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A Ripple in Ann Arbor

When: November 9, 2025

Originated and produced by Ann Arbor City Council Member Cynthia Harrison, the short documentary film A Ripple in Ann Arbor tells the story of the search for a serial rapist in Ann Arbor in the 1990s, the unfocused and invasive tactics used by police to find the perpetrator, and the innocent man who took the city to court to expose these tactics and reclaim his dignity, weaving interviews with people who lived these events with primary source materials.

Directed by filmmaker Aliyah Mitchell in partnership with the Ann Arbor District Library Archives, the film was released on November 9, 2025, in a truth and reconciliation event at the Michigan Theater. Following the showing of the film, a panel discussion of local civic and law enforcement leaders discussed the events and offered a formal apology to those affected.

The AADL Archives has many additional materials to explore relating to this topic, including dozens of Ann Arbor News articles that appear in the film. Michigan Daily articles are courtesy of the Bentley Historical Library:

1:02 - Police Suspect Serial Rapist - Michigan Daily, May 11, 1994

1:13 - Manhunt For Rapist Intensifies - Michigan Daily, October 17, 1994

2:21 - 5 Police Officers Receive Special Valor Citations - Ann Arbor News, June 24, 1991

3:00 - Police Give Public Improved Profile Of Serial Rapist - Ann Arbor News, June 30, 1994

6:27 - Rites Honor Gailbreath - Ann Arbor News, May 13, 1994

9:28 - Residents Resent Living In Fear - Ann Arbor News, May 13, 1994

10:35 - Public Seeks Action On Serial Rapist - Ann Arbor News, May 12, 1994 

10:37 - Police Take Hit At Rapist Forum - Ann Arbor News, August 3, 1995

11:11 - Tenants Union & HRP Plot Renter Survival Tactics - Ann Arbor Sun, October 11, 1974

17:42 - Women & Safety - Ann Arbor News, November 15, 1994

20:28 - Coalition For Community Unity - Ann Arbor News, August 1, 1994

21:42 - Description Used Of Rapist Worries Some - Ann Arbor News, May 15, 1994

22:30 - Reward In Serial Rapist Case Grows - Ann Arbor News, October 29, 1994

24:22, 24:57 & 25:16 - Blacks Feel Wounded By Suspicion - Ann Arbor News, January 25, 1995

25:04 - Police Vow To Return Samples Eventually - Ann Arbor News, July 16, 1995

27:45 - More Consideration Of Blacks Urged In City Planning - Ann Arbor News, March 20, 1972

31:04 - Kurt Berggren For District Court Election Editorials - Agenda, November 1990

31:35 - Search For Serial Rapist Prompts Civil Rights Suit - Ann Arbor News, April 4, 1995

31:59 - 2nd Serial Attacker Suspected - Ann Arbor News, November 1, 1994

32:07 - Police Find Clues In Molester Hunt - Ann Arbor News, November 19, 1994

32:23 - Ann Arbor Man Gets 16-20 Years For Sexual Assault - Ann Arbor News, November 18, 1997

32:53 - Cabbie Describes Tension of Pursuit - Ann Arbor News, January 10, 1995

33:16 - Women Feel Sense of Relief - Ann Arbor News, March 3, 1995

33:23 - 5 Stories That Rocked Our Summer - Agenda, September 1995

33:28 - ‘92 DNA Tests Link Man To Serial Rapes - Michigan Daily, January 9, 1995

33:38 - Police Take Hit At Rapist Forum - Ann Arbor News, August 3, 1995

33:46 - Man Wins Ruling on Blood Sample - Ann Arbor News, December 14, 1995

36:19 - Blood Samples Are Still Barrier - Ann Arbor News, July 14, 1995

36:48 - Man Sues A2 Police Over Harassment In Rape Case - Michigan Daily, April 4, 1995

41:46 - Black Men Recount Pain Of Being Suspected In Rapes - Ann Arbor News, December 11, 1994

45:13 - Public Concerned About Racism Allegations - Ann Arbor News, November 15, 1994

Transcript

  • [00:00:15] PETER STIPE: I'm only familiar with Dragnet from the television show. It's a fishing term, I guess, where you cast a net to catch the greatest number of fish. That's essentially what Ann Arbor Police Department did in this instance is cast a giant net. If there was 999 other people out there and they took all their blood, they wouldn't have gotten a match because they weren't the guy.
  • [00:00:54] MICHAEL J. STEINBERG: Between 1992 and 1994, there was a serial rapist in Ann Arbor.
  • [00:01:02] EDITH LEWIS: There were police coming, asking Black men in the communities to come forward.
  • [00:01:09] CARMELITA MULLINS: The coalition formed because we feared a witch hunt.
  • [00:01:17] MICHAEL HENRY: Somebody had an idea, let's go grab some blood from a bunch of Black men, and test it to see if we can find out who the rapist is.
  • [00:01:33] MARY BEJIAN: I did not ask to have the civil liberties of any man, African American, White, whomever, thrown over, supposedly so I could be kept safe.
  • [00:01:41] PETER STIPE: We went through this ordeal. The African American community went through the ordeal. Ann Arbor went through this ordeal, and a woman was murdered because we didn't do our due diligence in the first place. [MUSIC] I was somewhat of a troubled youth, so the fact that the police department considered hiring me in the first place was a fluke but I think I had enough encounters with the police department that they thought I must know something about law enforcement from the other side. Well, the first assault, I believe, was in September of 1992, in Allmendinger Park. A jogger was attacked there and brutally beaten. That was the first assault, and she got a very vague glimpse of him, and then she was pounded senseless, pretty much. There wasn't much to go on there. We were on another attack in Allmendinger Park in September of '93, a full year later. There were patrol officers taking reports that thought that there was a pattern there. But for some reason, there was a different detective assigned to each one, and they weren't--not to each one, but they weren't comparing notes. One officer in particular was dismissed for her assessment that, "I think you've got a serial rapist." The one in September of '93, we called a K-9 tracking dog out, and we tracked the suspect to an address on Carolina where this Ervin Mitchell was living in the basement there. Another woman was the tenant, but he was staying there. He evidently went in there and passed a polygraph test and was dismissed. Ervin Mitchell had been convicted of assault in Inkster, Michigan, but it was a lesser included offense of a sexual assault. Those charges were dismissed based on a tainted search or something. Because his criminal history showed that he'd just been convicted of assault, there was no other follow up done. The state police had a DNA sample from the initial charge. They retained that like they did all the other samples in the case. Had they checked that, then the case would have been ended right there. In May of 1994, an officer and I were sent to an address out off of Pauline or Commerce out there near Stadium / Pauline area to pick up pictures of a woman who was reported missing earlier in the day. I went to make contact with the husband, this Mr. Gailbreath. His apartment was full of people there. It was a tense, chaotic scene. He was pacing back and forth. I said, "Wouldn't you like to be doing something?" He said, "Well, yeah." I said, "Well, let's go look for her." The other officer, he followed us in the car. We walked from their apartment to what was a CVS pharmacy, there at Liberty and Stadium. It was turned into a Gordon Foods or something like that. We didn't see anything on that route. Then I asked him, "Is there another way that you would go back, a shortcut?" He said, "Well, yeah, we cut through Boulevard Plaza." Boulevard Plaza, there was only a couple of businesses open. The parking lot was abandoned, the businesses were all dark. We were walking down this path behind the Stadium post office. I'm shining my flashlight and I see an umbrella and a backpack on the left side of the path, and he goes, oh, my God, that's her stuff. I ran him down the path to the patrol car and put him in the car and turned the radio off and got my partner, and called the sergeant that had sent us out there to get the pictures in the first place. I said, "I think we've got something out here." He came out and we found her shortly after that, and she'd been murdered. That murder, that's when they started the task force.
  • [00:06:41] JEFFRI CHADIHA: When I started covering police, literally, I would go around different police stations in the morning and look at all the police blotters and find out what crimes had happened and then come back. If there was a major story, you would write that up as a bigger piece or you would just do a crime blotter with basically a summary of different things that happened around the area in Ann Arbor. I remember it was May of 1994, and it was a different vibe to the entire conversation with the police at that time. There was a point person within the police department who I would talk to about different cases, and we would go over different things. But with this one, it was very much, "We need to sit down and talk about this. Talk about how you're going to approach this with your bosses because this is a different level of severity." Right away, I'm 22, 23 years old at the time. Super young kid, not even a full year on the job. I recognized just within his voice and the way he was approaching this, this was going to be something much different than what I had seen. He explained that there was a murder, but there was also a rape. There also was a great likelihood that this was a serial rapist, not just one standalone case, but there were multiple victims involved with the same perpetrator. At that point, I'm thinking, this is big. I've got to go back to my bosses and talk to them about what was happening. Obviously, my first question is, "If it's a serial rapist, why am I just hearing about this now? Why are you just bringing this up at this moment?" The response I got from the police was that they had thought the guy had left town, there had been not much evidence involved. They were seriously concerned about creating a crazy response within the community to it. It was, from that conversation, pretty apparent that they didn't have a lot of information to go on, even at that point. They felt this was something that was going to be very hard to get their hands around. Certainly the last step was going to the media and trying to let people know this was happening in their community.
  • [00:09:06] MICHAEL J. STEINBERG: There was a lot of fear in the community. There was a task force formed consisting of the Ann Arbor Police Department, Washtenaw County Sheriff's Department, the U-M Department of Public Safety and other police agencies, and they decided based on the pressure they were feeling, to develop a plan to try to obtain as many DNA profiles as they could of Black men. Why Black men? Because some of the survivors of the assaults were able to see the man, and most of them, if not all of them, thought that he was African American.
  • [00:09:58] JEFFRI CHADIHA: This was a case that if you don't have this kind of experience on a regular basis, I'm sure, in New York City or LA you're dealing with this stuff. When these kind of cases wind up in your lap, it's not as simple as just "go find bad guy, solve case, save community." What I learned was that this was a police force that was very comfortable in knowing this town in a way that I think the public wanted to know it, which was: it's safe, it's secure, a lot of good people, not a lot of dangerous things happening, and that they had control of it. That's the thing that really struck me during this case, was that they didn't have hardly any control of this. Here was a guy working in their community doing very ugly things that they could not find.
  • [00:10:54] MARY BEJIAN: The DNA Dragnet was essentially the police trying to find a needle in a haystack. A few people who were involved in housing justice activism at that time--one person who worked for the Ann Arbor Tenants Union where they would receive calls from people around the city about problems that they were having in their housing. They, I think, had been hearing from people in the community that the Ann Arbor police were going door to door in low income neighborhoods, in Black neighborhoods and asking Black men to account for their whereabouts, and in many cases, we're asking them to give blood for DNA testing, because the city was trying to find a serial rapist. The way that they talked about it to these men was to say, "It's a way to rule yourself out." They made it sound like this is a good idea for you to do this. Never letting on what they were actually planning on doing.
  • [00:11:57] EDITH LEWIS: Normal for us to ask you.
  • [00:11:59] MARY BEJIAN: Normal for us to ask you. The concept of innocent before proven guilty did not exist if you were a Black man in Ann Arbor during that time.
  • [00:12:08] EDITH LEWIS: I noticed that because, as you can see, my hair is short. And at that time, it was short and black. I would drive down the street and the police would follow me. There was one day I'm driving down Washtenaw Avenue, and my daughter is in the car next to me. I said to her, "The police are coming in the opposite direction. Camila, watch. They're going to turn around and follow us." She said, "That can't possibly be." I said, "Watch what happens." The car sees me, slows down, turns around, crosses several lanes of traffic, comes back and follows us for about a mile. And I said, "That's what it means, Camila, to be African American in this town."
  • [00:12:46] DAVID MALCOLM: Growing up, I think I was blind to racism for the most part. I experienced very little here and there. You would experience little racist tropes from people, the N-word, or saying stupid stuff, or when you go in a store, people following you around and stuff like that. But growing up in Ann Arbor was fun. It was diverse. We had friends from all different backgrounds. We had places to go. You go downtown. You go to Pinball Pete's. We would go to Harry's Army Surplus and buy throwing stars and get our Levis and silk shirts and all of that kind of stuff. But then there's those little subtle racist things that come out, that make you understand that, we are in a liberal town, but sometimes it's the most liberal people that cause the most harm in our community. You know what I mean? Back in 1994, I was a newly married young man. I had a young son and a daughter on the way. This case came about. For me, it was weird because I'm used to being looked at as a Black man. But it seemed the awareness of who I was and my hue started to permeate throughout the community, and people were looking at me in a different way. Because looking at the description, I told myself, I was like, "That sounds like me." It was nerve-racking and scary. My grandmother, having five men that she raised, didn't want any of us to go anywhere. She was always worried about us stepping out, and I started to walk around my own community looking at people different. Who is it? I just remember feeling they're talking about me. Just looking around in the community, it was hard because we didn't know who was doing this. You didn't want that tag on you, you know what I mean? You don't know who's wondering if it is you, and you feel like you're being watched. That's the way I felt back then.
  • [00:15:28] MICHAEL HENRY: When I came to Ann Arbor for school, it was a little bit of a culture shock for me, but I had the benefit of the bubble of the University of Michigan's protections. During the time of the DNA dragnet, I was recently finishing up at the University of Michigan. My first full-time job was at the Ross School of Business. I was always trying impress my boss. When she would give me an assignment for the week, I wanted to get it done by Monday or Tuesday. I would oftentimes stay at work late. I would leave the University of Michigan, and I was living at a complex called Glencoe Hills off of Washtenaw. As I would drive down Washtenaw, I always got pulled over. Over a 10-week time period, I probably got pulled over 12 times. After about the fifth or sixth time, I was really getting frustrated. Not as nice when they would pull me over. I was short and irritated because I would get all these weird excuses as to why. I would always ask why, and some of the excuses were, "Well, I noticed that your license plate was secured with one bolt and not two, and that's against the code for driving or driving laws." There were times when patrol officers would say, "Oh, it looked like you may have veered across the white dotted line a little bit, so I wanted to make sure you were right or weren't drunk or weren't sleepy." During that time period, too, it was before the police had announced that they were looking for the Ann Arbor rapist, and none of us knew that this whole investigation was going on. None of us knew that there was a dragnet. If we had known, a lot of us probably would have wanted to help because nobody wants women in their community being terrorized with the threat of rape, with the threat of violence. I think I was fortunate because I've always been like a little scrawny, skinny guy. Once they actually got up to the car and realized I was a buck and a few pounds, they were like, "Yeah. It's probably not him, but let's still go through the motions, follow through with this stop, so we can justify it." But fortunately, I never got my DNA taken. I just got harassed by the police, got terrorized by patrol officers pulling me over, like an obscene amount of times coming from work, trying to get home.
  • [00:18:26] CARMELITA MULLINS: The coalition formed because we feared a witch hunt. Even before the police department and other law enforcement agencies became very aggressive, we had this concern, and that's why we immediately formed this coalition.
  • [00:18:40] MARY BEJIAN: The Coalition for Community Unity was formed by a group of local activists from the civil rights community, from the housing justice community, from the community of people who were involved in fighting sexual violence, and brought together very specifically, number one, because there was a serial rapist in Ann Arbor, and everybody wanted that person found. Number two, because the tactics that police were using--primarily a DNA dragnet informed, emboldened by a profile that in and of itself was racially discriminatory--was causing immense harm, immense division in the community, immense fear, and was not helping to find the serial rapist.
  • [00:19:37] MARY BEJIAN: I did not ask to have the civil liberties of any man, African American, White, whomever, thrown over, supposedly so I could be kept safe. That makes me really, really angry.
  • [00:19:46] MARY BEJIAN: The idea was to bring many different communities together to push the city, to push the police department to change tacks, and pursue an investigation that was actually going to help.
  • [00:20:05] EDITH LEWIS: The Coalition for Community Unity was useful in that it provided Black men in town with a card. Those cards were so important to me, the card that said, "Here are your rights. Here is what you have to do. Here's what you don't have to do." Folks talked about how important it was to have those cards.
  • [00:20:32] MARY BEJIAN: This was something that we did. We did that early on.
  • [00:20:35] EDITH LEWIS: Yes.
  • [00:20:36] MARY BEJIAN: It was a way to say, people in this community from so many different backgrounds are not okay with what's happening.
  • [00:20:45] EDITH LEWIS: Including groups that are still fighting that fight, the Interfaith Council for Peace and Justice, for example.
  • [00:20:53] MARY BEJIAN: Then here it was. Here was the profile, and we could just see right here how problematic it was.
  • [00:21:02] EDITH LEWIS: Right.
  • [00:21:03] MARY BEJIAN: Age, 25-35 years old. Race, Black.
  • [00:21:05] EDITH LEWIS: But we were picking up 14-year-olds.
  • [00:21:08] MARY BEJIAN: Right. The profile was incredibly broad. A Black man between 25 and 35 or 45 years old. The height range was a huge height range. The weight range was a huge range. They never talked about skin tone, skin complexion. They never talked about whether or not he had facial hair. Because it was a profile. It wasn't a description of a suspect.
  • [00:21:43] MICHAEL J. STEINBERG: The problem with the profile that the police came up with is that it was so vague that it basically brought in most Black men in the city. To me, the most offensive part of the profile was the part that said it was a Black man with hostility to White women because it was a lie. It was a Black man who also sexually assaulted an Asian woman. It seemed to me that they relied on this stereotype, this very harmful stereotype that had been used throughout history to get more people to send in more tips so they could come to people's workplace or home or stop them on the street and say, "You must give blood for the serial rapist investigation if you want to clear yourself." [MUSIC]
  • [00:23:01] MARY BEJIAN: I think what we used to say was like, based on the Black population in Ann Arbor at that time, it was something like 25% of the Black population in Ann Arbor. The profile was also so disturbing because the police had absolutely no evidence to claim that this was someone who was intentionally attacking only White women.
  • [00:23:25] EDITH LEWIS: Exactly.
  • [00:23:27] CARMELITA MULLINS: Not only were we concerned about Black males being victimized by this investigation and this process, but we were also concerned about women who we did not feel were being served appropriately by this investigation.
  • [00:23:43] MARY BEJIAN: We'll never know who else might have been attacked and assaulted by him because we already know that sexual assault is an incredibly under-reported crime. Historically, women are doubted, women are blamed, and it's even worse if you're a woman with color.
  • [00:24:03] EDITH LEWIS: [OVERLAPPING] Woman of color.
  • [00:24:03] JEFFRI CHADIHA: Ann Arbor, it's a great place in many ways, and it's a very liberal place. But my experience in covering that case, it really helped me understand how much the Black community was not as empowered as I thought, was more on the fringes of things that were happening to them. I think this case made them feel more like, I don't want to say second-class citizens or secondary to the major concern, which was stopping this guy. The sense I got was that the relationship was not as strong as I thought it might have been. The way Ann Arbor is set up, there's a lot of Black communities in different pockets of it, but the majority of the Black communities are really on the outside: Ypsilanti, and Belleville, and Ypsilanti Township. The representation within the city where this was largely happening was not that strong. I felt like a lot of people felt like they didn't have voices, and they were being taken advantage of in a certain way. They were a means to an end, which was to make people feel like, "Hey, we don't have this guy, but we're exhausting every last resource to find him." That means, actually going through these people to get it.
  • [00:25:28] MICHAEL J. STEINBERG: This was a racist and blatantly unconstitutional practice. The Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution prohibits illegal searches and seizures. They were coercing men to give blood when there was no probable cause to believe that they were the rapist. These tips were often very vague. All they pointed to often was that the person was a Black man that lived in Ann Arbor, and yet the police would tell individuals if they didn't give blood, they'd get a search warrant, which was a lie. They were also being stalked all over the city without reasonable suspicion. The mere fact that somebody was a Black man did not mean there was cause to stop them, and that was unconstitutional. Also, the Equal Protection Clause of the United States Constitution prohibits the disparate treatment of people based on race.
  • [00:26:39] WILLIAM HAMPTON: People think that everything that they do is constrained to right now, right then. That's not the case. We have no control over how we're born. I'm still paying the price of what happened to my grandparents, for what happened to my uncle, what happened to my aunts, and I wasn't even born yet. It makes me think of back when I was a kid and I threw a rock in the lake, and the rock is right here, but it created a ripple effect all the way around. I thought Ann Arbor was absolute utopia when I came here. We had an African American city administrator. We had an African American mayor. I just thought, "Jeez, I've made it." I didn't realize when I came here that the percentage of people who looked like me was as low as it was. It was substantially less than 10%. In fact, at the time it was around 6 or 7%. In 1994, it was a hard time for people who look like me. It was only five years earlier, that we had the Central Park Five. It was only two years earlier that we had the famous Clarence Thomas situation.
  • [00:28:06] JOE BIDEN: Do you swear to tell the whole truth, and nothing but the truth so help you God?
  • [00:28:10] ANITA HILL: I do.
  • [00:28:10] JOE BIDEN: Thank you.
  • [00:28:15] WILLIAM HAMPTON: After that, they had the Rodney King situation. That was a critical time in America, anyway. In 1994, I lived on the West Side. I used to like to take walks in the early evening, early to mid evening. I stopped doing it because I knew that I ran the risk of getting pulled over, stopped, frisked, could have been beat up. That was happening in Ann Arbor, too. A lot of people who live in Ann Arbor who look like me was not treated fairly. But because of the fact that we as African Americans have been socialized differently, we have a little bit different opinion about law enforcement than we would if we didn't look like this--a lot of us felt as if, if they told us they needed our DNA, they felt obligated to do it. Unfortunately, that wasn't true. There's nothing written that says police personnel always has to be true to you. When they told me they wanted my blood in order to clear myself, my first question was, "Clear myself from what?" I don't know whether this is true or not, but I was told that a White woman anonymously, had said that I hated White women. I don't hate anybody. I don't like certain people's ways but I don't hate anybody. I'm not sure that was an accurate statement, but that was the rationale that was given for asking me for my blood, and I said, "No."
  • [00:29:53] MICHAEL J. STEINBERG: Blair Shelton was one person who was a victim of this investigation. Not only was he stopped approximately eight times by the police, and not only was he coerced into giving blood, but he also lost one of his jobs through the investigation. The police officer went to his place of employment. It was Blair's day off. The officer spoke to Blair's manager, and indicated that Blair was a suspect in the investigation. A few days later, he lost his job mysteriously. We filed a lawsuit on behalf of Blair Shelton, and we're seeking damages, and we're also seeking injunctive relief by the return of his blood samples. At the time of the investigation, I was the president of the National Lawyers Guild, which is a civil rights lawyers group. It was formed as an alternative to the American Bar Association. So one member of the Lawyers Guild was a man named Kurt Berggren. Kurt already knew Blair. When Blair was first asked to give blood and started to be stopped repeatedly by the police on the street, he came to Kurt Berggren, and Kurt came to me and said, "This is an important case. Maybe it should be a national lawyers guild case." Well, I brought it to our steering committee, and everybody unanimously thought we should get involved. First and foremost, we were trying to show that this DNA dragnet was unconstitutional, and we wanted the world to know it was unconstitutional. There is no way that the police would have targeted White men if the serial rapist was thought to be White. In fact, during this time, there was a White serial rapist out there. All the descriptions were the same. He had a grayish brown beard. He had bluish gray eyes. He was between 5'8" and 5'10". They did not engage in the same practice as they did for Black men.
  • [00:32:39] LARRY HUNTER: None of those examples of collecting blood helped them solve this crime whatsoever. A crime got solved by a victim who had been victimized by a rape, who was able to describe the assailant, and they put out an all-point bulletin with a taxicab driver. The taxicab driver managed to observe the person shortly after the crime was committed. Then they were able to match his DNA. It was just good old-fashioned routine police work and nothing to do with this huge, wide-scale--some people call it a witch hunt. I call it a hunt for Black men.
  • [00:33:19] MICHAEL J. STEINBERG: We brought the case after Ervin Mitchell was convicted. At trial, it came out that he was conclusively the rapist because of the DNA evidence. Despite that fact, they would not return either the blood or the DNA profiles of the other men. We thought that was wrong, and we wanted to get it back, not just for Blair, but for everybody. Lastly, we wanted the world to know that even in a so-called liberal community like Ann Arbor, White people can turn against people of color when they're afraid. If we didn't bring this case to light, we were concerned that it could happen again, and we wanted to make sure that it wouldn't happen again.
  • [00:34:16] SHOW HOST: We got our dances all lined up in our dance line, [APPLAUSE] and we're going to start you off with Mr. Blair of Ann Arbor, Michigan. Let's go now. [MUSIC]
  • [00:34:46] MICHAEL J. STEINBERG: Blair is a great person. He's very hardworking. He had two jobs when we met him. He was a model. He played the guitar. He was very passionate about justice. He had other hobbies; lots of people throughout town knew him.
  • [00:35:08] BLAIR SHELTON: My name is Blair Shelton, and I'm a victim of the Ann Arbor serial rape investigation dragnet.
  • [00:35:16] PHIL DONAHUE: Presumably, the DNA test on you is for the purpose of matching with the body fluids found on the victims.
  • [00:35:23] BLAIR SHELTON: He said, "You have to give a blood sample," and I started to cry. He said, "You have to do this." He said, "If you don't, we'll go upstairs and get a court order from the judge." At that point I thought that I didn't have any other choice, by the language in which he was using, I'd have to comply. It took the life out of me. I had just bought a home, and they've got a surveillance van outside of my house. The isolation--it was different. It's something I never experienced before. This is going to affect me for a long time. As I get older, I'm getting more angry about it. It was an obsession. It's like this blood somehow has a cure that can solve all the problems in the world if we have these blood samples. It's my ancestors, many of whom were slaves, and you want to keep that? No, I'm not rolling over for this.
  • [00:36:50] PHIL DONAHUE: You successfully sued the Ann Arbor Police Department, and show them this tape here. Here is Blair Shelton, no criminal record, we should say. He's getting his blood back, and had to sue to get the blood back.
  • [00:37:06] BLAIR SHELTON: Michael had picked up my blood, and he gave me that at his house. It was like winning an Oscar. Here we go. Here's the DNA. As it rests on the American flag. I think any family that has a family member that's embroiled in some controversial issue, there's always a danger of alienating yourself because you feel like you're embarrassing your family's name. I can't remember what it was like to put my name in a computer and not have anything come up. Now, everything comes up: pictures; different law schools studying the case; crime investigators, psychologists, all weighing in on why does he keep the blood? They were so hell-bent on putting me in prison, incarcerating me when one out of three Americans has a police record, but nobody in my family does. It took me to a place where I'm thinking, what do I do if they send me to prison? What would be my method of departure from this world? I came up with the idea of swallowing my own tongue. Now, that seems extreme, but I was having thoughts of how would I do it. When they say life in prison, I would instantly figure out how to swallow my own tongue. I only went there for a few seconds, and then I picked up my guitar, and I just realized myself when I looked in the mirror, and I said, "No, I'm here for the long haul." [MUSIC] These are just some pictures that I had. This is my first girlfriend. We were actually in the hospital nursery. This is a modeling picture I did. This is a fashion show actually. Who am I supposed to be? Musician. Make music for people that will last long past me.
  • [00:40:09] DAPHNE WATKINS: People really underestimate the power of trauma. I can only imagine about some of the men who may have been in that cohort who were targeted and from whom DNA was drawn probably had degrees, education, prestigious careers. But all of a sudden now they're back to just being someone who does not have that, who did not have those accomplishments. There are sources out there that say that Black men tend to have really high rates of depression, anxiety, and PTSD. If you think about it, if that is the baseline, when incidents like this happen, we can only imagine how things just skyrocket in terms of challenges and additional problems. When I talk about these topics, I like to talk about it from a place of we have no idea what these men experienced before this incident happened. We don't know what their childhoods were like, we don't know what their family dynamics were like. But everyone came to this place, and it almost evened everyone on the same playing field. Regardless of where these men came from, because they were all treated the same way, they were all criminalized. They were all pathologized. That trauma is something that ripples through each of their households. I can guarantee you it affected their spouses, their children, their friends, their church families. I talk with a lot of Black men. Actually, I've done hundreds of interviews with Black men who have said, "Society has told me that if I get a degree, if I stay out of trouble, if I get a good job and pay my bills, that I will be treated better, that I will excel and be respected as a contributor to society. I have done all of that, and I'm still getting targeted. I'm still getting profiled." So what is a person to do? That stuff can carry throughout the rest of their lives. Oftentimes we have things happen to us, and we brush it under the rug, or we remind ourselves of how strong we are and how we've overcome, not realizing how the ripple effect of what happened to us is seeping out the way we talk to people, the way we react, the way our bodies tense up when we see the police behind us when we're driving. Whatever the trauma is that you've experienced, you have to do the work within yourself. Until that work gets done, it's going to be very difficult to proceed in a healthy way and to be able to preserve your mental health moving forward.
  • [00:42:52] EDITH LEWIS: This is really difficult to talk about because of who we are in 2025. One of the things that Mary and I think about is, I think, 30 years has passed, but it's the same as yesterday. Thirty years.
  • [00:43:09] MICHAEL J. STEINBERG: I used to think, especially during the Black Lives Matter movement, that it could never, ever happen again in Ann Arbor. I always ask that question to people when they come speak to my class about the DNA Dragnet. Most White people say, "No." Most Black people say, "You never know." I don't think it would happen under our current police chief, current prosecutor, our current Ann Arbor City Council. But in the past few years, things have swung so much against civil rights that I would like to think that it couldn't happen again. But when people are afraid, you never know.
  • [00:44:09] CYNTHIA HARRISON: Policy is so important because it helps people from falling through systemic cracks that exist, and it helps to repair when harm has been done. I've worked on a lot of policy, but I want to talk about the driving equality ordinance. The driving equality ordinance came from the idea of limiting harm and limiting disparities in traffic stops. People likely have their first encounter with police either in school because of a school resource officer or as the result of a traffic stop. When you have individuals that are disproportionately impacted by these types of ticky-tacky stops, otherwise known as pretext stops, there is a disproportionate impact because of the result of racial profiling. Thirty years ago, during this DNA Dragnet, racial profiling was at the heart of stopping individuals, stopping Black men living their daily lives, to coerce them to give blood to prove their innocence. What people need to understand is there was an immense amount of harm that occurred right here in this beautiful town in the city that we love. What people need to understand is there are Black men right now that do not want to travel through the city of Ann Arbor. What people need to understand is that there are Black men and whole families who have left the city of Ann Arbor. Women were not made safer because of this DNA Dragnet. It is so important that precious lives are not negatively impacted the way they were 30 years ago. If we don't have the proper policies in place--independent police oversight, de-escalation training, cultural competency training, somebody with lived experience having a seat at the table, their voice heard--in this day and age, we could see history repeating itself. It is so important that the work that we do today, and I'll speak for myself, the work I do today, that it carries on into the future long after I'm gone. [MUSIC]
  • [00:47:13] BLAIR SHELTON: What brings me peace? After all I've been through, all I can say is I'm going to stay optimistic and continue to accept life challenges and deal with them as they come.
  • [00:47:26] MICHAEL J. STEINBERG: People need to know about this case, and we need to know about our history to make sure that we don't make the same mistakes going forward.
  • [00:47:39] EDITH LEWIS: Those organizations that have been able to pull together coalitions like this have changed the lives of the people who are part of them.
  • [00:47:52] WILLIAM HAMPTON: I hope people learn that America's not a melting pot. America's more like a stew. We have a lot of different people coming together to make everything taste better. If we all fight for that, this world will be a better place for us all [MUSIC].