Physical Address
304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124
LANSING, Mich. – As Annie Harrison looked at the email from the lab, she felt sick. It had happened again.
The police hadn’t pursued a case against Marshawn Curtis back in 2012, and now, nearly a decade later, his DNA had matched evidence in a second rape case.
She worried there could be even more victims out there.
If the case went to trial, one witness could be enough. If Joslyn Phillips testified that Curtis had raped her in 2012, and a jury believed her, they could convict him on that evidence alone. Jurors, though, can be swayed by a defendant’s claims of consent. If they’re not sure who’s telling the truth in a “he said, she said” case, the law requires them to vote “not guilty.”
Harrison had picked up Phillips’ case as part of her new job on a Michigan task forcereexamining cold-case sexual assaults. Because the second rape complaint had been filed in Georgia, far outside her jurisdiction, there was nothing she could do to get justice for the victim there. But she might be able to use that case against Curtis.
Under both federal court rules and Michigan law, if someone has been accused of sexual misconduct in the past – even if he wasn’t charged – the judge in a rape case can sometimes allow those past accusers to testify. One victim might leave room for reasonable doubt. But if more come forward, they can sway the jury.
So Harrison dove into Curtis’ background – where she found one complaint after another.
A month after Phillips fled his house, Curtis invited a 15-year-old girl over to party. The girl told Harrison that Curtis talked about wanting to get her pregnant, too. This time, it happened.
Because of her age, having sex with the girl was illegal. But even after a paternity test proved Curtis was the father, her parents said they didn’t want to pursue a statutory rape case.
Harrison found another police report, this one from February 2018. It said a security camera in Curtis’ apartment building had captured him head-butting a girlfriend in the face, dragging her around by the hair and repeatedly punching her.
The woman refused to speak with police. The prosecutor, Aylysh Gallagher, made the bold move of putting Curtis on trial for domestic violence without the victim’s testimony. But the jury found him not guilty.
Harrison found a string of other incidents where Curtis hadn’t physically assaulted anybody. But when she put them together, what she saw was terrifying.
On Aug. 4, 2019, a Michigan State student named Hannah was walking home from a bar around midnight when Curtis fell into step beside her. At first, she tried to make friendly conversation. He mentioned wanting to go to McDonald’s, so she gave him directions. But he didn’t make the turn. Instead, he stayed close as he took out his penis and stroked it.
Hannah pretended not to notice.
Her heart was beating faster, and she was having trouble breathing. This was not a good situation. She was small. It was dark. He could be a rapist, and there was no one else around.
Hannah had her phone, but what if she took it out to call for help and he grabbed it? She wanted to run home and lock herself inside, but then he would know where she lived.
She stopped on a corner. Curtis remained beside her, his shoulder nearly touching hers, as he continued to fondle himself.
Out of nowhere, a car drove up to the stop sign. Hannah bolted out in front of it, pounding on the hood so it wouldn’t drive away. The man in the passenger seat rolled down his window.
This guy is following me, she said. Will you stay with me?
As the words came out, she realized the situation could go from bad to worse – from one sketchy guy on the street to more of them in a car.
Instead, the guys in the car offered to help. Before they had a chance to dial 911, a squad car pulled over nearby.
Curtis was arrested and charged with aggravated indecent exposure.
That was just one of five times – in as many months – women had accused him of sexual misconduct short of rape.
He followed a woman into the ladies’ room at a bookstore, where he’d planted a camera. Store surveillance video also showed him masturbating. As part of a plea deal, he was convicted in that case and Hannah’s and was sentenced to probation and four months in jail.
He approached a woman as she walked out of a mall bathroom, telling her he’d filmed her as she peed. She didn’t believe him until he told her he liked her blue underwear. No conviction.
He sat uncomfortably close to a high schooler in the public library, and then followed her from the children’s section to the adults’, where he told her he’d taken a picture of her crotch and asked if he could see her toenail polish. No conviction.
Two blocks from the courthouse, he’d catcalled a prospective juror so she would see him masturbating on the street. He didn’t stop when she yelled, and he hid under a parked pickup when the police chased him with their guns drawn. He was arrested, but only on an unrelated warrant.
In some of the cases, no investigator had ever spoken with the victim. Harrison would call them all. If the judge permitted it, their testimony would do a lot to bolster Phillips’ credibility with a jury.
And there was one more potential witness Harrison needed to find: Emily Zaballos, the Georgia woman who had accused Curtis of rape. The judge would certainly allow her to testify – but only if Harrison could persuade her to do it.
The email notifying Harrison of the DNA match in Gwinnett County, Georgia, included the name of the lead investigator there, Angela Carter. Harrison got her on the phone.
I’m calling about a rape complaint you had against a man named Marshawn Curtis, she said.
To Harrison, Carter seemed surprised. That complaint was unfounded, she replied.
Carter told Harrison the woman who filed the complaint had changed her story several times.
The rape kit had only been sent to the lab because under Georgia law, any time someone reports a rape to police, their kit must be analyzed. But Carter had closed the case before the results came back.
As Harrison reviewed the case materials from Georgia, she learned that Carter had talked with Curtis on the phone. He’d denied having sex with Zaballos, let alone raping her. Carter had even gotten a video he shot earlier in the evening, which showed Zaballos slurring her words and not making much sense.
Carter had questioned Zaballos the night she reported being raped and followed up by phone. A month later, they talked again at the police station. A camera was rolling as Carter confronted Zaballos about her inconsistencies.
“So, the reason I wanted to bring you in here is because I reviewed everything that we have so far. I talked to Curtis and everything like that,” Carter told Zaballos. “I reviewed the video camera footage from the officer. You told him something different than you told me. … I need you to walk me through literally from when he got there to when he left. Everything that happened.”
Carter wanted to know: Did Zaballos have anything to drink that night? How much did she have to drink? Why didn’t she ask him to leave? Why didn’t she make him leave?
With every answer, Zaballos’ voice grew quieter. The pauses between her answers grew longer. Tears formed in her eyes.
And then, from Carter: “Let me ask you a serious question: Do you want to prosecute on this?”
Zaballos answered: “I don’t want him to think this behavior is OK. But I just don’t want to f—ing relive this.”
Carter interrupted: “So how do you want to go forward? What do you want to do from here?”
Zaballos was crying now, blowing her nose. “I don’t want to go through all this all over again, over and over, because at this point – “
“I need an answer,” Carter insisted. “Do you want him to go to jail? Do you want to prosecute for this?”
Zaballos sniffled. Took a deep breath. “I don’t want to go through this. … This is just too much for me right now.”
“So you don’t want to prosecute for this?”
Another sniffle. A sigh. “No.” A pause. A whisper: “I want it to go away.”
“All right. I see you’re upset. Do you have any more questions for me?”
“No.”
“So at this point, what will happen is the case will be unfounded,” Carter told her. “It will be closed, and then no one should contact you in reference to this anymore. OK?”
The interview lasted 13 minutes.
When Harrison watched the video several weeks later, it was clear to her that Carter didn’t believe Zaballos had been raped. But Harrison had every reason to believe it.
In January 2022, she and her partner, Joseph Merritt, got on a plane to Georgia. Harrison had found several possible addresses for Zaballos in suburban Atlanta. The two detectives headed for the first one straight from the airport.
The winter sun was low in the sky by the time they knocked on the door. Zaballos’ ex-husband opened it. Zaballos no longer lived there, he said, and he didn’t want to share her new address with random strangers. Instead, he gave them her phone number.
They drove to a second house, but Zaballos wasn’t there. By then, it was dark. At this rate, they could drive around all night tipping off the neighborhood that they wanted to talk to her, and still not find her. Merritt pulled their rental car to the side of the road while Harrison took out her phone and punched in Zaballos’ number.
Voicemail.
A few minutes later, she tried again. Voicemail. Voicemail. Voicemail. Harrison didn’t want to leave a message. She knew it would be better if they had a conversation.
She dialed again. Zaballos finally picked up.
I’m a detective in Michigan, Harrison told her. Do you remember making a police report in April 2020, when you went to the hospital?
Zaballos did.
I’m investigating the same person, and I would like to talk to you, Harrison said.
Zaballos agreed but wanted to do it at the police station. And she needed some time to pull herself together.
They met about an hour later.
The DNA from your rape kit matched a cold case I’m working in Michigan, Harrison told her.
What? Zaballos asked, shocked. My rape kit? Mine? Are you sure? They told me it was inconclusive.
Harrison apologized, as she does to every victim.
I can’t believe I let her talk me out of it, Zaballos said.
She shook her head again and again.
I’m not crazy. I know I’m not. I’m not crazy. I was raped. I knew he was dangerous. I knew it.
Zaballos met Curtis on the dating app Plenty of Fish in the spring of 2020.
Thirty-two and divorced, Zaballos invited Curtis over while her three daughters were with their father.
Zaballos thought she and Curtis would hang out and get to know each other, have a few drinks, maybe watch a movie. When he didn’t arrive when he said he would, she put on her sleep shorts and started drinking without him.
Sometime after midnight, Curtis showed up, and he was sloppy drunk. He was handsy from the beginning and made her uncomfortable. Zaballos tried to cut the tension by inviting him to see some newborn kittens in a box in her bedroom.
He started making comments about her body, and she told him to calm down. Then he put his hand down her shorts.
Zaballos slapped him. Get off me!
She slid off the bed and walked to the bathroom. It was the middle of the night. He needed to sober up. They should go to sleep, and everything would be better in the morning.
When she got back to the bedroom, Curtis, five years younger, seemed contrite.
Can I talk to you? he asked.
Yes, she said, but keep your hands off me. I don’t want to have sex with you. What you did, it was just disrespectful. Would you want some guy to treat your daughters like that?
She thought she had gotten through to him. She thought he would pass out and sleep it off.
She was wrong.
Before she could comprehend what was happening, he was raping her.
She shouted at him to stop. She locked her legs as tightly as she could, but he pried them apart. She thrashed beneath him, her arms landing blows.
Get off me! Get off me!
He finally did, and immediately headed for the door.
Zaballos ran upstairs, shaking and choked out what had happened to her roommate, who called the police. After they had asked her lots of questions, her roommate drove her to a rape crisis center to have a rape kit exam done.
Afterward, Zaballos signed a form releasing the evidence to law enforcement. She thought they would put Curtis away.
Instead, the Gwinnett County police closed the case as “unfounded.“ As far as they were concerned, there had never been a rape at all.
Harrison thought Zaballos was telling the truth. She had flown all the way to Georgia to prove it. And she needed Zaballos to come to Michigan to testify.
Please tell me he didn’t hurt anybody else, Zaballos implored.
But Harrison couldn’t. She knew what Curtis had done to Joslyn Phillips.
By the time Harrison knocked on her door in 2022, Phillips was raising a daughter alone. She lived out in the country, where she could keep her interactions with other people to a minimum. Ten years had passed since she’d filed a police report about being raped.
When Harrison asked if she remembered making that report, Phillips started to cry.
I’ve spent years trying to move past this, and now you’re here? she asked.
She had told the Lansing police she wanted to move forward with prosecution back in 2012, but it hadn’t happened.
Another officer had come to see her several years later. That’s when she found out her rape kit – like hundreds of thousands of others nationwide – hadn’t been tested at the time of the crime.
When it finally was, the DNA in it matched Curtis, the cop had informed her. That came as no surprise – Phillips had always known his name, and she’d given it to the police right away.
That officer had also asked if she wanted to move forward with prosecution. Again, she said yes. Again, it didn’t happen.
Harrison apologized for how poorly Phillips had been treated. She told Phillips she wanted to hold Curtis accountable.
Are you saying you’re going to put him in jail? Phillips asked.
Yes, Harrison replied. Is that what you want?
Phillips’ reply was the same as it had always been: Yes.
During a follow-up call a few days later, Phillips did a lot of yelling. About how the rape ruined her life. About how no one believed her. About how Curtis continued to harass her for years and nobody cared.
I deserve justice! she shouted. He’s been out there hurting other people, and it’s your fault!
Harrison knew she was part of the system that let Phillips down. She was part of the system that let Curtis get away with it.
But there was a key difference: From the minute she read the police reports, she believed the victims.
So she didn’t send Curtis a letter asking him to come to the station for a chat. She didn’t call him with a few quick questions. She wrote up a warrant for his arrest.
UNTESTED, Chapter 2 | Next: Chapter 3, The Trial. | Previously: Chapter 1, The Case. | About this story. | 8 lessons learned.
Gina Barton is an investigative reporter at USA TODAY. She can be reached at (262) 757-8640 or [email protected]. Follow her on X @writerbarton.
English