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| 05-02-22 03:58am - 966 days | Original Post - #1 | |
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LKLK (0)
Active User Posts: 1,583 Registered: Jun 26, '19 Location: CA |
The law grinds slow. But it is majestic. Its will be done. Never question the power and force of the law. ------ ------ The Tragic Case of the Wrong Thomas James Is Finally Righted After 32 years, a Florida man sentenced to life in prison for murder because he had the same name as another suspect is finally free. By Tristram Korten April 28, 2022 Thomas James walked into Miami’s Richard E. Gerstein Justice building shortly after 11 o'clock in the morning yesterday wearing a red inmate uniform, his head shaved smooth. Within the hour he was putting on street clothes for the first time in 32 years and walking out into the bright afternoon. Prosecutors had moved to vacate Thomas's 1991 murder conviction following a year-long review of his case. That review followed a GQ story I published last July that uncovered evidence showing James was the victim of mistaken identity. James’s journey to this point had been incredible. Even though police never talked to him, he was charged with murder in a 1990 apartment robbery in Miami, because, as he later found out, he had the same name as the suspect they were looking for. It was a simple and cruel error with devastating consequences. James was sentenced to life in prison, where he began to investigate his case, and then exhausted his appeals trying to point out the mistake that had landed him there. From behind bars, he improbably located the namesake suspect the police never found — an extraordinary discovery that helped set into motion the events that would culminate in his release. Yet the end to James’ confinement came abruptly and almost anti-climatically. After months and months of investigation, the State Attorney's Office suddenly notified James's lawyer, Natlie Figgers, on Tuesday that they would announce their decision in the case the next day. On Wednesday, after stating “we have determined that Thomas Raynard James is actually innocent,” Deputy Chief Assistant State Attorney Christine Zahralban asked Miami Dade Circuit Court Judge Miguel de la O to “vacate the judgment and allow him to be freed.” The judge talked a little about how “bittersweet” the moment was for both James, who lost so much of his life, and for the family of the victim, who now don't have justice. Then he granted the state’s motion. “Mr. James, at this time you have no further business in front of this court,” he said. It was over. James's long journey to prove his innocence, which would have broken lesser men, had ended. He was a free man. He stood up to start another journey into a world very different from the one he left. James would not be going back to prison to collect any of his belongings. Everything important to him he took to court that morning: pictures, notes on a book he wants to write, notes on businesses he wants to start, some legal documents. Three decades stuffed in a blue mesh bag. As he changed out of his jail clothes for the last time at the State Attorney's Office across the street from the courthouse, he was briefly and literally emerging naked into a new world. His family had brought new threads for him to wear. A gray sweatshirt, a t-shirt with “Versace” on it, dark slacks, new leather tennis shoes. It must have felt good. Back in the day, when James was awaiting trial in a Miami jail, families were allowed to drop off street clothes for inmates to wear. Sammy Wilson, who served time with James, remembers a young man who kept up appearances. James “always dressed fresh,” Wilson told me. “His pants, his shirt, his shoes always matched. He liked that Yankees blue. He was GQ.” Wilson, a gravel-voiced cynic, played an integral part in helping James, speaking to him regularly throughout his incarceration. He's the one who told me about the case and put me in touch with James, who had been reaching out to media for years with no luck. Wilson was in the courtroom Wednesday for the hearing. “Damndest thing,” he recalled. “When they announce he free, tears came out of my eyes. I didn't even cry when I went to prison. Man, I must be getting soft.” James didn't cry. After suffering for so long, he is careful not to let his emotions overwhelm him. I know because I've been talking to him for two years now as we shepherded his story into the light, then waited to see if anything would happen. I was not in Miami for the hearing, but I made him tell me in detail his movements that day. Some of that was cover. Given the magnitude of his injustice, the emotionally safe spot for both of us has always been digging for facts. Now was no different, except instead of witnesses, it was about the weather. James stepped from the State Attorney's Office into a bright, sunny Miami afternoon, with a cooling breeze. What were those first moments of freedom like? “It was myriad emotions all at one time,” he said. Was there an overriding one? “Joy, it gotta be joy. A sigh of relief,” he said. “Everything hasn't sunk in yet, it's been a long time.” It has. A very long time. The road to James’ unjust incarceration is complicated … and not. It boils down to a 1990 apartment robbery that left 57-year-old Francis McKinnon dead from a gunshot wound to the head. From there, a Metro-Dade Police detective named Kevin Conley heard from witnesses and the tip line that “Thomas James” was involved. So he went to the records department at headquarters and pulled up a mug shot of a Thomas James. (He later said he didn't remember if there were any other mug shots with the same name.) One witness, who had never met James before, identified him as the shooter. There was no other evidence against him, no fingerprints, footprints, DNA, or ballistics. He met his public defender about three times before trial. I started looking into the case in March of 2020 after speaking with Wilson, who had been a prior street source. I talked to James, who guided me through his version of events; to witnesses; and eventually to the neighborhood man he was confused with, the other Thomas “Tommy” James, who had a history of robbery. The other James admitted to me that he was the one police were actually looking for, even though he couldn't have committed the crime because he was in jail at the time, which I confirmed. (Another suspect, who is already in prison on unrelated charges, has been identified by the State’s Attorneys office.) I went over statements and depositions to identify all the moments in which it was clear witnesses were talking about a different Thomas James. All the moments police, prosecutors and even the defense attorney missed. All of those moments that conspired to put a poor black man represented by a harried public defender in prison for life after a trial that lasted two and a half days, with no evidence other than an eyewitness who didn't know Jay but picked him out of a police lineup. In March of 2021 I contacted prosecutors and alerted them to what was in the story. In June they opened their investigation. It was a long wait from there. Key to keeping attention on the case was Al Singleton, a retired homicide detective with the Miami-Dade Police Department who read my story. Singleton was in homicide when McKinnon was killed, but he didn't remember the case, let alone work it. A few years ago he had “reluctantly and recently come to the conclusion that we convict a lot more innocent people than we ever imagined,” and he started talking to prosecutors at the State’s Attorney’s Office, only to find they knew nothing about the case or the story. His outrage grew as he began contacting county officials, police and prosecutors, and found no sense of urgency. His masterstroke of disruption was contacting Melba Pearson, a civil rights attorney and prosecutor who ran (and lost) on a justice reform platform in the last State’s Attorney election. She was as alarmed as he was and contacted James's attorney about organizing a press conference to put pressure on the prosecutors (Figgers withdrew support for it at the last minute). Pearson rolled on, holding a symposium on the case at Florida International University, generating coverage and a “day of action,” and eventually cooperating with Figgers’ on a streetside rally for James. The State Attorney's Office seemed to take offense that civil rights advocates might not trust their institution, and pushed back against the perception they were dragging things out. Prosecutors released their report the day of James's hearing. But to their credit, they did a thorough job. They confirmed the suspect's death, and interviewed the other Thomas “Tommy” James, leading to identification of the last suspect. (Tommy told me he didn't know who the shooter was, but I suspected differently). There currently is not enough evidence to charge that man in McKinnon's death. The final piece of the puzzle came when the main witness recanted her testimony. She no longer believed it was Thomas James she saw in the apartment that night. In the end, Pearson and Singleton believe their pressure campaign worked, while State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle maintains her office held its ground against outside pressure, and took the time needed to do a thorough investigation. At this point, it's hard to argue with the results. James is free. Justice of sorts is served. And although this is beyond bittersweet for James, a terrible wrong has been made right. On that sunny afternoon of freedom, James's family, his mother Doris, his cousins Santay, Charles and Sankavia, and his legal team whisked him over the causeway straddling Biscayne Bay to the Miami Beach restaurant Yardbird. There, surrounded by those who have stayed with him through a terrible journey, he ordered his first meal as a free man – country fried chicken with mashed potatoes and sweet corn. | |
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| 05-02-22 11:48am - 965 days | #2 | |
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LKLK (0)
Active User Posts: 1,583 Registered: Jun 26, '19 Location: CA |
Coverup, or bungled investigation into the death of Robert Kennedy? -------- -------- Retropolis Who killed Bobby Kennedy? His son RFK Jr. doesn’t believe it was Sirhan Sir... This article was published more than 4 years ago Retropolis Who killed Bobby Kennedy? His son RFK Jr. doesn’t believe it was Sirhan Sirhan. By Tom Jackman June 5, 2018 Sen. Robert F. Kennedy lies wounded on the floor of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles on June 5, 1968. His wife, Ethel, is at lower left. (Bettman Archive/Getty Images) LOS ANGELES — Just before Christmas, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. pulled up to the massive Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility, a California state prison complex in the desert outside San Diego that holds nearly 4,000 inmates. Kennedy was there to visit Sirhan B. Sirhan, the man convicted of killing his father, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, nearly 50 years ago. While his wife, the actress Cheryl Hines, waited in the car, Kennedy met with Sirhan for three hours, he revealed to The Washington Post last week. It was the culmination of months of research by Kennedy into the assassination, including speaking with witnesses and reading the autopsy and police reports. “I got to a place where I had to see Sirhan,” Kennedy said. He would not discuss the specifics of their conversation. But when it was over, Kennedy had joined those who believe there was a second gunman, and that it was not Sirhan who killed his father. “I went there because I was curious and disturbed by what I had seen in the evidence,” said Kennedy, an environmental lawyer and the third oldest of his father’s 11 children. “I was disturbed that the wrong person might have been convicted of killing my father. My father was the chief law enforcement officer in this country. I think it would have disturbed him if somebody was put in jail for a crime they didn’t commit.” Kennedy, 64, said he doesn’t know if his involvement in the case will change anything. But he now supports the call for a reinvestigation of the assassination — which is led by Paul Schrade, who also was shot in the head as he walked behind Kennedy in the pantry of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles but survived. Did L.A. police and prosecutors bungle the Bobby Kennedy assassination? His sister. former Maryland lieutenant governor Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, is now expressing doubts, too. “Bobby makes a compelling case,” she told The Post. “I think [the investigation] should be reopened.” Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in New York in 2017. (Evan Vucci/AP) Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was just 14 when he lost his father. Even now, people tell him how much Bobby Kennedy meant to them. RFK’s death — five years after his brother, President John F. Kennedy, was gunned down in Dallas and two months after civil rights leader the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed in Memphis — devastated a country already beset by chaos. In 1968, the Vietnam War raged, American cities had erupted in riots after MLK’s assassination and tensions between war protesters and supporters were growing uglier. Robert F. Kennedy’s newly launched presidential bid had raised hopes that the New York Democrat and former attorney general could somehow unite a divided nation. The gunshots fired that June night changed all that. Though Sirhan admitted at his trial in 1969 that he shot Kennedy, he claimed from the start that he had no memory of doing so. And midway through Sirhan’s trial, prosecutors provided his lawyers with an autopsy report that launched five decades of controversy: Kennedy was shot at point-blank range from behind, including a fatal shot behind his ear. But Sirhan, a 24-year-old Palestinian immigrant, was standing in front of him. Was there a second gunman? The debate rages to this day. The moments surrounding RFK's assassination Sen. Robert F. Kennedy (D-N.Y.) was shot and killed in 1968, while running for President, but 50 years later, doubts linger on who pulled the trigger. (Video: Joyce Koh/The Washington Post) But the legal system has not entertained doubts. A jury convicted Sirhan of first-degree murder and sentenced him to death in 1969, which was commuted to a life term in 1972. Sirhan’s appeals have been rejected at every level, as recently as 2016, even with the courts considering new evidence that has emerged over the years that as many as 13 shots were fired — Sirhan’s gun held only eight bullets — and that Sirhan may have been subjected to coercive hypnosis, in a real-life version of “The Manchurian Candidate.” His case is closed. His lawyers are now launching a long-shot bid to have the Inter-American Court of Human Rights hold an evidentiary hearing, while Schrade is hoping for a group such as the Innocence Project to take on the case. A spokesman for the Innocence Project said that the organization does not discuss cases at the consideration stage. In the final court rejection of Sirhan’s appeals, U.S. Magistrate Judge Andrew J. Wistrich ruled, “Even if the second shooter’s bullet was the one that killed Senator Kennedy, [Sirhan] would be liable [for murder] as an aider and abettor.” And if Sirhan was unaware of the second shooter, Wistrich wrote that the scenario of a second gunman who shot Kennedy “at close range with the same type of gun and ammunition as [Sirhan] was using, but managed to escape the crowded room without notice of almost any of the roomful of witnesses, lacks any evidentiary support.” ‘Is everybody okay?’ On June 5, 1968, Kennedy had just won the California Democratic presidential primary and delivered a victory speech to a delirious crowd. At 12:15 a.m., the 42-year-old candidate and Schrade left the celebration, walking through the hotel pantry en route to a news conference. Schrade was a regional director of the United Auto Workers who had helped Kennedy round up labor support, and Kennedy had singled him out for thanks in his victory speech moments earlier. Advertisement Schrade, now 93, still recalls the scene in the pantry vividly. “He immediately started shaking hands” with kitchen workers, Schrade said of Kennedy. “The TV lights went on. I got hit. I didn’t know I was hit. I was shaking violently, and I fell. Then Bob fell. I saw flashes and heard crackling. The crackling actually was all the other bullets being fired.” Witnesses reported that Kennedy said, “Is everybody okay? Is Paul all right?” Kennedy was still conscious as his wife, Ethel, pregnant with their 11th child, rushed to his side. He lived for another day and died at 1:44 a.m. June 6, 1968. JFK assassination conspiracy theories: The grassy knoll, Umbrella Man, LBJ and Ted Cruz’s dad Schrade was shot above the forehead but the bullet bounced off his skull. Four other people, including ABC News producer William Weisel, were also wounded. All survived. Sirhan was captured immediately; he had a .22-caliber revolver in his hand. Karl Uecker, an Ambassador Hotel maitre d’ who was escorting Kennedy through the pantry, testified that he grabbed Sirhan’s wrist and pinned it down after two shots and that Sirhan continued to fire wildly while being held down, never getting close to Kennedy. An Ambassador waiter and a Kennedy aide also said they tackled Sirhan after two or three shots. Advertisement Several other witnesses also said he was not close enough to place the gun against Kennedy’s back, where famed Los Angeles coroner Thomas Noguchi found powder burns on the senator’s jacket and on his hair, indicating shots fired at close contact. These witnesses provided more proof for those who insist a second gunman was involved. The Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office and the Los Angeles Police Department declined interviews on what both consider a closed case. Who killed Martin Luther King Jr.? His family believes James Earl Ray was framed. Schrade believes that Sirhan shot him and the others who were wounded but that he did not kill Kennedy. Since 1974, Schrade has led the crusade to try to persuade authorities — the police, prosecutors, the feds, anyone — to reinvestigate the case and identify the second gunman. “Yes, he did shoot me. Yes, he shot four other people and aimed at Kennedy,” Schrade said in an interview at his Laurel Canyon home. “The important thing is he did not shoot Robert Kennedy. Why didn’t they go after the second gunman? They knew about him right away. They didn’t want to know who it was. They wanted a quickie.” Advertisement ‘He never got near my father’ At trial, defense lawyer Grant Cooper made the decision not to contest the charge that Sirhan fired the fatal shot and instead tried to persuade the jury not to impose the death penalty by arguing Sirhan had “diminished capacity” and didn’t know what he was doing. It is a standard tactic by attorneys in death-penalty cases, but Cooper, who died in 1990, was widely criticized for not investigating the case before conceding guilt. Sirhan is now 74 and approaching 50 years behind bars. After California’s courts abolished the death penalty in 1972, he was first made eligible for parole in 1986 but has been rejected repeatedly. In 2016, Schrade spoke on Sirhan’s behalf at his parole hearing and apologized for not coming forward sooner to advocate for Sirhan’s release and exoneration. California inmates are not permitted to give media interviews, and Sirhan did not respond to a letter from The Post. But his brother, Munir Sirhan, said Sirhan still hopes to be released and that his defense team probably hurt his case more than helped it. | |
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| 05-02-22 11:51am - 965 days | #3 | |
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LKLK (0)
Active User Posts: 1,583 Registered: Jun 26, '19 Location: CA |
Article above continued: There’s plenty of damning evidence against Sirhan. He confessed to the killing at trial, although he claims this was done on his attorney’s instruction. He took hours of target practice with his pistol earlier in the day, and he took the gun into the Ambassador Hotel that night. He had been seen at a Kennedy speech at the Ambassador two days earlier. He had a newspaper clipping critical of Kennedy in his pocket and had written “RFK must die” in notebooks at home, although he said he didn’t remember doing that. And he waited in the pantry for about 30 minutes, according to witnesses who said he asked if Kennedy would be coming through there. Lee Harvey Oswald’s chilling final hours before killing JFK But questions about the case arose almost immediately in Los Angeles, resulting in hearings and reinvestigations as early as 1971 by the district attorney, the police chief, the county board of supervisors and the county superior court. Many of them focused on the ballistics of the case, starting with Noguchi’s finding that Kennedy had been shot from behind, which Sirhan’s lawyer didn’t raise in his defense. In addition, lead crime scene investigator DeWayne Wolfer testified at trial that a bullet taken from Kennedy’s body and bullets from two of the wounded victims all matched Sirhan’s gun. But other experts who examined the three bullets said they had markings from different guns and different bullet manufacturers. An internal police document concluded that “Kennedy and Weisel bullets not fired from same gun” — Weisel was the wounded ABC News producer — and “Kennedy bullet not fired from Sirhan’s revolver.” This prompted a Los Angeles judge in 1975 to convene a panel of seven forensic experts, who examined the three bullets and refired Sirhan’s gun. The panel said no match could be made between the three bullets, which appeared to be fired from the same gun, and Sirhan’s revolver. They found Wolfer had done a sloppy job with the ballistics evidence and urged further investigation. In addition, witnesses said bullet holes were found in the door frames of the Ambassador’s pantry, and photos showed investigators examining the holes in the hours after the shooting. Between the three bullets that hit Kennedy and the bullets that hit the five wounded victims, Wolfer had accounted for all eight of Sirhan’s shots. Bullets in the doors would indicate a second gun. Wolfer later said the holes and the metal inside were not bullets, and the door frames were destroyed after the trial. Though Los Angeles authorities had promised transparency in the case, the police and prosecutors refused to release their files until 1988, when they produced a flood of new evidence for researchers. Among the material was an audiotape, first unearthed by CNN journalist Brad Johnson, which had been inadvertently made by Polish journalist Stanislaw Pruszynski in the Ambassador Hotel’s ballroom, and turned over to police in 1969. Pruszynski’s microphone had been on the podium where Kennedy spoke, and TV footage shows him detaching it and moving toward the pantry as the shooting happens. In 2005, audio engineer Philip Van Praag said the tape revealed that about 13 shots had been fired. He said he used technology similar to that of the ShotSpotter used by police to alert them to gunshots, and which differentiates gunshots from firecrackers or other loud bangs. Van Praag said recently that different guns create different resonances and that he was able to establish that two guns were fired, that they fired in different directions, and that some of the shot “impulses” were so close together they couldn’t have been fired by the same gun. He said he could not say “precisely” 13 shots but certainly more than the eight contained by Sirhan’s gun. “There were too many bullets,” Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said. “You can’t fire 13 shots out of an eight-shot gun.” British author Mel Ayton wrote “The Forgotten Terrorist,” which posits that Sirhan killed Kennedy because he supported sending military firepower to Israel — the Sirhans were Christian Palestinians forced from their Jerusalem home by the Arab-Israeli War in 1948. He said Van Praag had misinterpreted the Pruszynski tape and that other experts who examined it show only eight “spikes,” one for each gunshot. Ayton also cited numerous eyewitnesses who said they heard at most eight shots. Ayton and investigative reporter Dan Moldea, who also wrote a book about the assassination, argue that Sirhan’s gun could have reached Kennedy’s back. No witnesses saw the actual shots fired in the chaos of the pantry, and Moldea noted that Kennedy almost certainly turned and tried to protect himself after the first shot, which some said was preceded by Sirhan yelling, “Kennedy, you son of a bitch!” “What were Kennedy’s last words?” Moldea asked during an interview. “‘How’s Paul?’ How would Kennedy know Paul had been injured if he had not been turned around. He turned around when Sirhan rushes towards him, yelling ‘you son of a bitch Kennedy.’ Kennedy’s not going to just stand there. He turns his back defensively.” Moldea theorized that Schrade fell forward into Kennedy, pinning him against a table and pushing him into the muzzle of Sirhan’s gun, enabling him to fire four contact shots into Kennedy. One shot went through his jacket without hitting Kennedy, one went into his back and stopped below his neck, one went through his armpit and one went into his brain. But Robert F. Kennedy Jr. doesn’t find those theories persuasive. “It’s not only that nobody saw that,” he said. “The people that were closest to [Sirhan], the people that disarmed him all said he never got near my father.” Schrade used an expletive to describe Moldea’s explanation and said he fell backward when he was shot above his forehead. Both Ayton and Moldea assisted the California attorney general’s office in contesting Sirhan’s final appeal, and the government’s legal briefs cited the investigative work of both men. Moldea had initially been a believer in the second-gunman theory, but after interviewing numerous police officers, witnesses and Sirhan, he concluded in his 1995 book, “The Killing of Robert F. Kennedy,” that Sirhan acted alone. He cited as additional proof a comment Sirhan reportedly made to a defense investigator about Kennedy turning his head before Sirhan shot him, a comment Sirhan strongly denied making. More recently, Sirhan’s lawyers have explored whether he was hypnotized to begin shooting his gun when given a certain cue, even hiring a renowned expert in hypnosis from Harvard University to meet with Sirhan. Wistrich, the judge, was completely dismissive of any suggestion of hypnosis. Schrade said the various theories of conspiracy and hypnotic programming are of little interest to him. “I’m interested in finding out how the prosecutor convicted Sirhan with no evidence, knowing there was a second gunman,” Schrade said. It was Schrade who persuaded Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to examine the evidence. “Once Schrade showed me the autopsy report,” Kennedy said, “then I didn’t feel like it was something I could just dismiss. Which is what I wanted to do.” Kennedy called Sirhan’s trial “really a penalty hearing. It wasn’t a real trial. At a full trial, they would have litigated his guilt or innocence. I think it’s unfortunate that the case never went to a full trial because that would have compelled the press and prosecutors to focus on the glaring discrepancies in the narrative that Sirhan fired the shots that killed my father.” Kennedy is not afraid to express controversial views. Last year, he and actor Robert De Niro held a news conference to argue that certain vaccines containing mercury are unsafe for some children. He said he is not opposed to all vaccines, but wants to make them safer. Two of his other siblings — human rights activist Kerry Kennedy and filmmaker Rory Kennedy — declined to discuss the assassination or the case against Sirhan. Kennedy understands why. “I think that, for most of my family members,” he said, “this is an issue that is still too painful to even talk about.” It’s painful for him, too. Kennedy was asleep in his dorm at Georgetown Preparatory School in Bethesda, Md., on June 5, 1968, when a priest woke him and told there was a car waiting outside to take him to the family home, Hickory Hill, in McLean, Va. The priest didn’t say why. In his new memoir, “American Values: Lessons I Learned from My Family,” Kennedy said his mother’s secretary was waiting for him. “Jinx Hack told me my father had been shot, but I was still thinking he’d be okay. He was, after all, indestructible.” Robert F. Kennedy Jr., his older sister Kathleen and brother Joe flew to Los Angeles on Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey’s plane, Air Force Two. At Good Samaritan Hospital, Kennedy wrote, his father’s head was bandaged and his face was bruised. A priest had already delivered last rites. His mother was there. “I sat down across the bed from her and took hold of his big wrestler’s hand,” he wrote. “I prayed and said goodbye to him, listening to the pumps that kept him breathing. Each of us children took turns sitting with him and praying opposite my mom. “My dad died at 1:44 a.m., a few minutes after doctors removed his life support. My brother Joe came into the ward where all the children were lying down and told us, ‘He’s gone.’ ” | |
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