Paul Bass Photos
Henry: jailed for life, then released & recompensed.
Darcus Henry tasted freedom in the form of two pieces of mint chewing gum.
Henry wasn’t allowed to chew gum during the 13 and 1/2 years he spent in prison along with three lifelong friends from Quinnipiac Terrace for a murder they claimed they didn’t commit.
They were supposed to spend their full lives in prison for that murder. Henry’s sentence was 100 years.
Inside Cheshire Correctional and MacDougall-Walker Correctional Institutions, the rules forbade chewing gum. Henry missed it. He thought about it. And he believed that once day that he’d be free again.
That belief turned true. The Connecticut Supreme Court ordered Henry and his three friends freed in 2013 because the state had messed up at their trial. The state’s key witness had testified that he hadn’t struck a deal to have any charges reduced in any separate criminal cases against him. It turned out he had. And the state hadn’t corrected the record.
On July 25, 2013, Henry and his three friends —Seth Adams, Carlos Ashe, and Johnny Johnson — walked out of state Superior Court on New Haven’s Church Street (in video) into the arms of their family and into freedom.
Henry looked forward to that first stick of gum. But it was daylight out, and the month of Ramadan. Henry had converted to Islam while in prison. He couldn’t eat until sundown.
“When the sun went down around 8:30, I went to the 24-hour” store on Whalley Avenue, he recalled.
He selected a pack of Trident mint-flavord gum. “I started opening it as soon as I purchased it,” popped two sticks into his mouth.
He was free.
“It was good to chew gum — to be able to do something that you wanted to do that they told you couldn’t do. I had the freedom to chew gum, to make that decision to chew gum.”
Henry, who is 40 years old, talked about his life’s changing fortunes during an appearance on WNHH radio’s “Dateline New Haven” show. His case has returned to the headlines, because the state awarded Henry and his three friends $4.2 million apiece to compensate for the years they lost behind bars. That case has proved controversial; the state claims commissioner who awarded the money has resigned in part over some public officials’ criticism that he shouldn’t have awarded the money.
Henry shrugged off that criticism during the WNHH interview. He spoke instead of the way people he’s always known — and some he hasn’t — have reacted to his receipt of the money.
But one business project is benefitting from the ex-prisoners’ bounty: A project the four lifelong friends launched themselves. They call it “365 Entertainment.” As in the 365 years they were supposed to rot in jail.
Never “Forever”
Melissa Bailey Photo
Henry with son Darcus Jr. upon his release from custody.
Darcus Henry didn’t used to be someone with money to throw around. He grew up in Fair Haven’s Quinnipiac Terrace public-housing development. The Old Q Terrace. The rundown, drug-infested projects that the city later tore down and rebuilt.
Henry’s mother and grandmother, the late Dalzenia and Virginia Henry, were tenant leaders at the old Quinnipiac. They started a group called Tenants Against Drugs Dammit! They also organized kids’ activities. Henry said he grew up with plenty to do, with no sense of lacking because he was poor.
He was 20 years old, living in West Haven and working as a barber, on Dec. 14, 1996 when a group of men shot at another group of men at 2 a.m. at the Farnam Courts housing development. One of the men, Jason Smith, died. Police weeks later obtained warrants to arrest Henry and his three friends for the murder, largely on the testimony of two of the other shooting victims. The police said the men belonged to the Q Terrace-based Island Brothers and had shot the victims, members of the Ghetto Boys, in a gang-related dispute.
Henry said he didn’t believe that up until the time when the jury verdict came down, he didn’t believe he’d be convicted. Because, he said, he knew he didn’t do it. He said he had gotten in trouble in his youth at times (“I wasn’t a choir boy”). But he insisted he never belonged to a gang. “I from Quinnipiac projects. We called each other ‘Island.’” He said “it stumps me” how his name emerged as a suspect in the witness’s mind.
Henry said he had been at a nearby bar the night of the shooting, the old Melebus Club, then gone home by 2 a.m. “I had like six different people” who vouched for his whereabouts. He said he had no idea who shot up Smith and his crew or why.
The jury concluded otherwise. On Dec. 14, 1999, Henry began what was supposed to be a remaining lifetime as a prisoner.
“I never thought it would be forever,” he recalled. “I was innocent. I’m a fighter.”
One of the hardest parts of serving time in jail involved missing his two boys. They were born in the year before Henry went to jail. At first they visited each month, then as little as once a year. “I wrote to them all the time,” he said.
Like other inmates insisting on their innocence, Henry and his three friends, who were locked up together, obtained lawyers and studied the law themselves. Through a Freedom of Information Act request they obtained a transcript of a sentencing of one of the key witnesses against them, Andre Clark, in a separate criminal matter. The transcript included the information that Clark had received a break on his sentence in return for testifying against Henry and his crew. The state prosecutor did not correct Clark on the stand.
That was in 2001. It took another 12 years, including an appellate court ruling and then finally a Connecticut Supreme Court ruling, before Henry was freed.
And then came a new set of challenges. Like rebuilding a life.
The New “365”
365entertainment.biz
The crew: Ashe, Henry, Johnson, Adams.
Flyer from a 365 show at Toad’s.
One change struck Henry upon his release: “Everybody had a cell phone. Everybody was always on the phone. It was weird to be able to call anywhere in the world, for free.”
Before going to jail, Henry had done some rapping under the name Darky B. He rapped a few times in prison, recorded a few tracks once he won his freedom. But that wasn’t paying the rent.
Like other released inmates, Henry was having a hard time finding employers willing to hire him. He landed a position packaging women’s clothes at a Branford warehouse; six months later he was laid off. He then found work clearing out foreclosed homes for a local firm, which, he said, again downsized him out of the job after six months. Next Henry put up wood framing for the new Centerplan apartment complex rising on College Street — until the crew reached the top floor and no longer needed framers.
Meanwhile, Henry and his three friends remained in touch. They launched a a hip-hop concert and event-staging business called 365 Entertainment. They put on some shows, started building up the business. The name came from the cumulative number of years they’d been sentenced to serve in prison.
Henry kept finding paying gigs: He became a downtown “ambassador,” paid $10.10 an hour to stroll the streets in a bright uniform and smile at passersby. This time he wasn’t downsized. He left on his own, in January.
Why did he leave?
“I got $4.2 million,” Henry responded.
“I just smile at people another way” now.
The claims commissioner came up with the figure by calculating “$2.4 million for loss of liberty, $1.1 million for loss of earnings and future earnings capacity, $200,000 for loss of reputation, $100,000 for physical and mental injuries and $200,000 for legal fees and expenses,” according to a report in the CT Mirror.
How has Henry’s life changed so far now that the former life inmate is free and rich?
“I feel the same as I did without the money,” Henry said. “It hasn’t hit me yet. It might never hit me. I feel the same as I did without the money. I’m humbled.”
Except for the people showering him with requests for business seed money.
“Daily,” he said. “Everybody — friends, family, people I’ve never seen before. Everybody knows” he has millions.
He’s not investing in other businesses right now, he said. “Every idea’s not [necessarily] a good idea,” Henry reasoned.
He said he and the 365 Productions crew are working on making their business viable. Their next show is in Charlotte, Virginia.
Meanwhile, Henry purchased a home in the suburbs. (He declined to say where.) A quiet place. He hopes one of his sons will be coming to live with him there soon. (His son Darcus Jr. appeared on WNHH radio’s “One World” program recently to discuss Black History Month.)
Henry never believed that his life had ended when Connecticut sentenced to a century behind bars, he said. Now he has that life back, and it’s just beginning.
Click on or download the above sound file to listen to the WNHH “Dateline New Haven” interview with Henry, or subscribe to our new “Dateline New Haven” podcast on iTunes or any podcatcher, where the episode will be delivered directly to your phone.