In the summer of 1994, a young Japanese man named Kei Sunada, who was 22 years old, was living in the LeFrak City apartment complex in Queens, New York. On the night of August 4th, as he was returning home, his life was tragically cut short. Sunada was found on the landing of a fourth-floor stairwell in his building with a fatal gunshot wound to his head.
He succumbed to his injuries three days later, leaving behind a case that would take nearly three decades to untangle.
The initial investigation by the New York Police Department quickly focused on two local teenagers, 20-year-old Armond McCloud and 19-year-old Reginald Cameron. The two were arrested just four days after the shooting. The basis for their arrest was a statement from another teenager in an unrelated robbery case who claimed to have heard that someone matching McCloud's description was responsible. Following hours of intense interrogation without legal counsel, both McCloud and Cameron confessed to their involvement in the botched robbery and murder of Sunada. These confessions would become the sole evidence against them. A third individual, Kendo MacDonald, was also implicated by the confessions but the focus of the prosecution remained on McCloud and Cameron.
Based almost entirely on his coerced confession, Armond McCloud was convicted of murder in 1996 and sentenced to a term of 25 years to life in prison. To avoid a similar fate, Reginald Cameron pleaded guilty to first-degree robbery and was sentenced to over eight years in prison before being paroled. For years, both men maintained their innocence, their claims falling on deaf ears within the justice system. The tide began to turn with a re-examination of the case by the Queens District Attorney's Conviction Integrity Unit. The unit's investigation uncovered credible new evidence that pointed to the innocence of both McCloud and Cameron.
The reinvestigation revealed that the confessions were unreliable and had been elicited by a detective with a known history of obtaining false confessions in high-profile cases, including the 'Central Park Five' case. A new crime scene reconstruction determined that the shooting could only have happened in the stairwell where Sunada’s body was found, which contradicted the details provided in the coerced confessions that stated the crime occurred in the hallway. These discrepancies, coupled with the detective's history of misconduct, led the District Attorney's office to conclude that the convictions were wrongful. In August of 2023, after serving decades in prison for a crime they did not commit, Armond McCloud and Reginald Cameron were officially exonerated, and their convictions were vacated. The true perpetrator of the murder of Kei Sunada was never identified.
