nothing. And then that night for the late news, it's still nothing. And then the next day I got up and then nothing.
Alicia Garza:
Keith's death was virtually ignored by the media. When Dallas finally did see coverage of Keith's killing, it was a small mention in a local paper calling his death a suicide that's when Dallas knew that the news and the police combined were going to brush this case under the rug,
Dallas Lip:
The scene itself showed that there was a problem here that needed to be understood, but they just checked the boxes to make it a suicide. And then it went away because Keith and his family didn't have any value. And that's outrageous to me.
Dell Walters:
The fact that it wasn't covered speaks to the racism of the time.
Alicia Garza:
Again, Dell Walters.
Dell Walters:
I mean, imagine that this was a young white kid hanging from a tree in a black neighborhood, they would still have the squad cars parked out there. This set off so many different alarm bells inside our own unit that we found it impossible that they did not look at it more seriously. And it was offensive.
Alicia Garza:
The EMTs secured the scene and left it in the hands of the police, but Keith's body never made it to the medical examiner's office. An autopsy was never performed. In fact, the body was transported directly to a funeral home and embalmed before Keith's mother was even notified of his death.
Damon Hewitt:
The kind of practical duty of law enforcement is also to assess whether in fact, the crime has happened.
Alicia Garza:
This is Damon Hewit the president and Executive Director of the Lawyer's Committee for Civil Rights under law.
Damon Hewitt:
And that means an investigation. And you can't conduct an investigation unless you assess what happened in as close to real time as possible. Unless you collect evidence, you can't trample over a crime scene, allow folks to spoil the evidence and sometimes spoil the evidence yourselves. Like in the case of Keith Warren, ordering his body to be embalmed without an autopsy, uh, without actually seeing, you know what happen.
Alicia Garza:
There are few procedures that go hand in hand with any proper investigation. First, the area is secured. Remember Rodney walked up to a scene that had no tape.
Rodney Kendall:
The scene was not sealed off. There was no, no tape, no nothing.
Alicia Garza:
Then there's the determination of the crime. Is this an accident, a suicide, a homicide, the scene is supposed to be documented. Then the evidence should be recorded and preserved. Instead, the tree Keith was hanging from was chopped down soon after the rope that was used rather than being preserved and cataloged, the police gave it to his family the very next day.
Dell Walters:
They rule it with suicide so quickly. It was impossible. Everything about that is wrong.
Alicia Garza:
And if Rodney had been interviewed, when he first ID'd Keith's body, he would've told police that the tennis shoes Keith was wearing. Weren't his, everyone who knew Keith knew he only ever wore his beloved Timberlands.
Dell Walters:
So basically they want you to believe that Keith Warren hanged himself and then said, you know what? I'm gonna change my clothes after I hang myself and then hang myself again or die later, this story didn't make sense from day one, doesn't make sense now
Alicia Garza:
Today, over 30 years later, Keith's family is still asking questions. They want to change his death certificate from stating his cause of death as suicide to undetermined. It's the very first step to writing a wrong and to possibly getting more answers. It's one of the smallest things they can ask for, but still proving almost impossible to get
Dell Walters:
What needs to happen is they need to reopen the investigation, bring in people that look at it with a different lens. You know, for instance, we were talking about the difference between Montgomery county, then at Montgomery county now. You need somebody that was there in 1986 that can tell you what Montgomery county was like.
Alicia Garza:
The problem with looking into Keith's case now is that all the procedures were ignored back in 1986. The scene was never secured. Evidence was tampered with instead of being sealed and filed away. But beyond that, the police force still seems unwilling to try. Montgomery county police department has refused to reopen the case and their apparent refusal to revisit the facts is a strong indication of how they'll continue to treat cases of murdered black men.
Dell Walters:
It's incumbent upon law enforcement to do its job and solve these crimes with a gravity that the crime dictates. And I don't think we've seen that yet.
Alicia Garza:
Once again, Dell Walters,
Dell Walters:
If you don't fix the past, you can't recognize the present. And that's the problem that police departments have when it comes to dealing with black America, black America, can't forget the past.
Alicia Garza:
So far. In this episode, we've introduced Keith Warren a 19 year old college bound black man who was found hanging from a tree in Montgomery county, Maryland in 1986. We've heard a bit about the cultural context of 1986 Montgomery county. And we've also exposed some of the missteps related to the investigation up next, we'll hear from Avery speaks the showrunner and director of uprooted, the mini series to talk more about the Keith Warren case and the process of making this documentary behind the scenes, Avril Speaks. It is so, so wonderful to talk with you today. Let's just jump in, you know, this case is so interesting and it's unique in a lot of ways. I mean, the history of this country, right, has stories of lynchings all throughout it. There are so many that we never hear about that we never learn about, but in this one, there are some really unique aspects that I think come to the forefront. And I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit more about what grabbed you about this case in particular?
Avril Speaks:
Yeah. I think that this particular story there's several, I think, points of interest to the story. One being that this happened 35 years ago, and to this day, this family is still seeking answers as to what happened. I think it's also interesting that there are so many, uh, there's so many mysterious things about this particular case. There's the sort of lynching element of Keith Warren being found on a tree, but then there's also this element of the police and their involvement and their lack of an investigation. When you start looking into it, there's so many pieces of this story that don't add up in terms of why was it done that way? And I think the further you dig into the story, it just raises more,
Alicia Garza:
So I'm wondering if we can zoom out a little bit, just so that people listening can really understand, what does it take to bring out all of this richness and layers? How did you even approach working on a story like this?
Avril Speaks:
Well, I will say that the first approach in all of this was the family and making sure that we had full, you know, cooperation from the family, particularly because we chose to anchor this story in his sister and you know, his sister, Sherri Warren, and to anchor it in, you know, in her perspective, because it it's been 35 years. And, and much of those 35 years, it's been Sherri's mother, Mary Couey, who has been leading this charge of trying to find out what happened to her son and Mary Couey passed in 2009. And since that time it's, this has been, you know, Sherri's soul burden, if you will, this has been her journey. So we decided to anchor the story in Sherri's perspective. And so in large part, our journey in the making of this started with Sherri and having many conversations with her, having her recall her memories of what happened, but also, you know, the family was a wealth of information as to what happened.
Avril Speaks:
Obviously they were there, but also Mary Couey kept very, very meticulous notes. She was not someone who by any means was gonna let this fall by the wayside. And so every year of this, every single day, she was always sending out letters and correspondence to people. So we have documents upon documents, upon documents of, you know, of pretty much everything that has happened within the last 30, 35 years in terms of who they've reached out to and who they've been in communication with in order to get help on this matter. So a lot of the, the initial sort of preparation for this series was digging through a lot of those documents and trying to put together, put the pieces together. And so we, we, we also have a research team. We have a, um, you know, we had a fairly small crew, but a very efficient research team.
Avril Speaks:
We had a researcher, we have a writer who, you know, just really helped kind of put the story together and put the pieces together, cause it's been 35 years, you know, the writer and I, we had to get one of those big, you know, we had to go like to an office and get one of those big boards, white, white boards. Yeah.
New Speaker:
Did you face any resistance to collecting the information that you needed to make this such a layered story?
Avril Speaks:
There are a lot of people who are resistant to talk about what happened and, you know, I say it all the time, but E even down to the people, he knew his friends won't talk, you know, and it just brings up those questions of the police immediately ruled this a suicide. And, you know, if this is a suicide, then what are you afraid of? You know, if it's, if it's a suicide, why can't we just say, okay, well, this is what happened. It's sad. It's tragic and move on from there. But the, we, we ran into a lot of difficulty getting people to, to speak out.
Alicia Garza:
Well, let's talk a little bit about the criminal investigation itself, because I think there's a lot of places in this investigation or lack thereof where we see the way in which race shapes the rules. Is there a history in this police department of this kind of sloppiness of this kind of intentional kind of looking away from cases like this? I mean, we know that it's a little bit complicated because this isn't a clear cut case of, you know, a set of white officers, right. Um, making decisions about a case where a black man is found, hung from a tree that actually there's black people involved in this process as well. So I, I, I want people who are listening to understand a little bit more about this particular department and what their pattern in practice was around racially related, uh, cases like this one. And I'm wondering if you can talk specifically, as we discussed that about, you know, what you learned about this criminal investigation in air quotes as you were making this series.
Avril Speaks:
I mean, if, if I may, I wanna answer that last question first and sort of zoom out a little bit in terms of what I learned about the criminal justice system as a result of doing this documentary. I think that, you know, what's really interesting. And what we were hoping to get out of in this series is that the Warren family, they were a regular fam, you know what I mean? Like they were a family that went to work every day. Sherri is a woman that has a job. She, she goes to work, she comes home, she makes dinner. She watches, you know, television, you know, these are like regular people who don't necessarily spend their lives studying the criminal justice system and what to do when something like this happens. Right? And it's been very eye opening of how this criminal justice system doesn't work.
Avril Speaks:
The entities that are supposed to be designed to justice don't even work together. They don't talk to each other, they don't compliment one another. And so when you have a family, like the Warren family, who they just want the death certificate changed, and you have one entity that's telling them, oh, you need to go to the medical examiner to get that changed. The police is saying, we have no jurisdiction over that. That's the medical examiners, that job. And you go to the medical examiner and they say, we have no jurisdiction over that. That's the police. And you have this family caught in the middle going, well, what am I supposed to do?
Alicia Garza:
But sometimes they talk to each other, right. Just to interrupt for a second. I mean, what did we have had the same rigamarole and bureaucracy and the kind of scooby do everybody's pointing at each other, if this was a white affluent family.
Avril Speaks:
You're correct. I think that this would've been a completely different scenario had this family have been white. So it's like, it's kind of like that kind of racism is, is infiltrated into the system. I mean, into the, into the police force. And I think it does kind of affect and, and have a, a bearing on whether or not you take a case like Keith Warren, whether you take it as seriously enough to take it to the next step or take it to the next level to investigate, it feels like there's been a lot of covering up. And, you know, the police not giving information to the family, you know, just at the bare minimum, the day that he died, there was no autopsy conducted. There was no in depth investigation conducted the fact alone that there's no autopsy is kind of one of the big mishandling of this case, because now it makes it that much more difficult to pin down.
Avril Speaks:
What really did happen to keep the other part of this is that much of the evidence, what would be, what would've been evidence in this case has been destroyed, which, which raises another red flag in this case of what happened. Number one, and also, what are you hiding? You give the family the rope that he was hanging from, you know, the family's going, that's odd that the day after he he's found you give us the rope, aren't you doing? Aren't you gonna investigate? Aren't you gonna take this rope and, and look at it, look at the fibers, look at, look at where, which direction they're facing. There was none of that, you know, and then to get a message later that the tree was cut down, that he was hung from there's these things that just raise a lot of questions in terms of, you know, the police and who they were asking questions.
Avril Speaks:
Many of the people who, the, you know, the people that were in the house where the 911 call came from, any of them were not questioned. There was not a full investigation, a full question of what happened and what they saw. There's so many sort of holes that were left in this investigation. That just, it just makes it hard to believe that this is what they said it was, which is a suicide. And again, I believe, I do believe that if Keith were white and he was hanging from that tree, we would've figured it out by now. What really happened to him? The fact that we're 35 years later, and there's still all these question marks and the police department still doesn't see any reason to reopen open this case from their perspective is highly problematic.
Alicia Garza:
You would think that given that black lives are so much at the forefront of conversation today, that in the production of this docu-series, that people would wanna talk, right?
Avril Speaks:
I really thought that there would be someone who would come forward and say, this is what I know. This is what happened. And it was really heartbreaking. I, I wanna say disappointing, but it was heartbreaking that to this day they would not do it. I think one of the things that, especially while we were in production, while we were making those calls of trying to, you know, book interviews, I think the thing that really broke my heart the most is that none of his friends would speak on camera. No one, no one, they would talk to us on the phone, you know, just to tell us what they think happened. I mean, it got to a point where we just wanted people to just say, Keith is a nice guy. You know, like we hung out and Keith was a nice guy and he like, people wouldn't even do that. And you know, my hope is that, you know, when this series comes out, that people will see this and have a change of heart and, and come out and say something. But I will say that that was something that was shocking and heartbreaking that in this day and age and people are, oh, about the culture and all this, like no one will speak up for this black man. You know, even, even after all this time,
Alicia Garza:
I do wanna just ask you Avril, this project, I imagine must have taken some kind of emotional toll. How did you navigate working on this project and also taking care of your spirit?
Avril Speaks:
You know, I think when I started this project, I, I kind of went into it with that anticipation that it was going to be emotionally heavy. And it's something that I had a lot of conversations with with, you know, friends with, like, with my management, like with everybody, I had this conversation that this is, this is gonna be rough. This is gonna be a challenge. And I think, I think I set out just trying to set a boundary for it, you know? And there were a number of, especially when we were in production. And when, you know, when we were really in the thick of things, I found myself just it might sound strange, but I found myself like talking to Keith and just being like, I'm really sorry. I'm really sorry that the world did you this way. Like, I would just say that out loud, this was a life.
Avril Speaks:
This is a family that did not deserve what happened and did not deserve to be treated this way in the aftermath. So that's just something I started doing just to kind of keep my own head straight was just to be like, Keith, I'm really sorry that the world did you this way. That's right. I'm gonna do everything in my power. Like everything that I can with this series to let your story be heard, let your voice be heard. Let Mary Couey's voice be heard, obviously for Sherri's voice to be heard. But yeah, it's, it's really hard to separate yourself from it. It's just, it becomes a part of becomes a part of you becomes a part of your life and it becomes a part of like what you think about every day.
Alicia Garza:
So as we wrap up, I'm hoping that you can tell folks who are listening. What do you want them to take from this story? And what's maybe one step they can take after they watch this story.
Avril Speaks:
Yeah. I hope that they get from this story that this family was not served justice. Right? I hope that they can, can, can see that, um, what was done to this family and how this family was treated in light of this case is wrong, is problematic. I believe that it's something that can still be rectified. I still don't believe that even though I know that there are systems and there are processes and procedures in terms of getting a death certificate changed, I still feel like ultimately what this family is asking for is not that hard. That's right. They're not asking for a conviction. They're not asking to put anyone in jail. They're not ask, they're not asking for any of that. All they're asking for is for the death certificate to be changed a piece of paper, to be changed from suicide to undetermined. And I think that's the least that we can do through this family, especially given everything that has come out since that point. I think that's the least, the least that can be done. I hope that people will become active and put pressure on the police department to re-look at this case, to reexamine this case, to open it back up. So I hope that people who watch this really put pressure on the police department to help, to listen to the Warren family, to help the Warren family, to go through those steps, to get the death certificate changed, but also that someone would come forward. And I think that that will have help in that process as
Alicia Garza:
Well. Avril, it's been wonderful talking with you. Thank you so much. And thank you for this incredible project.
Avril Speaks:
Thank you. Thank you so much for, for doing this and for hosting this podcast,
Alicia Garza:
That's it for this week. Thanks so much for listening to uprooted the companion podcast to the Discovery Plus series. I'm Alicia Garza. On the next episode, we'll take a deep dive into the role the police played in Keith Warren's case. And we'll also talk with Linda Sarsour organizer and Co-Founder of the Women's March who has been outspoken about addressing issues of policing and dedicated her life to fighting for equitable humane treatment. For all communities.
Speaker 11:
Our injustice system is set up, is set up to protect police officers. And you know, this better than I do Alicia, Ida B Wells said those who commit the murders, write the reports. And it always baffles me that when a young black man or woman or brown man or woman are murdered at the hands of the police, the first thing people will say, but look at the police report, but look at the police said happened. And I wanna remind them the police is the one with the trigger that murdered that person.
Alicia Garza:
That's next week on uprooted for more on Keith Warren's case, check out the mini series on discovery plus, and if you love the podcast, be sure to rate, review and subscribe to uprooted on apple podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. Uprooted is produced by NowThis for Discovery Plus in partnership with Pod People special, thanks to the production team at pod people. Rachel King, Matt Sav, Ivana Tucker Jazzie Johnson, Liz Mack, Brian Rivers, Vincent Cashion and Amy Machado.