Opinion ID: 2756443
Heading Depth: 4
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Cipo and Kovach target Ayers

Text: Over the next few months, Cleveland police detectives Cipo and Kovach investigated Brown’s murder. They first focused their attention on a suspect who had previously been arrested for a sex offense, in part because Brown had been found with no pants on. In the weeks following the murder, however, this suspect could not be found. At the same time, Cipo and Kovach began focusing on Ayers. A member of the CMHA police performed a “voice stress test” on Ayers in January 2000 and reported to Cipo and Kovach that Ayers “exhibited deception during the test.” In February, Cipo and Kovach interrogated Ayers. They also interviewed Ayers’s friend, Ken Smith, whom Ayers had spoken to over the phone on the afternoon of the murder. In a statement that he signed in March, Smith said that Ayers called him around 2:00 p.m. on the day of the murder—before Brown’s body was discovered—and told him that a resident had just died. Cipo and Kovach similarly wrote in a report that Ayers called Smith at 1:54 p.m. and told him about Brown’s death before the body was discovered. But phone records show that Smith was actually the one who called Ayers, not the other way around. Moreover, at trial, “Smith recanted portions of his written statement and testified that Detectives Cipo and Kovach pressured him into stating that Ayers phoned him regarding Brown’s death prior to the discovery of her body.” Ayers v. Hudson, 623 F.3d 301, 306 (6th Cir. 2010). Cipo and Kovach also obtained Brown’s phone records from the evening and early morning preceding her murder, which apparently show no outgoing calls from her phone number during that time. These records directly conflict with Ayers’s statement that Brown had called No. 13-3413 Ayers v. City of Cleveland, et al. Page 4 him at around 2:00 a.m. that morning to request assistance. But they also conflict with statements from five other persons who independently stated that they had received calls from Brown during that same time period. Notwithstanding these witness statements corroborating Ayers’s account, Cipo and Kovach believed that Ayers was “lying.” In another report, Kovach wrote that Ayers was “lying again.” A CMHA officer had informed Kovach that, contrary to Ayers’s account that he went to the lobby to get keys to lock Brown’s door after helping her get up from the floor, Ayers did not appear on the lobby’s security tape during that time period. Cipo later signed an affidavit for a search warrant swearing that he reviewed the lobby security tape and that “Ayers does not appear at the time stated or thereafter.” But Cipo never actually reviewed the tape, which does, in fact, show Ayers in the lobby at the stated time. Ayers was arrested on March 14, 2000 after being interrogated by Cipo and Kovach that same day. Both detectives later testified that, during the interrogation, Ayers said, “if I say I hit [Brown], can I go home?” Kovach’s notes from that day, however, stated only that “[w]e interviewed AYRES [sic] and upon completion, he was booked for this homicide and conveyed to City Jail.” The detectives interrogated Ayers yet again two days later. Although Kovach took extensive notes this time, she once again did not mention Ayers’s alleged statement from March 14, 2000. A grand jury indicted Ayers on March 27, 2000.