In the fall of 1996, in the small community of Rome, Georgia, the life of 15-year-old Brian Bowling was cut short by a single gunshot to the head. On the evening of October 18, Brian was in his bedroom, talking on the phone with his girlfriend. He told her he was playing a game of Russian roulette with a. 38-caliber Smith & Wesson revolver that his best friend, 17-year-old Cain “Josh” Storey, had brought over to his family's mobile home. Moments later, the phone line went silent after the sound of a gunshot. Storey, who was in the room with Brian, initially told Brian's family and the police that his friend had accidentally shot himself. The Caucasian male teenager died from his injuries the following day.
Initially, the authorities treated the case as a tragic accident, and Storey was charged with manslaughter. However, at the urging of Brian’s distraught family, the investigation was reopened as a homicide. This led to the arrest of not only Storey but also another friend, Darrell Lee Clark, who was also 17 at the time. Investigators began to build a murder case against the two teenagers, alleging they had conspired to kill Brian because he knew about a theft they had committed. The prosecution's case rested heavily on the testimony of two key witnesses. One was a woman who claimed that months after the shooting, at a party, she overheard Storey and Clark discussing a plan to murder Brian. The other was a man with hearing and speech impairments who, according to police, identified Clark as someone he saw running through the Bowling's yard on the night of the shooting. Despite a lack of physical evidence, including no autopsy being performed and no gunshot residue found on Storey's hands, both teenagers were convicted of murder and conspiracy to commit murder in 1998 and sentenced to life in prison.
For over two decades, Cain Joshua Storey and Darrell Lee Clark maintained their innocence while serving their life sentences. Their case eventually gained the attention of the true-crime podcast 'Proof'. The podcast's investigation uncovered new evidence that unraveled the prosecution's case. The podcasters interviewed the two key witnesses from the trial and found that the woman who hosted the party had been coerced by police into giving false testimony, with threats of having her children taken away if she didn't comply. They also discovered that the hearing and speech-impaired man had been misunderstood, as he had witnessed a different, unrelated shooting years earlier and was confusing the two events; he had never actually seen anyone in the Bowlings' yard that night.
Armed with this new evidence, the Georgia Innocence Project fought for the two men's freedom. In December 2022, after spending 25 years behind bars for a crime they did not commit, both Storey and Clark were released from prison. Clark was fully exonerated of all charges. Storey, as part of a deal with prosecutors, pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter for bringing the gun to Brian's house that night and received a sentence of 10 years, which he had already served. Following his release, Clark filed a lawsuit against Floyd County and the investigators involved, alleging police misconduct and the fabrication of evidence that led to his wrongful conviction.
