The Trial of Serial's Adnan Syed

Justice served or a wrongful conviction? Decide for yourself what really happened in court

This is the first installment of a new Courthouse Stories series that will be published over the coming days and weeks. It’s designed to help you assess whether there was something unfair about Adnan Syed’s trial, as the Serial podcast led many to believe. Please subscribe to ensure you get the entire series delivered straight to your inbox.

Part 1: Opening Statements and the first witnesses

January 27, 2000

In his opening statement, Kevin Urick, Maryland Assistant State Attorney and lead prosecutor for this case, introduces himself and his co-counsel, Kathleen Murphy, to the jury. He tells the 16 men and women – twelve jurors and four alternates – that they’re going to have to be patient and listen carefully because real-life trials are not like movies with “a clear line of testimony.” Things will hop around and sometimes appear disjointed as different witnesses testify about what they know, which is usually just one piece of the puzzle. At times, the overall picture might  seem unclear, but in the end it will all come together, he says.

The confusion starts early as Urick outlines the case to come. He talks about cell towers, the exact times certain phone calls were made, and a long list of people the jury has never heard of. One of the few things that’s really clear from his opening statement is Adnan Syed’s alleged motive for the crimes with which he is charged, the kidnapping and killing of Hae Min Lee, an 18-year-old high school senior in Baltimore.

Urick says that Adnan lost it when Hae¹ split up with him. As a devoted Muslim, he broke his religion’s rules and went against his parents’ wishes to have a relationship with Hae, his first girlfriend. In the words of the prosecution, “He was living a lie, and when it ended that’s all he had left, the lie that he’d been leading. He became enraged. He felt betrayed that his honor had been besmirched. And he became very angry. And he set out to kill Hae Min Lee.”²

Urick also prepares the jury for the arrival of his star witness, Jay Wilds, who has admitted to helping Adnan bury Hae’s body and destroy evidence, and has been charged as an accessory after the fact to Hae’s murder. What kind of a person would do that, the prosecutor asks, anticipating a question he expects many jurors to raise. Urick explains that while Jay was a graduate of Woodlawn High, the school attended by the victim, the defendant and their circle of friends, unlike them, he was “not among the bright and gifted.” He was poor and lived with his mother. 

“The state,” says Urick, “has to take its witnesses where it finds them.” The jury may well not like Jay Wilds, but they should ask themselves “what was it about this individual that made him susceptible to being used and manipulated by this defendant?”

Syed’s attorney Cristina Gutierrez delivers an opening statement that is almost twice as long as Urick’s. She touches on many of the same subjects, calling Hae and Adnan “young, star-crossed lovers of different cultures, of different races, from different countries, from different families, from different religions, from one side of the street to the other.”

She talks glowingly about the gifted and talented program at Woodlawn High and the diversity of its students. She delves into the partition of India and the birth of Pakistan, home to Adnan’s parents who emigrated to the US before their son was born. She discusses, in floridly dramatic terms, the history of the Pakistani community in Baltimore and the mosque that Adnan and his family attended on Johnnycake Road. 

Gutierrez says that like many parents, Adnan’s “became concerned that for six to eight hours a day their children went from their own bosom, their own language, from their own religion, out into the world of others in the school system where they learned things foreign to them.” 

She talks about the special friendship Adnan had with Stephanie, another student in the gifted and talented program and also the longtime girlfriend of Jay Wilds. Like Urick, Gutierrez throws shade at Jay, pointing out again and again that he was not like the other kids in this story. “He’d supply the marijuana, sometimes the uppers or downers, or the designer drugs,” she says.

“He’d buy beer liquor because he was older … He worked in a porn store. He had porn videos … He was never part of the group for himself. And if Stephanie had dropped him, he never would have been called by anybody.” Gutierrez says Hae didn’t like Jay Wilds or how Adnan shielded him from being caught cheating on his girlfriend.

She questions Urick’s position that Hae’s body was buried on the day of the murder, January 13, 1999, and that Adnan could have received a phone call while he and Jay were digging her shallow grave in Baltimore’s Leakin park. “Anyone who drives through there knows one cannot talk on the phone inside the park,” she says. “The signal doesn’t hold.” 

Gutierrez also spends a good chunk of time trying to discredit Alonzo Sellers aka Mr. S, the man who found Hae’s body after he had supposedly parked by the roadside and entered the park for a quick emergency pee. His story made no sense, she says, which is why the police immediately treated him as a suspect. “They gave him a polygraph which he flunked,” she says.

That reference to a lie detector test prompts an objection from Urick, which Judge Wanda Keyes Heard says she will handle once Gutierrez has finished her opening statement. The Judge then asks much longer Adnan’s lawyer expects to be, to which Gutierriez replies 15 minutes, probably not as long as the jurors might have feared but not as short as they might have preferred. Her rambling open statement is a portent of things to come.

Eventually, Gutierrez wraps up with the claim that there is no physical evidence tying her client to the crime. “No dirt in his car. No dirt on his boots. They took everything from his house, from his car. They took out the carpet. Not a single corroborating piece of trace evidence,” she says. While Gutierrez describes the death of Hae Min Lee as a tragedy for all who loved her, she also injects a conspiratorial note, maintaining that those with the “power to clarify seek to disguise the truth.”

Before the first witness can be called, Judge Heard calls the lawyers to the bench for a conference over Gutierrez’s reference to the failed lie detector test, which prompted Urick to call for a mistrial after her opening statement. “Polygraph evidence is absolutely inadmissible. No attorney could mistake that fact,” Urick says. “To mention the polygraph test is so prejudicial and so contrary to law that it has made it impossible for the State now to get a fair trial.” But Heard disagrees and says that she will take care of the issue by reminding the jury that opening statements are neither testimony nor evidence and should not be regarded as such.

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At Adnan Syed’s first trial, where a mistrial was declared several days in and before the prosecution had finished presenting its case, the first witness was Hae’s brother, Young Lee. But at this second trial, the State’s case begins with a witness who couldn’t make it to court any other day and had to be slotted in at a less than optimal time for the prosecution. That witness is Emmanuel Obot, a Baltimore Police Department Mobile Crime Lab Technician, who is in court  to testify that on March 20, 1999 – almost three weeks after Adnan Syed’s arrest for the murder of Hae Min Lee – he was present as a search warrant was executed at the home where the defendant lived with his parents and brothers. His job was to photograph and recover the evidence, process it and then submit it to the Evidence Control Unit where it would be safely stored.

Among the items he recovered and photographed that night were a pair of Adnan’s shoes found in the basement and a textbook, with documents folded in among its pages. The latter had been stored on a bookshelf in the defendant’s bedroom. The State, explains Urick, has pulled one specific item out as a separate exhibit – a letter that Hae Min Lee wrote to Adnan, on which he later wrote “I will kill”³.

As she cross examines Obot, Gutierrez often interrupts his answers, prompting the judge to tell her to let the witness finish, an admonition that will be repeated many times throughout the trial. Also revealed is Gutierrez’s tendency to unnecessarily patronize witnesses. “Sir,” she says at one point. “Just listen to my questions. They’re very simple and they really only call for yes or no.” It comes across as a bad tactic to be rude to Obot, who is there for nothing more than to introduce various items seized from the defendant’s home into evidence.

The second witness, Detective Sergeant Kevin Forrester, was a homicide investigator at the time of the murder but has since been reassigned. On February 28, 1999, in the early hours of the morning, he, along with two other homicide detectives, had been taken to Hae’s car by Jay Wilds. It was parked in a “common area behind a row of homes, half asphalt, half grass. And there’s numerous cars parked in there,” says Forrester. “It was sitting right there.”

About half an hour after police discovered the car that had been missing since Hae Min Lee disappeared six weeks earlier, the Mobile Crime Lab began photographing  and processing  the vehicle. Investigators discovered that the windshield wiper switch was broken, but later realized that their photos  didn’t accurately illustrate the switch’s condition. “It just showed that it was a downward angle toward the floor,” says Forrester. “So at this time I determined that a videotape would better show the selector switch was broken.”

During cross examination, Gutierrez establishes that the videotape in question was made after the car had been returned to Hae’s family, the implication being that it could have been tampered with after the fact.

Day two of testimony begins with a discussion of the bad winter weather and what everyone will do in case of a storm. The judge has no heat and Gutierrez has no water. They disagree on which is worse before Gutierrez  tells Judge Heard that she would like an order prohibiting jurors from reading newspapers. This is far above and beyond the standard warning that jurors must not follow news about the case. 

“There was a coup in Pakistan about two months ago that sort of is related to the hijacking of an Indian airline and concerns about Pakistan’s control over certain nuclear weapons,” explains Gutierrez. After admitting to not being aware of the events in Pakistan, Judge Heard turns Gutierrez down but says she would be prepared to reconsider if the situation escalates. She points out that jury members were extensively screened to ensure they didn’t have any problems with Muslims or people of Middle Eastern, Asian and Pakistani background. “I don’t believe that we would have a panel member now that would be influenced by that, based on their responses or lack of responses to that issue,” says Heard.

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Hae’s brother, 17-year-old Young Lee, is called as the first witness of the day. He explains that he, his sister and mother, his grandparents and two of his cousins all lived together. On the day his sister went missing, he got a call from his cousin’s school saying the child had not been picked up. “This was unusual because my sister was supposed to pick her up every day” at around three o’clock, he says.

Young’s mother, whose English was not fluent, told him to call the LensCrafters shop where Hae worked to see if she was there and, when she wasn’t, asked her son to call the police. After making the call, he went to his sister’s room to try and find her friends’ phone numbers. He then called both Hae’s good friend, Aisha, and Adnan, whose phone number he had found in Hae’s diary on a page where Hae had written the name of Don, her new boyfriend, over and over again.

“When I called the number I [thought] I was calling Don, but after talking for a while I realized that it was Adnan,” Young explains.

“How did you realize it was Adnan?” asks prosecutor Kathleen Murphy.

“I recognized his voice.”

“What was your conversation about?”

“It was about my sister, if he knew where she was, or where she could be.”

“And did he say whether he knew where she was?”

“No.”

Several questions later, Murphy asks Lee if can recognize an item that has been marked as State’s Exhibit 2. “It’s my sister’s diary,” he answers. He knows the handwriting and also admits to having read the diary, upsetting Hae.

From a photograph, Young is also asked to identify an old  shirt of his that Hae used as a rag in her car. He confirms that the shirt, which is stained in the photograph, had not been discoloured when he last saw it. 

Knowing it is unwise to beat up on family members of the victim, Gutierrez treats Hae’s brother with respect, but many of her questions give the impression she’s on an unsuccessful fishing expedition. Consider this exchange about Hae’s relationship with her mother:

“And like most teenagers, your sister had little disagreements with your mother on a regular basis about what she was allowed to do?”

“Yes.”

“And where she was allowed to be?”

“Yes”

“And to who she was allowed to have relationships with?”

“Well, not that, really”

“Not really?”

“No”

In the end, Gutierrez learns little of consequence from Young, who is the only member of his family to testify at trial. When she winds up her questioning, the judge tells Young, whose testimony is now done, that he is free to stay in the courtroom and watch the trial alongside other members of his family.

Installment two of The Trial of Serial’s Adnan Syed will be published in a few days. If you’re looking for more Courthouse reading in the meantime, check out She said, he said, a series about a sexual assault trial. Subscribe to Courthouse Stories to ensure you never miss a trial.

1. I have followed the naming style of the podcast Serial for this series, using first names in some cases and surnames in other

2. While all quotes are accurate and chosen to represent what happened at trial, they comprise just small pieces of the transcript

3. Urick’s description is inaccurate. The actual words were “I’m going to kill”