Keith Sylvester spent 15 months behind bars after being accused of strangling his mother and stepfather and lighting their northwest Atlanta home on fire.
During that time, he faced murder, arson and aggravated assault charges while police theorized that he committed the crime for insurance money.
But there was one big problem. He was innocent.
According to court records, all charges against Sylvester were dropped in March, allowing him to walk out of the Fulton County Jail as a free man for the first time since 2018. Another man, 44-year-old Cornelius Muckle, took Sylvester’s place in jail last week to face charges in the couple’s death.
Deborah, 65, and Harry Hubbard, 67, were found dead inside their burning home on Harvel Drive in July 2018. The couple had moved from Buffalo, N.Y., less than a year before their deaths.
Credit: Channel 2 Action News
Credit: Channel 2 Action News
Sylvester, who was 47 at the time, spoke to Atlanta police detectives at the scene, but he wasn’t arrested until six months later.
At the time, police said Sylvester was the only one with access to the house’s keys and that all the doors were locked, with no signs of forced entry. Police also accused him of bringing moth balls, candles and rubbing alcohol into the home, claiming those could be used to start the fire.
According to an affidavit, police said Sylvester was the sole beneficiary of his mother’s homeowners policy. But attorney Zack Greenamyre, who now represents Sylvester, said that is not true, providing AJC.com with a homeowners policy that does not list his client among the beneficiaries. Only the Hubbards were named.
It took several months, but the Fulton County District Attorney’s Office eventually learned that another man, Muckle, was in the home that day.
“The result of this investigation shows that an assailant, who was unnamed in the original police investigation, was, in fact, in the house of Deborah and Harry Hubbard 20 minutes before a 911 call was placed regarding the fire that caused their deaths,” DA Paul Howard said in an emailed statement.
Howard said the information was learned through the execution of a Google geofence search warrant, a court-approved order requiring the tech company to search for mobile devices within a specific area. The warrants are typically used to help investigators determine if a suspect was present during the commission of a crime. The DA said it took Google “nearly nine months to send that information” to his investigators.
“The results of this search warrant identified Cornelius Muckle as the culprit whose phone was inside the house at the time of the crimes,” the statement said. “Additionally, the Google information also revealed that Muckle pawned several items belonging to the Hubbards two days after the homicide.”
On March 4, the charges against Sylvester were dropped and Muckle became the new target for authorities. He was arrested last Thursday on two counts of felony murder and remains in jail without bond, records show.
Further records on Muckle’s charges were not immediately available.
According to county court records, Sylvester filed suits against seemingly everyone involved in his case for damages. The lengthy list of defendants included Howard, a deputy DA, two Atlanta police detectives, the Fulton County Medical Examiner, the Fulton County Jail, the chief jailer and the Atlanta Public Defender’s Office.
Greenamyre said the suits against everyone except for the two police detectives, James Barnett and Darren Smith, are no longer active.
According to a complaint, Sylvester claims the detectives “obtained a warrant that obviously lacked probable cause on its face” and did so “based on deliberate and reckless material falsehoods and omissions.” The detectives are accused of knowing that Sylvester had not entered the home for an eight-hour period before the fire was set.
The complaint also mentions the rubbing alcohol and moth balls, claiming that the former was recovered unopened and the latter was at Sylvester’s home. The detectives also allegedly omitted that a K-9 trained to detect accelerants did not detect any evidence of arson from their warrant affidavit.
“Barnett and Smith deliberately omitted from the warrant affidavit the known facts showing that there was no evidence of smoke, fire, accelerant, blood, struggle, or anything else incriminating on Plaintiff’s clothing or person, even though they knew such evidence would be present had Plaintiff committed the strangulations and arson as set forth in the warrant affidavit,” the complaint said.
The 19-page complaint also claims the two victims were not strangled but died of smoke inhalation.
The case is still pending.
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