A knock had come at his apartment window just before midnight, Smart said. It was the same window from which his longtime best friend and roommate, Jonathan Volcy, sold drugs. Volcy, a Haitian orphan whose only family was a nearby sister, was on the phone with his girlfriend. Neither Volcy nor 14-year-old Raynathan Ray, who'd recently run away from his El Portal home after saying he wanted to be a gangster, wanted to answer the knock. So Smart opened the window. "There was this one dude who was all mumbly and nervous," Smart told the couple. Smart said he couldn't make out the man's face. "All he was saying was, 'Gimme sumthin'. Gimme sumthin'.
In Detroit, city police shot a 7-year-old girl in the head in a botched attempt to catch a suspect sought on The First 48.
"So I said, 'Give you what?' "
A second person then appeared before the window. He held a black 9mm Luger. From within him came a deep voice: "What now, nigga? What now?" Smart dove out of the way as bullets filled the room, striking the freezer, the entertainment center, the walls. When the shooting subsided, Smart said, he sprinted out the back door, yelling for help.
Courtesy of Joe Klock
Smart told investigators the killer had shot into the apartment from outside. Police found the window opened six inches.
Photo still from A&E's "The First 48"
Smart called police to talk about the murders. When they met, detectives arrested him.
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As the couple listened, suspicion germinated. First, there were Smart's feet. They looked auburn, like he'd stepped in something red. Was it blood? Then, Smart's story seemed to defy reason. "With what happened to the other two, how's he going to come out without a scratch?" Rivera asked the cops. "It's common sense."
"I think he killed them," Fernandez later told investigators. "When he was in my house, he looked nervous, then he was OK, then he would cry, then he was fine. He knew his buddies were dead before the police got there."
Their doubts about Smart were confirmed, they said, when he departed their house and found a phone at another neighbor's. The youth placed at least 20 calls but none to police. Would an innocent man not call the cops?
Smart walked out of the neighborhood the next morning at 5, mulling the same question. He knew the police were looking for him but vacillated about whether to call them. "The way I grew up," he now tells New Times, "snitches get stitches. That's just how it is."
At a friend's place in North Miami, Smart took a call from his mom, Flora Smart. She's a rounded woman with a lazy eye who bounced in and out of homelessness with Taiwan during his childhood. While she looked for work in those days, the boy was often left alone or in the care of others. When he was only 6, she recalls, Taiwan's uncle forced him to smoke marijuana laced with cocaine multiple times before she discovered it. So in the shelters and unemployment lines, Flora and Taiwan had forged a fierce, determined relationship: They'd been through shit before, and they'd make it through again.
"Mom, my friends been shot!" Smart wept into the phone. "And people think I did it!"
"Taiwan," she recalls whispering into the phone, "the police are looking for you." In fact, she told her son, a thick man named Detective Fabio Sanchez had already arrived at her apartment to see if Smart was hiding there. He had a manicured widow's peak and a harried camera crew in tow. "The police says the killer's out there looking for you," she continued. "You need to talk with them. They can protect you."
But if interviews with the woman who discovered the bodies are any indication, police had different intentions. Around the same time Smart hung up the phone, Ciara Armbrister emerged from a soundproof room at the Miami Police Department that detectives call "the box." She'd been in there for hours, telling and retelling how she'd found the bodies and what had happened before the murders. The transcript of the interview reads like something out of Waiting for Godot, as detectives repeat the same question over and over. They wanted to know if Smart had argued with his roommates before the murders.
As Armbrister affirmed seven times in the interview, there had been an argument before the murders, but it hadn't involved Smart and the victims. It had been between Smart and an unnamed "Spanish guy."
Q: Was there any time that Taiwan argued with [victim Volcy]?
A: No.
Q: The argument was not towards each other?
A: Uh-huh.
Q: Was there a time when Taiwan was arguing with [victim Ray]?
A: No.
Q: So the argument was strictly with the Spanish guy?
A: Uh-huh.
This information, however, was disregarded in The First 48, in which the narrator growls, "The man the witness says the victims had argued with is named Taiwan." The police report likewise misrepresented her statement: "According to the witness," Detective Fabio Sanchez later wrote, "the defendant was involved in a violent argument with the victims over money and narcotics."
Armbrister eventually signed an affidavit stating that Smart had argued with the victims in Creole over money — despite the fact that neither she nor Smart speak Creole. Reached by New Times, Armbrister expressed outrage at the cops' treatment of her during that interview. "They made what I said into something entirely different," she says.
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