GRANT COULDN’T HAVE known when he parked his car outside Blur Bar the following night that someone would send an anonymous tip to police. That tip, a vehicle identification number, came back to Grant’s white Pontiac, which gave them their first real lead: not only did they have a name, but Grant’s physical description matched that of the killer: a Black man, 6-feet 2-inches, 225 pounds, with black hair. Detectives also learned Grant had a criminal history, including a recent one-year stint in prison for using stolen credit cards.

 

Sgt. Eli Cisneros, a 20-year veteran with the police department who had five years as a homicide investigator, pulled an old booking photo and put it in a six-person photo lineup he would show to the witnesses. It’s a technique that’s been used for decades by detectives who rely on witness identification to vet a suspect, though the practice has come under attack in recent years as more people are exonerated because of mistaken eyewitness identification.

 

Two days after Scheerhoorn’s murder, Cisneros and his partner, William Ferguson, showed the photo lineup to the seven witnesses. “This is the guy I saw stab a guy” and “the guy I circled was the guy I seen stab another guy at Blur where I work,” two of the bouncers wrote after picking Grant’s photo. Watkins wrote, “This is the guy that I saw stab the white male at Club Blur.” She would later say the attacker’s face was burned into her memory and he “looked very determined, which is the reason I have no problem recognizing his face.” In all, six of the seven witnesses picked Grant from the photo lineup. Armed with the anonymous tip and the word of the witnesses, the detectives went to the Harris County District Attorney’s Office for an arrest warrant.

 

Grant, though, has never disputed he was in the area the night of the murder. Then 33, Grant told me he would often visit the bars to get away from the people he knew and relax. The night of the murder, he met a man outside a bar less than half a mile away from Blur Bar. Raul Rodriguez had driven in from Austin that night for a weekend getaway. The two passed each other in a parking lot just after 11 when Grant stopped him and struck up a conversation. Rodriguez, a 52-year-old who had recently beaten cancer, felt a connection to the tall, handsome man standing before him. They spent the next few hours at various bars drinking and getting to know one another.

 

Around 1 the next morning, they left for an after-hours club near downtown Houston, where they stayed until the early morning. At no point, Rodriguez testified at trial, was Grant ever acting suspiciously or in a manner that suggested he killed a person. He never noticed any blood on Grant’s white shirt or jeans, and there was never a time the two weren’t together until they parted ways later that morning.

 

That made it all the more confusing for Grant as he sat in an interrogation room five days after Scheerhoorn’s murder, questioning how he got involved in a crime for which he knew he was innocent. In the interrogation room, Sgt. Cisneros shared his theory. Grant killed Scheerhoorn because Scheerhoorn owed him money for drugs. When he didn’t pay, Grant killed him. 

 

There was no physical evidence ever found at the crime scene linking Grant to the murder, yet he was charged and booked in the Harris County Jail.

​

EYEWITNESS TESTIMONY IS extremely persuasive during trial because juries often put a lot of weight in a person who testifies to the harrowing details of a crime. Jurors tend to believe that a person who experienced a traumatic event will likely remember details such as the attacker’s face or other identifiable characteristics. But as forensic science has grown and become more widely accepted in court—specifically DNA evidence—it’s also shown how memories can’t always be trusted, especially in stressful situations when a weapon is involved; details can be tainted or forgotten altogether, memories can fade over time. 

 

There was an alarming trend discovered in the early 1990s that showed many DNA exonerations were linked, at least in part, to mistaken eyewitness identification. Since 1989, when the National Registry of Exonerations began tracking wrongful convictions in the United States, more than 76 percent of DNA exonerations include witnesses who identified the wrong person. Of those, the wrongfully identified person was Black in 65 percent of the cases. 

 

Often, it’s not that witnesses are trying to deceive the jury, said Dr. Laura Smalarz, an assistant professor of psychology at Arizona State University who’s studied mistaken eyewitness identification for the past 11 years. Rather, she said, our memories don’t record like a video camera. In a situation like a stabbing, there’s a lot of movement fighting for our attention, our adrenaline flows as fear grabs hold, and our minds race to process the event as quickly as it’s happening. “In crimes in which a weapon is present,” Smalarz said, “witnesses’ memories of the culprit will tend to be weaker than if there had not been a weapon present.” Witness’ memories also tend to be less reliable when the suspect is a different race, such as in Grant’s case: five of the six eyewitnesses weren’t Black, which, Smalarz said, makes “eyewitnesses particularly susceptible to external influence.”

​

[Six eyewitnesses misidentified a murderer – here’s what went wrong in the lineup | Dr. Laura Smalarz]

 

Prior to 2011 in Texas, investigators who used photo lineups did so with few regulations. Often, the lead detective in the case created a lineup of six people with similar appearances and presented it to a witness. Though seemingly innocuous, it posed problems. Could a detective lead a witness, purposefully or not, by giving clues to the presumed suspect?

 

Texas lawmakers passed a series of guidelines for eyewitness identification in 2011, the year after Scheerhoorn was killed. Notably, when using a photo lineup, a detective not associated with the case must administer it. It’s a process known as a double-blind procedure, in which the lineup administrator doesn’t know the perceived suspect and can’t give any clues—inadvertently or not. The detective must also record the lineup and take a statement from the witness as to their confidence in their selection.

 

The guidelines are now used by the Houston Police Department, said Chief of Police Art Acevedo, who’s led the department since 2017. “Part of that is we want to avoid erroneous witness identification of the person, because, again, I really believe that the only thing worse than not catching a murderer or a violent criminal is charging an innocent person,” the chief said.

 

Those changes came too late for Grant. At his trial in December 2012, two years after Scheerhoorn’s murder, prosecutors relied heavily on the six eyewitnesses who picked him in the photo lineup. A bouncer from Blur Bar, who later quit his job because of the murder, told the jury he made sure to focus on the killer during the attack and was certain it was Grant. Another employee pointed to Grant in the courtroom and said Grant had “every intention of doing what he was doing.” Brittany Watkins told jurors Grant was “definitely the person I saw stabbing the victim that night. … And I see him in here and he is exactly what he looked like to me that night.”

 

Multiple witnesses testified that after picking Grant, Sgt. Cisneros, the lead detective, told them good job or that they picked the same suspect as other witnesses. Those types of confirmatory statements, Smalarz said, distort witness’ memories and give them false confidence about their selection, which can lead to testimony that is highly persuasive to jurors. (Cisneros testified at Grant’s trial that he didn’t recall giving that feedback to any of the witnesses. William Ferguson, his partner, said years later that Cisneros didn’t make those statements.)

 

Grant’s court-appointed attorney, Craig Still, fought with little success to discredit that testimony. When Still questioned one of the witnesses’ memories of the attack, he agreed it was a “mental blur” despite telling the jury his memory of the killer’s face was “very, very good.” Another witness said, “If I didn’t see anybody that looked like the person who committed the crime, I wouldn’t have circled the photo.”

 

Prosecutors openly admitted they didn’t have a motive. They never found the knife and there was no physical evidence linking Grant to the murder. But they questioned DNA found under Scheerhoorn’s right fingernail. Testing revealed there were two sets of DNA found: Scheerhoorn and an unknown man. The Houston Police Department Crime Lab was unable to determine whose DNA it was. Could it be Grant?

 

When questioned at trial, an analyst for the crime lab said, “No conclusions can be made regarding Lydell as a possible contributor.” 

 

“So in that circumstance, you could not exclude him from being a potential contributor to that DNA?” prosecutor Gretchen Flader asked.

 

“Correct,” the analyst said.

 

Once the state rested its case, Still called Raul Rodriguez to testify, a man who gave Grant an alibi that proved his innocence. Rodriguez told the jury of how he and Grant met and recounted their night. And no point, Rodriguez told the jury, did he ever see any blood on Grant’s clothing or shoes and never saw him acting suspiciously.

 

During the prosecutor’s questioning, however, Rodriguez struggled to remember specific details of the night. He couldn’t recall exactly what time he arrived in Houston from Austin, how long it took to drive to the bar from his hotel, and how many bars he and Grant visited before leaving for the club. Unlike the state’s witnesses who were so confident in their testimony, Flader was able to cast doubt on Rodriguez’s memory of the night.

 

“You would agree with me that it’s difficult for you to estimate the time since it was two years ago?” Flader asked him.

 

“Yes,” Rodriguez said.

 

In his closing argument, prosecutor Aaron Burdette told the jury, “If he’s not guilty of murdering Aaron Scheerhoorn, then why does all the evidence say he is?”

 

After a three-day trial, the jury found Grant guilty and sentenced him to life in prison.