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Tiara White
Tiara White, the girlfriend of murder suspect Michael Jackson-Bolanos, tesified Monday that she washed his North Face jacket as a matter of routine, and did not notice any blood on it.
White was a prosecution witness, but it's not clear whether her testimony hurt or helped the prosecution.
The prosecution has presented evidence that there were a couple spots of blood detected on the jacket linked to the victim, Samantha Woll, president of the Isaac Agree Downtown Synagogue in Detroit, after the coat had already been washed. Investigators also found blood on Jackson-Bolanos's backpack that has been tied to Woll.
White testified during cross examination that her boyfriend had not asked her to wash the jacket. She said she routinely washed his clothes.
She said she didn't carefully exam the coat, but did not notice any blood. She said she also didn't see any blood on any of his other clothing. Of course, there's no way of telling if the boyfriend did anything to the coat before the girlfriend washed it.
The prosecution alleged in opening statements that Jackson-Bolanos murdered Woll, 40, inside her apartment on Oct. 21. She was later found dead outside the townhouse in Lafayette Park.
Defense attorney Brian Brown mentioned in his opening statement that his client told police he stumbled upon the body outside, and after a quick examination, ran off.
Michael Jackson-Bolanos during interrogation.
But later in the morning, the prosecution played an interrogation video from Nov. 30 of Jackson-Bolanos, who denied having anything do with the murder and said he saw nothing unusual that evening in the area.
"There was nobody out there," he told homicide investigators. "I didn't see anyone laying down."
"This is not me bro, I only fuck with cars."
"I'm not lying...I don't know nothing about nothing."
He told the officers to check his phone.
"My phone was not in her condo bro."
One detective said the phone was there in the condo, when in fact it was not.
"I don't know shit about no homicides. I’m not into that shit. I don't know nothing about no body. I didn't encounter no body. ... I ain't killed nobody, bro."
The problem with those statements is that Woll's blood was detected on his jacket and backpack.
So, the two most obvious scenarios are that he simply stumbled across her body after the stabbings, or he was involved in murder.
During cross examination, defense attorney Brian Brown got Detroit Police Det. Patrick Lane, who helped interrogate his client, to admit that was misleading during the interrogation when he said he had evidence of Jackson-Bolanos's phone inside Woll's home.
Lane said sometime investigators try to pretend they have more evidence than they have to get the person admit certain things.
And yes, Lane said, that tactic can sometimes backfire and result in someone clamming up.
Brown tried to get Lane to speculate that such tactics might even result in someone saying they never saw a body because they're being misled. But Lane said he wouldn't speculate on something like that.
Brown, in his questioning, was trying to suggest his client might have stumbled upon the body after the murder.
Jackson-Bolanos was released that day, and arrested again in December.
