After a day and a half of deliberations, 12 jurors returned to the courtroom split on whether to find the man, Chanel Lewis, 22, guilty of the murder and sexual abuse of Vetrano on a late August afternoon in Spring Creek Park. The defense lawyers requested a mistrial, and Justice Michael B. Aloise of state Supreme Court in Queens granted the motion, supporting the jurors’ sentiment that their conclusion would not change. “I’m inclined to believe them,” he said.

During deliberations, the jury requested a number of key pieces of evidence presented during the trial. That included further examination of the DNA evidence, and a viewing of the confession tape, in which Lewis is seen admitting the murder on two separate occasions, after repeatedly denying it to investigators.

Robert Moeller, one of Lewis’ lawyers, said a day and a half had been sufficient time for deliberations. “According to their note, they were hopelessly deadlocked,” Moeller said. “So what’s another day going to do?”

Lewis is “happy that he wasn’t convicted,” Moeller added. Yet he remains in custody.

“The jury is understanding that DNA is not all it; the confession is not all it,” said Jen Cheung, a defense lawyer for Lewis. “There are issues in the case that, as you all see, are much more complex.”

Officials with the Queens district attorney’s office said they planned to retry the case. A new trial is set to begin Jan. 22.

Vetrano’s badly beaten body was found by her father on the night of Aug. 2, 2016, setting off a manhunt that involved scores of officers. In early February 2017, police arrested Lewis on charges of murder and sexual abuse.

Lewis became a suspect after a police lieutenant said he had spotted Lewis loitering in Howard Beach in the months preceding the murder. The lieutenant, John Russo, told jurors that Lewis had been wearing thick clothing during the middle of summer and had avoided the police, which made him stand out. Later, police reviewed a 911 call from May of that year that placed Lewis in the same part of the park where Vetrano’s body was discovered.

Soon after they identified him as a possible suspect, police confronted Lewis at his home, and asked him for a DNA sample. He confessed to the crime during a four-hour interrogation after his DNA matched a sample found on Vetrano. “I was beating her and was mad at her,” he told a Queens assistant district attorney in an interview that was videotaped.

In a nearly two-hour closing argument on Monday, the lead prosecutor, Brad Leventhal, raised his voice frequently to describe Vetrano’s killing. Then Leventhal acted out the crime, using both hands to show how prosecutors say Lewis first punched and then strangled Vetrano.

“If you follow the evidence, it leads you to one location; it leads you to one person. Right over there,” Leventhal said, pointing directly across the courtroom at Lewis. “Chanel Lewis. Murderer. Killer.”

Leventhal described Lewis, 22, as a loner, motivated by “anger and sexual frustration.” He said the defendant often roamed the streets of Queens and Brooklyn, where he lived, and did not have a job, friends or girlfriend.

The prosecution’s case relied heavily on Lewis’ videotaped confession and DNA evidence found at the crime scene that matched his profile. Prosecutors also focused on a hand injury that Lewis suffered the same day Vetrano was murdered that was consistent with punching someone.

Leventhal said that Lewis was upset when he left his home on the day of the murder because a neighbor was playing loud music, so he went to Spring Creek Park. He had previously visited the park at least seven times. It was a place, Leventhal said, where Lewis often “went to clear his head.”

The prosecutor said Lewis attacked Vetrano as she jogged through an overgrown section of the park. Medical evidence showed Lewis repeatedly punched Vetrano, then strangled her after climbing on top of her chest and sexually abusing her, Leventhal said.

Leventhal said the defendant had conducted 137 web searches on his phone after the police approached him and requested a sample of his DNA, including queries for the phrases “Miranda rights” and “sacrament of penance,” a Christian rite of atonement.

Moeller argued that the police had coerced Lewis’ confession.

He also tried to cast doubt on the DNA evidence, suggesting the crime scene had been contaminated. He said Lewis might have touched a surface that Vetrano touched at some point, and a transference of small amounts of DNA might have occurred.

“People’s DNA can end up in places that they’ve never been,” he said.

Moeller noted that Lewis, on the same night he eventually confessed to the crime, had first denied to the police having anything to do with Vetrano’s death several times before he was put in a “windowless” room for several hours without being allowed to call his family. The defense lawyer also pointed out that several details in the confession were at odds with some of the findings in the autopsy.

At times, Lewis, who attended a high school for students with learning disabilities, appeared confused on the videotaped confession. He occasionally mumbled through his responses.

The cause of death had been ruled as strangulation, but Lewis told an investigator on the night he confessed that Vetrano had drowned in a puddle. He denied sexually assaulting Vetrano, but the victim’s body was discovered partially clothed with trauma to her vagina and rectum.

Finally, in closing arguments, Moeller said Lewis’ hand injury would have prevented him from throwing a phone 40 feet from the path, where the police later found it.

Moeller claimed the police investigation and prosecution had tried to make the evidence support their faulty theory. “The government is trying to fit a square peg in a round hole.”

The New York Times

John Surico © 2018 The New York Times