Central Park Five

Their names are Korey Wise, Yusef Salaam, Raymond Santana, Antron McCray, and Kevin Richardson. But in 1989 the nation and the world came to know them as the “Central Park Five,” a group of Black and brown teenagers accused of one of the most heinous and shocking crimes New York City saw in the last part of the 20th century. More than a decade later, they would become known by another collective name, the “Exonerated Five,” and their prosecution would become a case study of how racial stereotypes, bungled police work, and a rush to judgment led to one of the most egregious cases of wrongful conviction in U.S. history.

The crime

On the evening of April 19, 1989, Trisha Meili, a 28-year-old white investment banker, went for a jog in New York City’s Central Park. She was found hours later, barely alive and with a fractured skull, having been brutally raped and left for dead in one of the park’s ravines. She was unconscious for 12 days, and when she regained consciousness her last memory of that evening was turning down an invitation to dinner with a friend. All memories of her trauma were gone. She would write in a 2003 memoir that the memory loss was a kind of blessing because “I don’t carry with me the horror and the humiliation of the event.”

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Five stories of the wrongfully accused: The Central Park Five

While Meili was recovering in the hospital, her case made headlines. It served up everything that was wrong with New York City in the 1980s—crime, economic woes, racism—in microcosm. Within days, five teenagers ranging in age from 14 to 16 were arrested and, after hours of interrogation, had confessed to the attack. The five had been part of a group of some 30 youths in the park that night who had been in the park to go “wilding,” a term one of the five used to describe the activities of the larger group that night: taking food from a homeless man, harassing bike riders, and injuring another jogger.

The evidence

The terms wilding and wolf pack would become headline fodder as the city and nation tried to come to terms with what was depicted as a gang rape in which one Hispanic and four Black teenagers took turns assaulting Meili, crushed her skull, and left her bleeding out in the park. The media sentiment was universal outrage:

• The New York Post called the attack “social and premeditated.”
• The New York Times asked in an editorial, “How could apparently well-adjusted youngsters turn into so savage a wolf pack?” 
• Columnist and later Republican presidential candidate Patrick Buchanan called for the eldest of the accused to be “hanged in Central Park” and the younger ones to be “stripped, horsewhipped, and sent to prison.”
• Donald Trump, then a New York real estate developer, took out full-page ads in the city’s newspapers, calling for the death penalty in the case.

However, the key evidence—the confessions—was problematic. The teens, who had no previous arrest records, were questioned for hours, sometimes with their parents present and sometimes without. They offered differing accounts of attacking the jogger, sometimes incriminating each other, sometimes giving accounts that were conflicting and inconsistent, while their stories about other elements of “wilding” that night in the park aligned. Ultimately, they recanted their confessions, and their attorneys sought to have them thrown out, but the judge in the case allowed them. The prosecution largely relied on the confessions, as DNA collected at the scene did not match any of the teens. An expert witness for the prosecution could not confirm that Meili had been raped by more than one man. In closing arguments the prosecutor said strands of the jogger’s hair had been found on the teens’ clothing, a bit of forensic evidence that would later be proven wrong. Regardless, in 1990, the five teens were convicted in two trials on charges that included rape and attempted murder. They would appeal and lose and would each spend between 6 and 13 years in prison.

The confession

In 2002 a convicted murderer and serial rapist serving time for other crimes reached out to the Manhattan district attorney’s office. He was the rapist in the Central Park jogger case, he said, describing how he had, on that April night, grabbed Meili as she ran and attacked and brutalized her. Matias Reyes came forward because he was in the same prison as Korey Wise. When Reyes realized that Wise was still in prison for a crime that Reyes had committed, he came forward.

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Reyes’s confession led to a reopening of the case. In the days before and months after the notorious case, Reyes had attacked at least four other women, killing one. His DNA matched samples taken from Meili. His attack on Meili was unrelated to anything else that occurred in Central Park that night.

New York City police stood by their investigation, hinting that the five had been part of the attack along with Reyes, but in 2002 the convictions were vacated. In 2014 the city paid the five a total of $41 million (roughly $1 million for each year they collectively wrongfully served). The city denied wrongdoing in the case by either police or prosecutors.

Where are they now?

• Trisha Meili: She testified in both trials, and in 2003 she wrote the memoir I Am the Central Park Jogger: A Story of Hope and Possibility. She wrote that the message of her book was “about the capacity of the human body and spirit to heal.”
• Antron McCray: He was 15 when he was arrested. He lives in Georgia with his family.
• Kevin Richardson: Fourteen at the time of his arrest, he now lives in New Jersey with his family. He has become an advocate for witness reform and the mandatory recording of interrogations.
• Yusef Salaam: He was 15 at the time of his arrest; he lives in New York City with his family. In 2023 he was elected to the New York City Council.
• Raymond Santana: He was 14 at the time of his arrest; he is an activist for justice reform. In 2015 he tweeted at producer and director Ava DuVernay, suggesting her next project after Selma should be the story of the Central Park Five. The tweet led to the 2019 Netflix miniseries on the case When They See Us.
• Korey Wise: At 16, he was the oldest of the group. He spent 12 years in prison and is the person most responsible for the exoneration because of his interaction with Matias Reyes. He is a motivational speaker and supporter of the Innocence Project.

Now known as the “Exonerated Five,” their story has been told in countless books, a Ken Burns documentary, and even an opera, in addition to the Netflix miniseries. They appeared at the 2024 Democratic National Convention and have sued Trump over comments he made about them during a 2024 presidential debate.

Salaam’s swearing in as a New York City Council member in December 2023 was a cause for celebration and reflection for the five, whom Salaam still refers to as “my brothers.” For his part, Santana saw it as part of a journey that started when they were just teenagers, telling The New York Times:

There is a lot of emotion in knowing that we are all these years later still trying to make a difference, still trying to give back.

Shortly before being sworn in to office, Salaam described his wrongful incarceration as central to his understanding of the role he had been elected to:

Everything—every single thing—that I experienced has prepared me for this. I needed to be in the belly of the beast, because now I can see that those who are closest to the pain need to have a seat at the table.