Terris Blog

Central Park Five Part 2. Matias Reyes He was already serving 33.5-year sentence for an unrelated crime when he admitted to being behind the Central Park Jogger case. A first-generation Puerto Rican, Matias Reyes was living out of his van when he attacked Meili. A Harlem bodega clerk by day, Reyes was a serial rapist by night. He was eventually convicted of an unrelated murder, and while serving life in prison, confessed to the rape of Meili, exonerating the Central Park Five after some of them had served over a decade behind bars. Netflix’s When They See Us docuseries chronicles how the standardization of DNA evidence and the confession of Matias Reyes paved the way for the 2002 exoneration of those five boys. When asked why he finally came clean, Reyes responded, “It was the right thing to do.” The life of Matias Reyes was fraught with trauma from the very beginning. According to an interview between him and a prison psychologist, he was born in Puerto Rico in 1971, and he moved to N...

  Central Park Five Part 1.   Ava DuVernay shed new light on the 30-year-old case of the Central Park Five with her Netflix miniseries, When They See Us. The scripted series is based on the true story of the “Central Park Five,” a group of five teenagers wrongly accused and convicted of a crime they didn't commit. Now, they're known as the “Exonerated Five,” since the real assailant was found in 2002.   Who are the Central Park Five? In 1989, Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Yusef Salaam, Raymond Santana Jr., and Korey Wise (who later changed his name to Kharey) were in Central Park on April 19—the night a white female jogger, Trisha Meili, was raped and severely beaten. All five were Black or Latinx teenagers from Harlem between the ages of 14 and 16.   What happened to the Central Park Five? Simply put, they were wrongly accused—and convicted—of raping and beating Meili, then a 28-year-old investment banker who fell into a coma after the attack. When sh...