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Gomez had tracked William Stevens to an upstate prison where he was serving time for a robbery. Over the following months, several versions of Stevens’s story would emerge, including the version Gomez shared with the media, the version that Stevens would offer to a television reporter summoned to the prison by Gomez and the version Stevens would recount to me. There were discrepancies among these accounts, and it was hard not to wonder if Gomez, in his zeal for vengeance and vindication, had embellished Stevens’s story. At one point, Gomez claimed that cops coerced Stevens into falsely identifying more than 25 different people as culprits in various crimes, but when I spoke with lawyers who represented several of those defendants, none of them recalled hearing about a witness named Stevens.
When I met with Stevens myself, at a different upstate prison, and asked if he remembered identifying more than 25 people, at first he said he didn’t, and then he said he did. It was hard to get a straight answer. Still, he repeated to me in detail the story of how he was forced to incriminate Hernandez, a story he had told television reporters. (He also repeated it in a legal filing, though his lawyers never followed it up with a suit.)
A couple of years earlier, he said, he and some friends were out on the street at night and ran into another group of boys. Someone pulled a gun and shot him in the arm. It was dark, and he claimed he didn’t see the shooter, but he said a detective at the precinct tried to get him to name Hernandez. Stevens refused. Not long after that, Stevens said, he got into a fight on the street, and this time he was caught by Terrell and another officer. He said the officers handcuffed him, drove him to a deserted street and repeatedly hit him in the face and the ribs while saying that he should have identified Hernandez. After that, Stevens said, he gave in. He told me that he signed paperwork implicating Hernandez in three different crimes. According to Stevens, one of the crimes, a robbery, never happened. As for the shooting that landed Hernandez in Rikers, Stevens told me he had no idea if Hernandez did it or not: He said he wasn’t there when the crime took place. (Terrell denied personal involvement with Stevens, and his lawyer called the claims false.) When I asked why the police would have targeted him, he said, “They don’t like my neighborhood at all. I’m not the only person they do this to.”
For months, Terrell had declined to speak with reporters, but after Stevens went on the news and accused him of coercion, he held a conference call with reporters denying the accusations. By then, he was working in the Manhattan courthouse. He insisted that he had been completely misrepresented in the media. In his version of events, Gomez was the villain, and he, Terrell, was the true champion of people living in the 42nd Precinct. “I don’t care if the bad guys don’t like me,” he said. “My job is to make sure the good people in the 4-2 can go to work and come home every day.”
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When he became a cop himself, he came to see the police differently. He now believed that cops sometimes had to resort to heavy-handed tactics in order to do their jobs effectively. “I’ve definitely had fights in the street, trying to restrain someone, or telling someone to back away and they refuse,” he said, prompting his lawyer to interrupt. “Cops don’t fight,” his lawyer said. “Cops use physical force.”
A former athlete who played professional basketball overseas, Terrell said he had come to think of policing as a kind of sport. “It’s a cat-and-mouse game,” he told me. “Sometimes the bad guy wins, sometimes the cops win.” Carefully enunciating each syllable, he said, “I like to compete.” In the N.Y.P.D., cops can get attention by racking up high arrest numbers. I asked Terrell where he ranked in that particular competition. “Oh, I’m high up,” he said, laughing. Other officers across the department have said that at least until recently, commanders generally expected them to make between 12 and 24 arrests a year. According to Police Department documents, Terrell was averaging around 62 annually.
After a few years in the 42nd Precinct, he was assigned to an influential position as a field intelligence officer responsible for gathering information on gangs and crews. The Police Department had begun monitoring the social media conversations of teenagers they had identified as potential gang members, and Terrell says he used that information to build cases against them. In 2015, he helped bring down a big target for the precinct — a crew of young men who were implicated in a rash of crimes, including the murder of a Little League coach. The Bronx district attorney singled him out for praise, and he was promoted to detective. It was after that, Terrell said, that he turned his attention to Hernandez. He never arrested him, but he said he began investigating him.
According to Terrell, Hernandez wasn’t who he said he was. “I’ve said it a million times,” he said, “and I’ll say it until the day I die: He’s a vicious kid.” He said he couldn’t speak about continuing investigations, but Terrell had a theory about Hernandez and all the other people who had leveled accusations against him. He said they all belonged to different gangs and had been trying to destroy his career so that they could continue to pursue their lives of crime with impunity. And he said that Gomez, by gathering and publicizing their false accusations, was perpetrating a kind of fraud on the public.
Terrell rightly pointed out that Gomez wasn’t working free. Gomez had introduced Hernandez, Nardoni, Floyd and many of Terrell’s other accusers to the lawyers Emeka Nwokoro and John Scola, who had agreed to file lawsuits on their behalf. Gomez says he is never paid on a contingency basis. (Nwokoro and Scola declined to comment.)
Terrell laid out his theory about Gomez and Hernandez in a sprawling complaint that he filed in court in April 2018 against a long list of defendants, including Gomez, Nwokoro and Scola, Shaun King, other reporters who covered the story, the police commissioner and the City of New York. In the lawsuit, which a number of defendants have successfully filed to be dismissed from, he argued that the Police Department had abandoned him, by failing to defend him in part because of his race, and he accused the city of encouraging people to bring frivolous litigation against the police without properly investigating their claims. (A City Hall spokeswoman said in a statement that the city was addressing this concern and has “filed more motions to dismiss cases and added resources and personnel to reduce settlements and challenge more frivolous allegations.”)
Gomez, of course, had told me a similar story about the complaints that were made against him during his own time as a cop, and as I listened to Terrell, it struck me that the two men had certain things in common. Like Gomez, Terrell classified people as “good guys“ and “bad guys.” Like Gomez, he felt betrayed by the Police Department. And like Gomez, he claimed that a conspiracy was afoot in the Bronx.
