VOTE Guilty or Innocent?

A bit about this case was posted a while back and I'm still curious how he was convicted so easily and why nobody seems interested in reviewing the case. Below are some of the details and maybe more useful comments will come from summarizing it again. The following is the best information I have found but any of it should be questioned / verified by anyone interested.

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5 Burmese refugees shared an apartment in Salt Lake city, Utah, U.S. Four of the roommates are from one ethnic and religious group and the fifth, Esar Met, is from another, the Rohingya ethnic group. Rohingyas are called one of the most persecuted minorities in the world by the UNHCR.

The four who share the same background are openly hostile to Esar Met.

A neighbor child, Hser Ner Moo, who is of the same ethnic background as the four sometimes played with Esar Met, the Rohingya. Comments from the four other roommates suggest that they do not approve of this.

*Starred items are information that was either not presented to the jury or was presented in a grossly distorted way. The jury did not have access to the videotape of the confession, nor to much of the material in the police report, both of which are available now.
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Day 1

Sometime in the late morning or early afternoon Esar Met goes to his uncle's for a visit that had been planned the previous day. At least one other person in the apartment complex is aware that he will be gone.

In the early afternoon the child tells her family that she is going out to play.

*At around 4 pm one of the four roommates returns early from work alone. The other three arrive over the next few hours.

When the child has not returned by the late afternoon her mother calls a social worker who contacts police.

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Over the next day and a half police and the FBI will search the apartment complex at least three times thoroughly. There are several dozen apartments and someone answers the door eventually at every single apartment, except the apartment where the four roommates are. There was never a good explanation given of why they did not answer the door.

At roughly 10pm the day following the disappearance, i.e., roughly 30 hours after she disappeared, an F.B.I. agent telephones a Salt Lake city police officer and tells him the child's body had been found in the one apartment that nobody had searched. In the apartment with the body are the four non Rohingya roommates and a 5th person who the F.B.I. released after only a brief questioning. Who he was and why he was released were redacted. He is not mentioned in media reports as far as I know.

The body was found in the downstairs living quarters of the Rohingya roommate, in the shower area, covered with blood and with unusually violent injuries.

~graphic~
*After the initial processing of the crime scene some police were sent back apparently to look for an object that could have been used to "rape" the child. This is significant because it suggests the crime was not so much sexual as 'made to look sexual'. In other words whoever killed her not only did it with extreme violence, as someone might do to "show who is boss", but they also wanted to give the appearance of a rape when that had not actually occured.

Whatever object was used was never found and numerous other items from the crime scene disappeared inexplicably from the reports about the crime and were never investigated, nor presented to the jury. These "unknowns" including a large bloody plastic bag found near the body, the fact that the linens downstairs were gone etc.

*As the apartment was being examined a crime scene tech found what appeared to be fresh blood stains upstairs, in the living space of the four roommates. Although this was eventually disclosed its relevancy was ignored since the tech discarded the evidence.

The same crime scene tech said that he found four drops of blood in a linear pattern on the back of Met's jacket. There are several problems with this, including the fact that he was not able to immediately identify them as blood, nor did anybody else who saw the jacket before him even note them. In other words the stains were either older dried blood or they did not exist.

The chld's body showed signs of so many severe injuries that the medical experts said she would have been dead shortly after the attack. In other words the killer was physically present within an hour of when she died.

~graphic~
However the first medical person to examine the body said the legs were so stiff they could not be bent. This was 30 or so hours after Esar Met was known to have been gone. The time that rigor mortis takes to pass varies by a number of factors. Small children and very old people pass more quickly through rigor. Someone who is struggling before death passes through rigor more quickly.

Cold temperature can slow the progression of rigor mortis, and the basement was described by everyone, including the roommates, as "cold and dark". But everyone in the apartment was a tropical Asian used to very hot climate. Further, Met owned only one jacket, a very lightweight denim jacket that can be seen in the video. In other words it is extremely likely the basement temperature was at least 50F or 60F.

"According to the ME investigator, Hser Ner Moo died sometime between 5pm on the day she disappeared and 1130am the next morning". This by itself, with no other evidence considered, would seem to exclude Met as a likely suspect. He was almost certainly gone at least several hours and probably much more when the death occurred.

The time of death has significant implications. Salt Lake city has had quite a few high profile child sex abuse and murder cases. One journalist refered to it as almost an annual event in that city. When Hser Ner Moo was abducted the governor and other local personalities quickly put pressure on authorities to solve the case quickly. When they solved it "instantly", without having even done a real investigation, the political pressures were gone.

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When the FBI had gathered up the five people in the apartment they briefly interrogated them and then went to look for Esar Met. They found him at his family's house and arrested him with a fair amount of excessive drama, including announcing to the press that he had tried to flee, which the police later admitted was not true.

Met was interrogated and a video was made of the interrogation.

*Anybody can watch the video and see that there are numerous problems with the "confession", including that Met is not able to accurately describe a single aspect of the crime until the F.B.I. agent tells him. The confession is so ridiculous it is almost funny. The lawyers on both sides of the case filed to suppress the video so it woud not be available for the jury to view.

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Under the fingernails of the deceased child was microscopic skin cell DNA from a number of people. Instead of isolating all the samples, forensic experts were told to only look for certain specific people's DNA. A small child will have the DNA from numerous people under their fingernails, including friends they play sports with, family and anyone else they touch with their fingers. Because Esar Met had played with the child before the crime it is likely there was some of his microscopic skin DNA under her fingernails before the crime. It follows that if his DNA was there before the crime it was also there after the crime, along with the DNA of others. In other words this "DNA evidence does not indicate guilt or innocence. It is completely meaningless and not "DNA proof of guilt" as the prosecution suggested.

There was one DNA sample taken from the crime scene that contained the blood of the victim along with the blood of an unknown male who was not any of the people in the apartment.

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After 6 years of investigating the case, not only were investigators not able to find any additional evidence, but it seems that some of the original evidence, perhaps exculpatory, may have disappeared.