Megan Wallace had just been booked at the St. Johns County Jail in St. Augustine, Florida, when she started hearing gossip about its most notorious resident. Michelle Taylor, then 34, had allegedly set fire to her own house in 2018, killing her 11-year-old son. The motive was insurance money. Everyone at the jail seemed disgusted by her. “The guards treated her like shit,” Wallace said.

A mother herself, Wallace vowed to stay away from Taylor. But after a couple of months, Taylor was moved out of solitary confinement and into her cellblock. “The stories I’d heard didn’t add up to how she was in real life,” Wallace said. Taylor was withdrawn and heavily medicated. Other women at the jail were openly cruel toward her, but she didn’t lash out. “She slept all day and wouldn’t get up for breakfast or lunch.”

Wallace knew how it felt to be judged by people who didn’t have all the facts. She had spiraled into addiction after the sudden death of her husband, culminating in her arrest two days after Christmas in 2022. Prosecutors accused her of drug trafficking, which she insisted was bogus. As Wallace fought her own charges, she started to feel sorry for Taylor. “All she did was cry about her son,” Wallace said. “She was like, ‘I don’t want to live.’”

Wallace eventually opened up to Taylor about losing her husband. They formed a bond that strengthened over time. As Wallace got to know Taylor, she seemed less like a monster and more like a grieving mother who had suffered unspeakable trauma. David wasn’t the only child Taylor had lost. Her middle child, Natalie, who was born with cerebral palsy, died in a tragic accident five years before the fire. News reports about Taylor mentioned her daughter’s death, leading to callous comments online and lurid rumors at the jail. “People said she drowned her daughter in the bathtub and locked her son in a closet and took off the door handle,” Wallace said.

Taylor didn’t talk about the fire in jail. But she’d always sworn she had no idea how it started — she barely escaped herself. Although Wallace had no way to know the truth, it seemed obvious to her that Taylor had loved her children and her home. By the time Wallace saw her own charges dropped in the summer of 2023, she felt certain that the fire had been an accident and that Taylor had been wrongly accused.

Back home, Wallace started reading everything she could about arson cases. She learned about people who had been wrongfully convicted based on junk science. And she discovered that the Florida state fire lab, which examined the evidence in Taylor’s case, had once lost its accreditation after misidentifying gasoline in numerous cases. One name came up over and over again: John Lentini, a renowned Florida fire scientist who had helped exonerate people all over the country. In October 2023 she wrote him an email with the subject line “Please help.”

As it turned out, Lentini had been contacted about the case before, by a defense attorney who no longer represented Taylor. At that time, Lentini was skeptical he could help; there appeared to be overwhelming evidence of arson. According to the lab, a dozen fire debris samples taken from Taylor’s home contained gasoline.

“The lab report that says they found gasoline is bullshit.”

Although Lentini was a fierce and vocal critic of the lab, he found it hard to believe that it would produce a report containing so many false positives. In a call with Taylor’s new lawyer, he offered to examine the underlying data from the fire debris samples — but he was doubtful it would change much. “If there really was that much gasoline in the house,” he told Wallace, “there is nothing I can do.”

But on January 4, 2024, Wallace received an email from Lentini. “Michelle is not guilty,” it read. “The lab report that says they found gasoline is bullshit. Every part of the state’s case rests on that.”

Today the state of Florida is prepared to convict Taylor for killing her son, despite the fact that the only direct evidence of arson has been thoroughly discredited.

More than a year after Lentini raised red flags about the state’s case, writing in an expert report that it is based on “unreliable methodology and incorrect opinions regarding the presence of ignitable liquid residue,” several other leading fire experts have agreed with his conclusions. They include two different lab directors who are also veteran forensic chemists. One of them examined the data from the state lab, while the other retested the carbon strips used to analyze fire debris from the scene. Both recently submitted reports to Taylor’s defense attorney saying there is no evidence of gasoline. 

The lab’s conclusions have also been contradicted by two forensic chemists with the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, who reviewed Lentini’s expert report and agreed in depositions last April that the gasoline findings were unsupported.

The lab has not responded directly to these claims. But in January, the analyst who examined the fire debris evidence in Taylor’s case submitted an amended report backtracking on some of her original findings “due to the re-evaluation of the data.” Four of the samples she previously said were positive for gasoline were now determined to be negative for any ignitible liquid. A spokesperson for the Fire Marshal’s Office did not respond to a detailed list of comments in time for publication.

Despite the ongoing dismantling of evidence supporting its arson case, prosecutors with the State Attorney’s Office for Florida’s 7th Judicial Circuit have refused to drop the charges against Taylor. They insist she is a habitual liar and a fraud — a mother so diabolical she was willing to set fire to her house with her children inside to “further her lifestyle.” They point to a paper trial that proves her willingness to commit arson “in an attempt to fraudulently collect insurance funds. Her 11-year-old-son … died as a result.” Yet the investigation carried out on behalf of Taylor’s homeowner’s insurance company did not find evidence of arson either. Fire debris analysis conducted at a private lab in the aftermath of the fire revealed no gasoline or other ignitable liquid.

To Lentini and others who have worked on wrongful convictions, the case against Taylor is a version of an all-too-familiar story. In the absence of reliable forensic evidence, prosecutors put together a circumstantial case that can convince a jury a defendant is capable of murder, even if the science does not add up. In cases where a child has died, which are especially emotionally charged, it does not take much to cast parents or caretakers in a suspicious light. Mothers who escape a fire without their children are often judged harshly for that fact alone — and those with a checkered past are easier still to demonize, especially when the state can show that they were guilty of fraud. In the case of Angela Garcia, a Cleveland woman tried three times for killing her daughters in a fire, prosecutors seized on evidence of financial fraud to win a conviction and life sentence despite the fact that there was no reliable evidence of arson. Her sentencing judge accused her of treating her daughters “like coins in a slot machine.”

Out of 26 cases in which the state fire lab had identified gasoline, more than half did not stand up to scrutiny.

In Taylor’s case, prosecutors have made clear that they plan to tell the story of a bad mother who senselessly sacrificed her only son for material gain. But that theory eclipses a different story, one with frightening implications for anyone who survives a fire in Florida. According to Lentini, Taylor’s case is the sixth time he has personally seen a misdiagnosis of gasoline by chemists at the state fire lab — and there is reason to believe there are many more. A review of the lab in 2016 by the nation’s leading accrediting body for crime labs found that analysts were using flawed methodology to identify gasoline in fire debris evidence. Out of 26 cases in which the lab had identified gasoline, more than half did not stand up to scrutiny.

Yet rather than reconsider its case against Taylor, prosecutors have sought to suppress any reference to the lab’s problematic history when the case goes to trial. “The State respectfully requests that no party or witness in the case be allowed to comment on the prior loss of accreditation by the State Lab,” Assistant State Attorney Jennifer Dunton wrote in a pretrial motion last spring, arguing that it was “not relevant.”

With a trial date set for June, Taylor and her attorney were reluctant to speak on the record about the case. But the likeliest scenario is that neither side will have a chance to tell their story to a jury. After long refusing to consider a plea negotiation for a crime she insists she did not commit, Taylor has been forced to confront the risk of going to trial against prosecutors intent on proving their case with or without reliable evidence of arson. In Florida, a first-degree felony murder conviction carries a mandatory life sentence. With her next court date set for April 2, a guilty plea to a lesser charge and years in prison may be the best of a bad set of options.

The first 911 call on the night of the fire consisted mostly of harrowing screams. “My house is on fire!” cried Taylor’s 18-year-old daughter, Bailey, wailing that her brother was inside.

The fire was at 1041 Lee St., just east of downtown St. Augustine. On a recording of the call, which was placed at 9:42 p.m. on October 23, 2018, the screaming continues while a 911 operator tries to get information. After two minutes, Bailey says she needs to call her dad and hangs up.

The second 911 call came two minutes later from Heather Anderson, who lived across from the Taylors — the last two houses on a dead-end street in a residential neighborhood just a few miles from the beach.

Taylor had shown up at her door begging for help. There was soot on her face, and she was hysterical. Anderson’s husband raced to the house in search of David. But now the fire was spreading, Anderson said, her voice trembling. She saw the Taylor’s small chihuahua Milo run out of the house. But David was nowhere to be seen.

Taylor had fled the house without her phone or keys. Witnesses described her frantically trying to get back inside. A St. Augustine police officer who was first on the scene tried to ask her questions to no avail. “Due to the emotional state of Michelle and Bailey, I was unable to gather any information in regards to how the fire started or why David was not able to get out,” he later wrote in a report.

Firefighters arrived at 9:49 p.m. Ten minutes later, they found David’s body, lying face down and covered in debris. He was unrecognizable.

In Florida, fatal fires are investigated by the state fire marshal’s Bureau of Fire, Arson, and Explosives Investigations, which dispatches personnel around the clock. The bureau also sometimes calls upon the ATF to provide additional resources — “an extra shovel,” as the supervising lieutenant said in a deposition in Taylor’s case. That night, the BFAEI called ATF Special Agent Kristie Calhoun, who drove out to the scene from Jacksonville. She would be in charge of determining the cause of the fire.

The Taylors lived in a modern, one-story home with a stone facade. It had an open floor plan, with the kitchen to the right of the entrance and a hallway leading to four bedrooms on the left. Toward the back was the living room and the area most heavily damaged by the fire, which investigators would label the area of origin. The drywall was gone from the walls, and “the entire drywall ceiling had fallen to the floor, exposing the wooden roof structure,” Calhoun wrote in her report. What was left of the insulation was all over the ground.

Around 1:20 a.m., Mason Patrou, a rookie detective with the St. Johns County Sheriff’s Office tried to interview Taylor at a local hospital, where she and Bailey were being treated for minor burns and smoke inhalation. “Michelle was very hesitant to speak with us and clearly displeased with our presence,” Patrou later wrote.

Until the fire, the evening had not been out of the ordinary. Taylor, who’d recently lost her job as a custodian for the local school board, had a meal with her husband Dennis and their children at Texas Roadhouse. Upon coming home, Taylor briefly ran out to buy lottery tickets. Dennis got a call from a friend who’d shot a deer and wanted help retrieving it; he left around 8 p.m. Taylor and David went to her room to watch TV. At one point, Taylor said she went outside to look for a homework assignment David said he’d left in the car, then settled back into her bedroom, where they watched back-to-back episodes of the sitcom “Mom.”

It was during the second episode that Taylor said she heard the smoke detectors go off. She opened her bedroom door to find thick, dark smoke. “Michelle said her and David went out of her bedroom, banged on Bailey’s door and they all tried to get out the front door but they couldn’t get the door open,” Patrou wrote. “It was so black you couldn’t see anything.” They turned down the hallway “when David went back for the dog.” She lost sight of him. She and Bailey then ran to the spare bedroom and climbed out of the window.

Taylor said she had no idea how the fire started. But there were a few possibilities. “Michelle stated that there was a candle lit on the coffee table, near the couch,” Patrou wrote. Asked if there was anything flammable nearby, “she cited a white runner on the table and the dog, which runs loose and jumps on couch.” There was also an old electric recliner in the living room inherited from Taylor’s grandmother, which plugged into the wall and constantly malfunctioned. Dennis had recently tried to repair the electrical wires, splicing and reconnecting them using heat shrink wrap and a glue gun.

Finally, Taylor sometimes smoked in the house. Although it was unclear whether Taylor was smoking that night, a fire marshal’s detective would report that a lighter and cigarette butt had been found in the debris.

All of these scenarios were consistent with the area of origin. In the back corner of the living room, the couch and the recliner had been almost entirely consumed by the fire, with only their metal frames remaining.

Nevertheless, suspicions of arson had crept in by the time the sun came up on October 24. A K9 handler had swept the home with his accelerant-detecting dog, a black labrador named Fresca, who alerted in five different places. Fire debris samples were collected in each spot, to be examined at the state fire marshal lab, which would determine whether there was proof of an ignitable liquid.

In early November, three samples came back positive for gasoline.

The Florida State Fire Marshal’s office is governed by Florida’s Department of Financial Services, which oversees fraud and fire investigations alike. At the time of the fire, the Chief Financial Officer and fire marshal was Jimmy Patronis, whose most recent annual report boasted “an arrest rate for the crime of arson well above the national average.”

Florida is only one of two states in the country whose fire marshal has its own lab for fire debris analysis. Although numerous agencies are involved in fire investigation, most forensic evidence is processed at the bureau’s state-of-the-art facility in Havana, just outside Tallahassee.

In mid-November, Calhoun and a team of investigators returned to the scene of the fire. For three days they excavated the site, collecting fire debris for additional testing. Seventeen samples were placed into tightly sealed metal cans and sent to the lab.

Most fire debris analysis works roughly like this: Cans are heated in an oven. The resulting vapors are captured on charcoal strips suspended from the top of each can. The strips are then injected into a machine called a gas chromatograph/mass spectrometer. The former (GC) separates compounds in a given sample, while the latter (MS) detects the compounds, ultimately producing an electronic signature called a chromatogram. The resulting graph looks like an irregular combination of peaks and valleys, which mark the chemical compounds in the sample. The patterns are compared to graphs of known substances to see if there is a match.

The process is straightforward in theory. But in practice, interpreting the data can be fraught with uncertainty. Modern homes are replete with synthetic materials, which make up everything from shoes to rugs to couch cushions. Many are made from petroleum-based products that share some of the same compounds as ignitable liquids. When these products burn and break down in a process called pyrolysis, the compounds contribute their own peaks to a chromatogram. Because today’s GCMS technology is highly sensitive and capable of picking up trace amounts of material, chromatograms from a fire debris sample are often crowded with detail. One training video by the National Center for Forensic Science at the University of Central Florida says “finding an ignitable liquid residue in fire debris is like searching for Waldo in the ‘Where’s Waldo’ puzzles.” The difference is that, unlike an ignitable liquid, Waldo is always somewhere to be found.

Gasoline, which is the accelerant most commonly used to commit arson, is a complex mixture that is especially tricky to identify within fire debris. Lab analysts have long abided by specific parameters when examining a sample for gasoline, starting by ensuring there are five specific peaks on a chromatogram, which must appear at certain ratios. But the interpretation is ultimately highly subjective.

In a 2019 podcast by Chemical & Engineering News, ATF chemist Michelle Evans said the difficulty of gasoline identification had made her more cautious in her analysis over the years. She told the host she was working on a case where the data was a little too ambiguous. “I think it’s there, but I don’t think I have enough to call it,” she said. “Maybe when I was starting out I might have actually identified gasoline. But in looking at the data, I don’t feel comfortable having to testify to that.”

Among the new samples sent from Taylor’s home to the Florida lab were two different types of vinyl flooring found in the house. A pair of boxes containing the same flooring had been found in the garage, pieces of which were collected as comparison samples. Such samples are key to distinguishing compounds found in synthetic materials from those found in an ignitable liquid. “Comparison samples allow the laboratory to evaluate the possible contributions of volatile pyrolysis products to the analysis,” Calhoun wrote in her report.

Comparison samples, in other words, are supposed to be clean of any ignitable liquid. So when the second set of lab results came back, something was clearly wrong. The flooring found boxed up in the garage had come back positive for gasoline. A third comparison sample, described as “underlayment from hallway closet floor,” also came back positive for gasoline.

Calhoun’s report attributed the false positives on the tiles to “soot staining,” attaching a photo that showed evidence of smoke in the garage. Yet the boxes were barely visible in the picture, let alone the tiles inside. In a deposition, the lab analyst who examined the flooring said she did not recall seeing soot on the comparison samples. Nor did she think that light smoke on the boxes would necessarily contaminate the tiles inside. “I mean I’m not, like, an expert in soot,” she said.

Lentini would later argue that the results from the comparison samples should have invalidated all of the gasoline findings. The soot explanation did not account for the false positive on the third comparison sample, he wrote in his report. What’s more, “if ‘soot’ can cause a false reading of gasoline, that can be applied to all of the debris samples.’”

But Calhoun did not see it this way. In December 2018, she obtained new vinyl tiles matching one of the previous comparison samples and submitted it to the lab. In February 2019, that one came back negative.

By then, the St. Johns County Sheriff’s Office was convinced they had an arson case on their hands. Patrou, the lead detective, saw red flags in the family’s financial records. At the time of the fire, the Taylors had been behind in their mortgage payments. Their bank was threatening foreclosure if they did not pay by early 2019. Despite having enough money in the bank to cover the mortgage, financial records showed that six local churches “had made payments on behalf of the Taylors.”

But even more disturbing were interviews with Dennis’s side of the family, who immediately blamed Taylor. There was bad blood between Taylor and her mother-in-law; the two had almost come to blows on the night of the fire. Patrou wrote that Dennis’s mother told him she believed “Michelle deliberately burned the house down because Michelle didn’t have the money to do what she wanted.” Dennis’s sister agreed.

The investigation into Taylor stretched into 2020, only to be derailed by the Covid pandemic. Calhoun’s final 45-page report was submitted in 2021. It synthesized the findings from the state fire investigators and the St. Johns County Sheriff’s Office, concluding that the fire could not have been an accident.

It had all happened too fast, Calhoun concluded. A timeline from the night of the fire had been put together through surveillance footage taken from the neighborhood’s security cameras. It showed Taylor going out to her car at 9:33 p.m. Only six minutes later, at 9:39 p.m., video showed smoke coming from the back of the house. The first 911 call came three minutes later. There was too little time between Taylor’s last appearance and the signs of the fire captured on the tape. “An ignition source such as a cigarette or candle scenario would be a slow growing fire,” Calhoun wrote, and if a small fire was already underway before Taylor went to her car, she would have spotted it on her way back to her bedroom.

There were at least some scenarios in which an accidental fire might have quickly overtaken the house. A cluster of living room furniture was near two windows and a pair of French doors — potentially powerful fuel, Calhoun noted. But the gasoline findings rendered other explanations moot. As Calhoun eliminated each accidental cause one by one, she wrote that each was “inconsistent with the presence of gasoline as confirmed by the laboratory analysis.”

In August 2021, Taylor was arrested for felony murder.

Fire investigators once described their work as an art more than a science. The process of determining the origin and cause of a fire relied as much on an investigator’s experience and intuition as on the evidence at the scene. When it came to uncovering arson, many fire investigators falsely believed they could figure out what happened based solely on visual indicators like “pour patterns” — places where an ignitable liquid had supposedly been poured, which caused a fire to burn hotter and faster than normal.

Lentini, who began his career as a forensic chemist before moving into fire investigation, had been trained to look for such signs of arson too. But in 1991, he worked on a case in Jacksonville that dramatically transformed the understanding of fire behavior, revealing how quickly an accidental fire could reach “flashover” — a critical concept often summarized as the moment a fire in a room becomes a room on fire. In the right conditions, a smoldering fire can reach flashover in under four minutes.

Today fire investigations follow the scientific method, as set out by the National Fire Protection Association in NFPA 921: Guide for Fire Investigations. But for those sent to prison based on misconceptions about fire behavior, the advances in the field came too late. The most famous wrongful arson conviction is that of Cameron Todd Willingham, who was accused of setting a fire in Corsicana, Texas, that killed his three children. Despite a race by fire experts to prove that his case was based on junk science, Willingham was executed in 2004.

That same year Texas executed Willingham, a fire broke out in Palatka, Florida, killing a woman named Tscharna Hampton. Her boyfriend, Randy Seal, was accused of dousing her with gasoline and setting her on fire. As in the Willingham case, fire investigators relied on discredited arson indicators. And as with Willingham, the state announced it would seek the death penalty.

“I looked at it and I thought, ‘This is not gasoline.’”

Like Taylor, Seal was prosecuted in the 7th Judicial Circuit of Florida. Lentini was hired as an expert for the defense. A lab analyst had identified gasoline in numerous samples. But when Lentini received the data, it was way off. “I looked at it and I thought, ‘This is not gasoline,’” he said. 

Lentini examined the carbon strips used to analyze the fire debris. He found no signs of gasoline. At the trial, he used a PowerPoint presentation to break down the science in the most accessible terms for the jury. “You go down to the gas station, you buy some gasoline, you evaporate it, you run it through your machines, you get a pattern,” he explained. In order to identify gasoline in a sample, “you’ve got to be able to match that pattern.”

“In the early days, the methodology was more or less: ‘The sample displays sufficient similarities to the standard for me to conclude that they are the same,’” Lentini went on. But this was entirely too subjective. Rules for identifying ignitable liquids in fire debris were developed by the American Society for Testing and Materials, which laid out criteria for gasoline, starting with a group of five compounds, whose peaks on a chromatogram had to appear in specific proportion to one another. “This is not a suggestion. This is not a guide. This says if you want to call it gasoline, you’ve got to have this stuff.”

While the Florida state lab purported to abide by this rule, known as ASTM E1618, the gasoline results showed otherwise. Not only were the ratios wrong, Lentini testified, but three of the necessary compounds were not present at all. In a deposition, a different expert later described the lab analyst’s approach as “peak pick.” If you zoom in close enough, the expert explained, virtually any chromatogram from a fire debris sample will contain patterns resembling gasoline. “It’s just, Let’s blow it up and let’s see what components show up,” he said.

With no real rebuttal to the chemistry, the prosecutor goaded Lentini on cross-examination, daring him to smell the blue jeans worn by Hampton when she died. “You’re not willing to do it, are you?” he asked. Lentini replied with obvious irritation. “They smell like burnt cloth,” he said. More importantly, “they don’t look like gasoline when analyzed with the gas chromatograph.” The prosecutor replied that jurors could use their “common sense” to conclude that the clothing smelled like gasoline.

Seal was found guilty but avoided the death penalty. A judge sentenced him to life in prison.

The Seal case was the first time Lentini saw the state lab analysts find what he has wryly called “Florida gasoline.” It would not be the last.

One year after Seal was convicted, a fire broke out inside an apartment complex outside Fort Lauderdale. Eleven-month-old Jada Reynolds was found in her crib, dead from smoke inhalation. Her mother, Sasheena Reynolds, had escaped the fire while carrying her 2-year-old son. Witnesses described her panic. “She kept saying, ‘My baby is inside the fire!,’” a neighbor told a reporter.

At first there was an outpouring of support. Hundreds of people went to the baby’s funeral and neighbors raised money for the family. Reynolds’s electricity had been cut off at the time of the fire; she relied on scented candles to illuminate the home, which were believed to have caused the blaze.

But everything changed when the fire marshal lab found evidence of gasoline. Reynolds was arrested and charged with first-degree murder. Investigators said they’d suspected the fire was no accident given “how quickly the fire spread and burned.”

Lentini was hired by Reynolds’s defense attorney. The lab results echoed what he had seen in Seal’s case. Rather than face trial, Reynolds agreed to a plea deal and was released from jail in 2013. By then, Lentini had seen false gasoline findings in two other cases.

“I suspect that erroneous identifications of gasoline happen on a routine basis.”

In 2015, Lentini sat down to write a letter to the American Society of Crime Laboratory Directors/Laboratory Accreditation Board. “After several weeks of careful consideration, I have concluded that it is my professional obligation to bring to your attention a serious issue,” he wrote. He warned that the lab had “a continuing laboratory policy of identifying gasoline where none exists, based on a subjective and highly speculative thought process.” Although the lab claimed to follow ASTM E1618 in theory, in practice it deviated completely from the standard. “I suspect that erroneous identifications of gasoline happen on a routine basis.”

There is no federal agency that regulates forensic labs. Accreditation bodies like ASCLD/LAB, which has since been renamed, are private entities whose leadership is closely tied to professional forensic associations and which charge labs to receive accreditation. Although labs must demonstrate certain protocols and best practices to remain in good standing, there is little oversight of the work itself. Indeed, at the time Lentini filed his complaint, the lab’s accreditation had just been renewed.

In January 2016, a team from ASCLD/LAB traveled to Havana, Florida, to visit the lab. It interviewed lab analysts as well as its director, Carl Chasteen. Two months later, reviewers reported their findings. “The interpretation methodology being employed by the laboratory is an undocumented, unvalidated protocol that is not generally accepted in the scientific community,” they wrote. The numbers were alarming. “Of twenty-six(26) randomly selected cases in which gasoline or gasoline mixtures were reported, there were fourteen in which the interpretation of the data by the analyst resulted in an unsupported conclusion.”

The lab lost its accreditation as a result of the review. Chasteen appealed the results, writing in a 50-page letter that the review appeared “to repudiate all of our work over the years, our professional reputations, and our personal character.” A new panel of reviewers upheld the decision to revoke the lab’s accreditation.

Lentini considered the lab’s suspension a victory. But it was short-lived. After agreeing to a “corrective action plan,” Chasteen won back its accreditation. He also successfully sought accreditation from a second organization. By 2017, the lab had gone from being mired in scandal to boasting that it was the only public lab in the country dual-accredited by both organizations.

The saga had a critical impact in at least one case, however. The Florida Innocence Project filed a post-conviction appeal in Seal’s case based on the discoveries about the lab. New experts analyzed the evidence and concluded that the findings of gasoline had been wrong. In 2023, prosecutors offered Seal a plea deal and he accepted.

Before his release in 2024, Seal sent Lentini a handwritten note from prison. “I knew you were always right,” he wrote. “The lab was junk, still is. Thank you for what you did for me.”

Last spring I traveled to St. Augustine and drove to the site of the fire. The neighborhood is surrounded by longleaf pines, with modest homes set back from the road on green lots dotted by palm trees. Google Maps had captured the house after the fire, with boarded-up windows and piles of debris on blue tarps on the driveway. But when I arrived at 1041 Lee St., there was nothing but a concrete driveway leading to a gray slab.

Wallace told me that Taylor once described the house as her “dream home.” The family moved there in 2012 from a more rural area, mainly out of necessity. According to Dennis and Bailey, there was a man in the area who was a known pedophile; he had once tried to lure David into his car. “The cops said they couldn’t do anything about it,” Bailey told me. So they decided to move. “My mom and dad said it was to protect us.”

It took them six months to find a place they could afford, according to Dennis. The house on Lee Street was a foreclosure sale, which needed a lot of work. They painted and redid the floors and installed planters, a picnic table, and a bird bath outside. Because her daughter Natalie loved butterflies, Taylor took butterfly lawn ornaments she’d found at Dollar Tree and used them to decorate the entrance to the house.

I met Wallace at a Hampton Inn off I-95. She brought a small stack of papers: police reports and testimonials about Taylor from family and friends, which she had collected for an upcoming bond hearing. They described Taylor as loving and generous to friends and strangers alike. “My mother never got to grieve properly,” Bailey wrote. “She would never hurt anybody, please just let her come home.”

Wallace said Lentini had breathed new life into Taylor’s defense. But she was also frustrated — she could not understand how prosecutors could stick to their case. She’d recently learned that, back in January, Calhoun had forwarded Lentini’s report to two different forensic chemists at the ATF, both of whom had sat down for depositions. One of them took issue with Lentini’s claim that the state lab “routinely identifies gasoline where it does not exist.” But he did not disagree with Lentini’s conclusions about the chromatography data. “The patterns that I’m seeing in the data do not appear to be gasoline to me,” he said.

The other analyst was Michelle Evans, who gave the 2019 podcast interview in which she said she’d become more cautious in her gasoline findings over time. She concurred that the data did not show the patterns required to identify gasoline. “This strongly supports there not being gasoline there.”

Not long after my trip to St. Augustine, Taylor was released on bond after nearly three years in jail and reunited with her family. As her joy and relief began to fade, so did her hope that prosecutors would ever drop her charges. The fear of a life sentence has given way to anguished uncertainty about whether to plead guilty after all. More than six years after the fire, Wallace said, “she just wants it to be over.”

On March 3, which would have been David’s 18th birthday, Taylor and her family met at the cemetery where he is buried alongside his sister Natalie, under a large oak tree dripping with Spanish moss. They ate cake and wrote messages on Mylar balloons, which they released into the air.

Wallace shared some photos via text. In one, Taylor stands smiling with Bailey, her sole remaining child, over brilliant yellow flowers.

The group at the cemetery included Taylor’s mother, four sisters, and her nieces and nephews, some of whom she helped raise. In phone calls, friends and relatives told me the state’s case never made any sense to them. Taylor wasn’t seeking a lavish lifestyle. Her whole life revolved around her home and her children. “Wherever they went they took their kids,” her mother told me. “She loved the ground her kids walked on.”

The post The Arson Evidence Doesn’t Hold Up. Florida Is About to Convict Her for Murder Anyway. appeared first on The Intercept.

This post was originally published on The Intercept.

Megan Wallace had just been booked at the St. Johns County Jail in St. Augustine, Florida, when she started hearing gossip about its most notorious resident. Michelle Taylor had allegedly set fire to her own house in 2018, killing her 11-year-old son. The motive was insurance money. Everyone at the jail seemed disgusted by her. “The guards treated her like shit,” Wallace said.

A mother herself, Wallace vowed to stay away from Taylor. But after a couple of months, Taylor was moved out of solitary confinement and into her cellblock. “The stories I’d heard didn’t add up to how she was in real life,” Wallace said. Taylor was withdrawn and heavily medicated. Other women at the jail were openly cruel toward her, but she didn’t lash out. “She slept all day and wouldn’t get up for breakfast or lunch.”

Wallace knew how it felt to be judged by people who didn’t have all the facts. She had spiraled into addiction after the sudden death of her husband, culminating in her arrest two days after Christmas in 2022. Prosecutors accused her of drug trafficking, which she insisted was bogus. As Wallace fought her own charges, she started to feel sorry for Taylor. “All she did was cry about her son,” Wallace said. “She was like, ‘I don’t want to live.’”

Wallace eventually opened up to Taylor about losing her husband. They formed a bond that strengthened over time. As Wallace got to know Taylor, she seemed less like a monster and more like a grieving mother who had suffered unspeakable trauma. David wasn’t the only child Taylor had lost. Her middle child, Natalie, who was born with cerebral palsy, died in a tragic accident five years before the fire. News reports about Taylor mentioned her daughter’s death, leading to callous comments online and lurid rumors at the jail. “People said she drowned her daughter in the bathtub and locked her son in a closet and took off the door handle,” Wallace said.

Taylor didn’t talk about the fire in jail. But she’d always sworn she had no idea how it started — she barely escaped herself. Although Wallace had no way to know the truth, it seemed obvious to her that Taylor had loved her children and her home. By the time Wallace saw her own charges dropped in the summer of 2023, she felt certain that the fire had been an accident and that Taylor had been wrongly accused.

Back home, Wallace started reading everything she could about arson cases. She learned about people who had been wrongfully convicted based on junk science. And she discovered that the Florida state fire lab, which examined the evidence in Taylor’s case, had once lost its accreditation after misidentifying gasoline in numerous cases. One name came up over and over again: John Lentini, a renowned Florida fire scientist who had helped exonerate people all over the country. In October 2023 she wrote him an email with the subject line “Please help.”

As it turned out, Lentini had been contacted about the case before, by a defense attorney who no longer represented Taylor. At that time, Lentini was skeptical he could help; there appeared to be overwhelming evidence of arson. According to the lab, a dozen fire debris samples taken from Taylor’s home contained gasoline.

“The lab report that says they found gasoline is bullshit.”

Although Lentini was a fierce and vocal critic of the lab, he found it hard to believe that it would produce a report containing so many false positives. In a call with Taylor’s new lawyer, he offered to examine the underlying data from the fire debris samples — but he was doubtful it would change much. “If there really was that much gasoline in the house,” he told Wallace, “there is nothing I can do.”

But on January 4, 2024, Wallace received an email from Lentini. “Michelle is not guilty,” it read. “The lab report that says they found gasoline is bullshit. Every part of the state’s case rests on that.”

Today the state of Florida is prepared to convict Taylor for killing her son, despite the fact that the only direct evidence of arson has been thoroughly discredited.

More than a year after Lentini raised red flags about the state’s case, writing in an expert report that it is based on “unreliable methodology and incorrect opinions regarding the presence of ignitable liquid residue,” several other leading fire experts have agreed with his conclusions. They include two different lab directors who are also veteran forensic chemists. One of them examined the data from the state lab, while the other retested the carbon strips used to analyze fire debris from the scene. Both recently submitted reports to Taylor’s defense attorney saying there is no evidence of gasoline. 

The lab’s conclusions have also been contradicted by two forensic chemists with the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, who reviewed Lentini’s expert report and agreed in depositions last April that the gasoline findings were unsupported.

The lab has not responded directly to these claims. But in January, the analyst who examined the fire debris evidence in Taylor’s case submitted an amended report backtracking on some of her original findings “due to the re-evaluation of the data.” Four of the samples she previously said were positive for gasoline were now determined to be negative for any ignitible liquid. A spokesperson for the Fire Marshal’s Office did not respond to a detailed list of comments in time for publication.

Despite the ongoing dismantling of evidence supporting its arson case, prosecutors with the State Attorney’s Office for Florida’s 7th Judicial Circuit have refused to drop the charges against Taylor. They insist she is a habitual liar and a fraud — a mother so diabolical she was willing to set fire to her house with her children inside to “further her lifestyle.” They point to a paper trial that proves her willingness to commit arson “in an attempt to fraudulently collect insurance funds. Her 11-year-old-son … died as a result.” Yet the investigation carried out on behalf of Taylor’s homeowner’s insurance company did not find evidence of arson either. Fire debris analysis conducted at a private lab in the aftermath of the fire revealed no gasoline or other ignitable liquid.

To Lentini and others who have worked on wrongful convictions, the case against Taylor is a version of an all-too-familiar story. In the absence of reliable forensic evidence, prosecutors put together a circumstantial case that can convince a jury a defendant is capable of murder, even if the science does not add up. In cases where a child has died, which are especially emotionally charged, it does not take much to cast parents or caretakers in a suspicious light. Mothers who escape a fire without their children are often judged harshly for that fact alone — and those with a checkered past are easier still to demonize, especially when the state can show that they were guilty of fraud. In the case of Angela Garcia, a Cleveland woman tried three times for killing her daughters in a fire, prosecutors seized on evidence of financial fraud to win a conviction and life sentence despite the fact that there was no reliable evidence of arson. Her sentencing judge accused her of treating her daughters “like coins in a slot machine.”

Out of 26 cases in which the state fire lab had identified gasoline, more than half did not stand up to scrutiny.

In Taylor’s case, prosecutors have made clear that they plan to tell the story of a bad mother who senselessly sacrificed her only son for material gain. But that theory eclipses a different story, one with frightening implications for anyone who survives a fire in Florida. According to Lentini, Taylor’s case is the sixth time he has personally seen a misdiagnosis of gasoline by chemists at the state fire lab — and there is reason to believe there are many more. A review of the lab in 2016 by the nation’s leading accrediting body for crime labs found that analysts were using flawed methodology to identify gasoline in fire debris evidence. Out of 26 cases in which the lab had identified gasoline, more than half did not stand up to scrutiny.

Yet rather than reconsider its case against Taylor, prosecutors have sought to suppress any reference to the lab’s problematic history when the case goes to trial. “The State respectfully requests that no party or witness in the case be allowed to comment on the prior loss of accreditation by the State Lab,” Assistant State Attorney Jennifer Dunton wrote in a pretrial motion last spring, arguing that it was “not relevant.”

With a trial date set for June, Taylor and her attorney were reluctant to speak on the record about the case. But the likeliest scenario is that neither side will have a chance to tell their story to a jury. After long refusing to consider a plea negotiation for a crime she insists she did not commit, Taylor has been forced to confront the risk of going to trial against prosecutors intent on proving their case with or without reliable evidence of arson. In Florida, a first-degree felony murder conviction carries a mandatory life sentence. With her next court date set for April 2, a guilty plea to a lesser charge and years in prison may be the best of a bad set of options.

The first 911 call on the night of the fire consisted mostly of harrowing screams. “My house is on fire!” cried Taylor’s 18-year-old daughter, Bailey, wailing that her brother was inside.

The fire was at 1041 Lee St., just east of downtown St. Augustine. On a recording of the call, which was placed at 9:42 p.m. on October 23, 2018, the screaming continues while a 911 operator tries to get information. After two minutes, Bailey says she needs to call her dad and hangs up.

The second 911 call came moments later from Heather Anderson, who lived across from the Taylors — the last two houses on a dead-end street in a residential neighborhood just a few miles from the beach.

Taylor, then 34, had shown up at her door begging for help. There was soot on her face, and she was hysterical. Anderson’s husband raced to the house in search of David. But now the fire was spreading, Anderson said, her voice trembling. She saw the Taylor’s small chihuahua Milo run out of the house. But David was nowhere to be seen.

Taylor had fled the house without her phone or keys. Witnesses described her frantically trying to get back inside. A St. Augustine police officer who was first on the scene tried to ask her questions to no avail. “Due to the emotional state of Michelle and Bailey, I was unable to gather any information in regards to how the fire started or why David was not able to get out,” he later wrote in a report.

Firefighters arrived at 9:49 p.m. They found David’s body lying face down and covered in debris. He was unrecognizable.

In Florida, fatal fires are investigated by the state fire marshal’s Bureau of Fire, Arson, and Explosives Investigations, which dispatches personnel around the clock. The bureau also sometimes calls upon the ATF to provide additional resources — “an extra shovel,” as the supervising lieutenant said in a deposition in Taylor’s case. That night, the BFAEI called ATF Special Agent Kristie Calhoun, who drove out to the scene from Jacksonville. She would be in charge of determining the cause of the fire.

The Taylors lived in a modern, one-story home with a stone facade. It had an open floor plan, with the kitchen to the right of the entrance and a hallway leading to four bedrooms on the left. Toward the back was the living room and the area most heavily damaged by the fire, which investigators would label the area of origin. The drywall was gone from the walls, and “the entire drywall ceiling had fallen to the floor, exposing the wooden roof structure,” Calhoun wrote in her report. What was left of the insulation was all over the ground.

Around 1:20 a.m., Mason Patrou, a rookie detective with the St. Johns County Sheriff’s Office tried to interview Taylor at a local hospital, where she and Bailey were being treated for minor burns and smoke inhalation. “Michelle was very hesitant to speak with us and clearly displeased with our presence,” Patrou later wrote.

Until the fire, the evening had not been out of the ordinary. Taylor, who’d recently lost her job as a custodian for the local school board, had a meal with her husband Dennis and their children at Texas Roadhouse. Upon coming home, Taylor briefly ran out to buy lottery tickets. Dennis got a call from a friend who’d shot a deer and wanted help retrieving it; he left around 8 p.m. Taylor and David went to her room to watch TV. At one point, Taylor said she went outside to look for a homework assignment David said he’d left in the car, then settled back into her bedroom, where they watched back-to-back episodes of the sitcom “Mom.”

It was during the second episode that Taylor said she heard the smoke detectors go off. She opened her bedroom door to find thick, dark smoke. “Michelle said her and David went out of her bedroom, banged on Bailey’s door and they all tried to get out the front door but they couldn’t get the door open,” Patrou wrote. “It was so black you couldn’t see anything.” They turned down the hallway “when David went back for the dog.” She lost sight of him. She and Bailey then ran to the spare bedroom and climbed out of the window.

Taylor said she had no idea how the fire started. But there were a few possibilities. “Michelle stated that there was a candle lit on the coffee table, near the couch,” Patrou wrote. Asked if there was anything flammable nearby, she cited a white runner on the table, adding that the dog ran loose and jumped on the couch. There was also an old electric recliner in the living room inherited from Taylor’s grandmother, which plugged into the wall and constantly malfunctioned. Dennis had recently tried to repair the electrical wires, splicing and reconnecting them using heat shrink wrap and a glue gun.

Finally, Taylor sometimes smoked in the house. Although it was unclear whether Taylor was smoking that night, a fire marshal’s detective would report that a lighter and cigarette butt had been found in the debris.

All of these scenarios were consistent with the area of origin. In the back corner of the living room, the couch and the recliner had been almost entirely consumed by the fire, with only their metal frames remaining.

Nevertheless, suspicions of arson had crept in by the time the sun came up on October 24. A K-9 handler had swept the home with his accelerant-detecting dog, a black Labrador named Fresca, who alerted in five different places. Fire debris samples were collected in each spot, to be examined at the state fire marshal lab, which would determine whether there was proof of an ignitable liquid.

In early November, three samples came back positive for gasoline.

The Florida State Fire Marshal’s office is governed by Florida’s Department of Financial Services, which oversees fraud and fire investigations alike. At the time of the fire, the Chief Financial Officer and fire marshal was Jimmy Patronis, whose most recent annual report boasted “an arrest rate for the crime of arson well above the national average.”

Florida is only one of two states in the country whose fire marshal has its own lab for fire debris analysis. Although numerous agencies are involved in fire investigation, most forensic evidence is processed at the bureau’s state-of-the-art facility in Havana, just outside Tallahassee.

In mid-November, Calhoun and a team of investigators returned to the scene of the fire. For three days they excavated the site, collecting fire debris for additional testing. Seventeen samples were placed into tightly sealed metal cans and sent to the lab.

Most fire debris analysis works roughly like this: Cans are heated in an oven. The resulting vapors are captured on charcoal strips suspended from the top of each can. The strips are then rinsed with a solvent, producing a solution that is injected into a machine called a gas chromatograph/mass spectrometer. The former (GC) separates compounds in a given sample, while the latter (MS) detects the compounds, ultimately producing an electronic signature called a chromatogram. The resulting graph looks like an irregular combination of peaks and valleys, which mark the chemical compounds in the sample. The patterns are compared to graphs of known substances to see if there is a match.

The process is straightforward in theory. But in practice, interpreting the data can be fraught with uncertainty. Modern homes are replete with synthetic materials, which make up everything from shoes to rugs to couch cushions. Many are made from petroleum-based products that share some of the same compounds as ignitable liquids. When these products burn and break down in a process called pyrolysis, the compounds contribute their own peaks to a chromatogram. Because today’s GCMS technology is highly sensitive and capable of picking up trace amounts of material, chromatograms from a fire debris sample are often crowded with detail. One training video by the National Center for Forensic Science at the University of Central Florida says “finding an ignitable liquid residue in fire debris is like searching for Waldo in the ‘Where’s Waldo’ puzzles.” The difference is that, unlike an ignitable liquid, Waldo is always somewhere to be found.

Gasoline, which is the accelerant most commonly used to commit arson, is a complex mixture that is especially tricky to identify within fire debris. Lab analysts have long abided by specific parameters when examining a sample for gasoline, starting by ensuring there are five specific peaks on a chromatogram, which must appear at certain ratios. But the interpretation is ultimately highly subjective.

In a 2019 podcast by Chemical & Engineering News, ATF chemist Michelle Evans said the difficulty of gasoline identification had made her more cautious in her analysis over the years. She told the host she was working on a case where the data was a little too ambiguous. “I think it’s there, but I don’t think I have enough to call it,” she said. “Maybe when I was starting out I might have actually identified gasoline. But in looking at the data, I don’t feel comfortable having to testify to that.”

Among the new samples sent from Taylor’s home to the Florida lab were two different types of vinyl flooring found in the house. A pair of boxes containing the same flooring had been found in the garage, pieces of which were collected as comparison samples. Such samples are key to distinguishing compounds found in synthetic materials from those found in an ignitable liquid. “Comparison samples allow the laboratory to evaluate the possible contributions of volatile pyrolysis products to the analysis,” Calhoun wrote in her report.

Comparison samples, in other words, are supposed to be clean of any ignitable liquid. So when the second set of lab results came back, something was clearly wrong. The flooring found boxed up in the garage had come back positive for gasoline. A third comparison sample, described as “underlayment from hallway closet floor,” also came back positive for gasoline.

Calhoun’s report attributed the false positives on the tiles to “soot staining,” attaching a photo that showed evidence of smoke in the garage. Yet the boxes were barely visible in the picture, let alone the tiles inside. In a deposition, the lab analyst who examined the flooring said she did not recall seeing soot on the comparison samples. Nor did she think that light smoke on the boxes would necessarily contaminate the tiles inside. “I mean I’m not, like, an expert in soot,” she said.

Lentini would later argue that the results from the comparison samples should have invalidated all of the gasoline findings. The soot explanation did not account for the false positive on the third comparison sample, he wrote in his report. What’s more, “if ‘soot’ can cause a false reading of gasoline, that can be applied to all of the debris samples.’”

But Calhoun did not see it this way. In December 2018, she obtained new vinyl tiles matching one of the previous comparison samples and submitted it to the lab. In February 2019, that one came back negative.

By then, the St. Johns County Sheriff’s Office was convinced they had an arson case on their hands. Patrou, the lead detective, saw red flags in the family’s financial records. At the time of the fire, the Taylors had been behind in their mortgage payments. Their bank was threatening foreclosure if they did not pay by early 2019. Despite having enough money in the bank to cover the mortgage, financial records showed that six local churches “had made payments on behalf of the Taylors.”

But even more disturbing were interviews with Dennis’s side of the family, who immediately blamed Taylor. There was bad blood between Taylor and her mother-in-law; the two had almost come to blows on the night of the fire. Patrou wrote that Dennis’s mother told him she believed “Michelle deliberately burned the house down because Michelle didn’t have the money to do what she wanted.” Dennis’s sister agreed.

The investigation into Taylor stretched into 2020, only to be derailed by the Covid pandemic. Calhoun’s final 45-page report was submitted in 2021. It synthesized the findings from the state fire investigators and the St. Johns County Sheriff’s Office, concluding that the fire could not have been an accident.

It had all happened too fast, Calhoun concluded. A timeline from the night of the fire had been put together through surveillance footage taken from the neighborhood’s security cameras. It showed Taylor going out to her car at 9:33 p.m. Only six minutes later, at 9:39 p.m., video showed smoke coming from the back of the house. The first 911 call came three minutes later. There was too little time between Taylor’s last appearance and the signs of the fire captured on the tape. “An ignition source such as a cigarette or candle scenario would be a slow growing fire,” Calhoun wrote, and if a small fire was already underway before Taylor went to her car, she would have spotted it on her way back to her bedroom.

There were at least some scenarios in which an accidental fire might have quickly overtaken the house. A cluster of living room furniture was near two windows and a pair of French doors — potentially powerful fuel, Calhoun noted. But the gasoline findings rendered other explanations moot. As Calhoun eliminated each accidental cause one by one, she wrote that each was “inconsistent with the presence of gasoline as confirmed by the laboratory analysis.”

In August 2021, Taylor was arrested for felony murder.

Fire investigators once described their work as an art more than a science. The process of determining the origin and cause of a fire relied as much on an investigator’s experience and intuition as on the evidence at the scene. When it came to uncovering arson, many fire investigators falsely believed they could figure out what happened based solely on visual indicators like “pour patterns” — places where an ignitable liquid had supposedly been poured, which caused a fire to burn hotter and faster than normal.

Lentini, who began his career as a forensic chemist before moving into fire investigation, had been trained to look for such signs of arson too. But in 1991, he worked on a case in Jacksonville that dramatically transformed the understanding of fire behavior, revealing how quickly an accidental fire could reach “flashover” — a critical concept often summarized as the moment a fire in a room becomes a room on fire. In the right conditions, a smoldering fire can reach flashover in under four minutes.

Today fire investigations follow the scientific method, as set out by the National Fire Protection Association in NFPA 921: Guide for Fire and Explosion Investigations. But for those sent to prison based on misconceptions about fire behavior, the advances in the field came too late. The most famous wrongful arson conviction is that of Cameron Todd Willingham, who was accused of setting a fire in Corsicana, Texas, that killed his three children. Despite a race by fire experts to prove that his case was based on junk science, Willingham was executed in 2004.

That same year Texas executed Willingham, a fire broke out in Palatka, Florida, killing a woman named Tscharna Hampton. Her boyfriend, Randy Seal, was accused of dousing her with gasoline and setting her on fire. As in the Willingham case, fire investigators relied on discredited arson indicators. And as with Willingham, the state announced it would seek the death penalty.

“I looked at it and I thought, ‘This is not gasoline.’”

Like Taylor, Seal was prosecuted in the 7th Judicial Circuit of Florida. Lentini was hired as an expert for the defense. A lab analyst had identified gasoline in numerous samples. But when Lentini received the data, it was way off. “I looked at it and I thought, ‘This is not gasoline,’” he said. 

Lentini examined the carbon strips used to analyze the fire debris. He found no signs of gasoline. At the trial, he used a PowerPoint presentation to break down the science in the most accessible terms for the jury. “You go down to the gas station, you buy some gasoline, you evaporate it, you run it through your machines, you get a pattern,” he explained. In order to identify gasoline in a sample, “you’ve got to be able to match that pattern.”

“In the early days, the methodology was more or less: ‘The sample displays sufficient similarities to the standard for me to conclude that they are the same,’” Lentini went on. But this was entirely too subjective. Rules for identifying ignitable liquids in fire debris were developed by the American Society for Testing and Materials, which laid out criteria for gasoline, starting with a group of five compounds, whose peaks on a chromatogram had to appear in specific proportion to one another. “This is not a suggestion. This is not a guide. This says if you want to call it gasoline, you’ve got to have this stuff.”

While the Florida state lab purported to abide by this rule, known as ASTM E1618, the gasoline results showed otherwise. Not only were the ratios wrong, Lentini testified, but three of the necessary compounds were not present at all. In a deposition, a different expert later described the lab analyst’s approach as “peak pick.” If you zoom in close enough, the expert explained, virtually any chromatogram from a fire debris sample will contain patterns resembling gasoline. “It’s just, Let’s blow it up and let’s see what components show up,” he said.

With no real rebuttal to the chemistry, the prosecutor goaded Lentini on cross-examination, daring him to smell the blue jeans worn by Hampton when she died. “You’re not willing to do it, are you?” he asked. Lentini replied with obvious irritation. “They smell like burnt cloth,” he said. More importantly, “they don’t look like gasoline when analyzed with the gas chromatograph.” The prosecutor replied that jurors could use their “common sense” to conclude that the clothing smelled like gasoline.

Seal was found guilty but avoided the death penalty. A judge sentenced him to life in prison.

The Seal case was the first time Lentini saw the state lab analysts find what he has wryly called “Florida gasoline.” It would not be the last.

One year after Seal was convicted, a fire broke out inside an apartment complex outside Fort Lauderdale. Eleven-month-old Jada Reynolds was found in her crib, dead from smoke inhalation. Her mother, Sasheena Reynolds, had escaped the fire while carrying her 2-year-old son. Witnesses described her panic. “She kept saying, ‘My baby is inside the fire!,’” a neighbor told a reporter.

At first there was an outpouring of support. Hundreds of people went to the baby’s funeral and neighbors raised money for the family. Reynolds’s electricity had been cut off at the time of the fire; she relied on scented candles to illuminate the home, which were believed to have caused the blaze.

But everything changed when the fire marshal lab found evidence of gasoline. Reynolds was arrested and charged with first-degree murder. Investigators said they’d suspected the fire was no accident given “how quickly the fire spread and burned.”

Lentini was hired by Reynolds’s defense attorney. The lab results echoed what he had seen in Seal’s case. Rather than face trial, Reynolds agreed to a plea deal and was released from jail in 2013. By then, Lentini had seen false gasoline findings in two other cases.

“I suspect that erroneous identifications of gasoline happen on a routine basis.”

In 2015, Lentini sat down to write a letter to the American Society of Crime Laboratory Directors/Laboratory Accreditation Board. “After several weeks of careful consideration, I have concluded that it is my professional obligation to bring to your attention a serious issue,” he wrote. He warned that the lab had “a continuing laboratory policy of identifying gasoline where none exists, based on a subjective and highly speculative thought process.” Although the lab claimed to follow ASTM E1618 in theory, in practice it deviated completely from the standard. “I suspect that erroneous identifications of gasoline happen on a routine basis.”

There is no federal agency that regulates forensic labs. Accreditation bodies like ASCLD/LAB, which has since been renamed, are private entities whose leadership is closely tied to professional forensic associations and which charge labs to receive accreditation. Although labs must demonstrate certain protocols and best practices to remain in good standing, there is little oversight of the work itself. Indeed, at the time Lentini filed his complaint, the lab’s accreditation had just been renewed.

In January 2016, a team from ASCLD/LAB traveled to Havana, Florida, to visit the lab. It interviewed lab analysts as well as its director, Carl Chasteen. Two months later, reviewers reported their findings. “The interpretation methodology being employed by the laboratory is an undocumented, unvalidated protocol that is not generally accepted in the scientific community,” they wrote. The numbers were alarming. “Of twenty-six(26) randomly selected cases in which gasoline or gasoline mixtures were reported, there were fourteen in which the interpretation of the data by the analyst resulted in an unsupported conclusion.”

The lab lost its accreditation as a result of the review. Chasteen appealed the results, writing in a 50-page letter that the review appeared “to repudiate all of our work over the years, our professional reputations, and our personal character.” A new panel of reviewers upheld the decision to revoke the lab’s accreditation.

Lentini considered the lab’s suspension a victory. But it was short-lived. After agreeing to a “corrective action plan,” Chasteen won back its accreditation. He also successfully sought accreditation from a second organization. By 2017, the lab had gone from being mired in scandal to boasting that it was the only public lab in the country dual-accredited by both organizations.

The saga had a critical impact in at least one case, however. The Florida Innocence Project filed a post-conviction appeal in Seal’s case based on the discoveries about the lab. New experts analyzed the evidence and concluded that the findings of gasoline had been wrong. In 2023, prosecutors offered Seal a plea deal and he accepted.

Before his release in 2024, Seal sent Lentini a handwritten note from prison. “I knew you were always right,” he wrote. “The lab was junk, still is. Thank you for what you did for me.”

Last spring I traveled to St. Augustine and drove to the site of the fire. The neighborhood is surrounded by longleaf pines, with modest homes set back from the road on green lots dotted by palm trees. Google Maps had captured the house after the fire, with boarded-up windows and piles of debris on blue tarps on the driveway. But when I arrived at 1041 Lee St., there was nothing but a concrete driveway leading to a gray slab.

Wallace told me that Taylor once described the house as her “dream home.” The family moved there in 2012 from a more rural area, mainly out of necessity. According to Dennis and Bailey, there was a man in the area who was a known pedophile; he had once tried to lure David into his car. “The cops said they couldn’t do anything about it,” Bailey told me. So they decided to move. “My mom and dad said it was to protect us.”

It took them six months to find a place they could afford, according to Dennis. The house on Lee Street was a foreclosure sale, which needed a lot of work. They painted and redid the floors and installed planters, a picnic table, and a bird bath outside. Because her daughter Natalie loved butterflies, Taylor took butterfly lawn ornaments she’d found at Dollar Tree and used them to decorate the entrance to the house.

I met Wallace at a Hampton Inn off I-95. She brought a small stack of papers: police reports and testimonials about Taylor from family and friends, which she had collected for an upcoming bond hearing. They described Taylor as loving and generous to friends and strangers alike. “My mother never got to grieve properly,” Bailey wrote. “She would never hurt anybody, please just let her come home.”

Wallace said Lentini had breathed new life into Taylor’s defense. But she was also frustrated — she could not understand how prosecutors could stick to their case. She’d recently learned that, back in January, Calhoun had forwarded Lentini’s report to two different forensic chemists at the ATF, both of whom had sat down for depositions. One of them took issue with Lentini’s claim that the state lab “routinely identifies gasoline where it does not exist.” But he did not disagree with Lentini’s conclusions about the chromatography data. “The patterns that I’m seeing in the data do not appear to be gasoline to me,” he said.

The other analyst was Michelle Evans, who gave the 2019 podcast interview in which she said she’d become more cautious in her gasoline findings over time. She concurred that the data did not show the patterns required to identify gasoline. “This strongly supports there not being gasoline there.”

Not long after my trip to St. Augustine, Taylor was released on bond after nearly three years in jail and reunited with her family. As her joy and relief began to fade, so did her hope that prosecutors would ever drop her charges. The fear of a life sentence has given way to anguished uncertainty about whether to plead guilty after all. More than six years after the fire, Wallace said, “she just wants it to be over.”

On March 3, which would have been David’s 18th birthday, Taylor and her family met at the cemetery where he is buried alongside his sister Natalie, under a large oak tree dripping with Spanish moss. They ate cake and wrote messages on Mylar balloons, which they released into the air.

Wallace shared some photos via text. In one, Taylor stands smiling with Bailey, her sole remaining child, over brilliant yellow flowers.

The group at the cemetery included Taylor’s mother, four sisters, and her nieces and nephews, some of whom she helped raise. In phone calls, friends and relatives told me the state’s case never made any sense to them. Taylor wasn’t seeking a lavish lifestyle. Her whole life revolved around her home and her children. “Wherever they went they took their kids,” her mother told me. “She loved the ground her kids walked on.”

The post The Arson Evidence Doesn’t Hold Up. Florida Is About to Convict Her for Murder Anyway. appeared first on The Intercept.

This post was originally published on The Intercept.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is quietly deleting rules for how contractors treat transgender people in immigration detention, endangering a vulnerable population that often faces abuse and sexual assault behind bars.

Over the last month, ICE has altered contracts for at least two detention centers, in Florida and New York, to remove transgender care requirements, according to records reviewed by The Intercept.

Those changes followed President Donald Trump’s anti-trans executive order targeting “gender ideology extremism.”

The Department of Homeland Security office charged with investigating civil rights violations in immigration detention has cited the same executive order to close at least one complaint based on gender identity discrimination, according to an immigrant rights group.

The government’s shifts could deny trans people some of the few tools available for protecting themselves in detention, advocates said.

“While this is not unexpected, it is still incredibly alarming, because the mistreatment of transgender people in immigration detention has been so horrible for so long, and it has been so difficult to combat that mistreatment,” said Bridget Crawford, the director of law and policy for the nonprofit group Immigration Equality. “There are so few mechanisms by which you can guarantee any modicum of protection or medically competent care, and now they are removing even those limited protections.”

Dropped Language

The records show ICE altered transgender care requirements for at least two facilities soon after Trump’s January 20 executive order, although the contract amendments do not specifically reference it.

In February, the agency changed its contract with Akima Global Services, which has a management contract for the ICE-owned Buffalo Service Processing Center in New York. The contract was modified to “rescind/remove all Transgender Care requirements,” according to an entry in the Federal Procurement Data System.

Earlier this month, the agency dropped similar language from its contract with the GEO Group, a publicly traded private-prison company that has cheered Trump’s immigration crackdown, covering detainees at the Broward Transitional Center in Florida.

Also in March, the agency uploaded to its website an undated amendment to its intergovernmental services agreement with the Calhoun County Sheriff’s Office in Battle Creek, Michigan, to delete transgender care requirements for immigration detainees in its jail.

GEO Group and Calhoun County referred requests for comment to ICE. Akima did not respond to requests for comment.

ICE did not respond to questions — including about what motivated the contract changes or which care requirements they are dropping.

One immigration lawyer said that while she had long viewed ICE’s standards as ineffective due to a lack of enforcement, dropping them still sends a chilling message.

“Even if there isn’t a huge amount of language that they are actually stripping from the contract itself, the message is the same. That the lives of people who are trans in that detention center are not valued and that abuse can be carried out with impunity,” said Ann Garcia, a staff attorney at the National Immigration Project.

American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan staff attorney Jay Kaplan said his group would closely monitor conditions at the lock-up in Battle Creek, noting that the Constitution and state law also provide protections for transgender people.

“If it is pursuant to some executive order, an executive order doesn’t usurp federal court decisions. It doesn’t usurp parts of the Constitution,” Kaplan said.

Homan Once “Strictly Prohibited” Discrimination

Trump, in his executive order, mandated that detained trans women be placed in housing with men and ordered federal agencies to “remove all statements, policies, regulations, forms, communications, or other internal and external messages that promote or otherwise inculcate gender ideology.”

That represents a sharp about-face from the Biden era, when ICE added extensive “transgender care” language to contracts with numerous vendors.

That language often extended far beyond medical care. Sample contract language included with a detention contract in Colorado shows that facilities were required to hold newly detained trans people away from the general population, for no more than 72 hours, until a special committee could decide where best to house them.

The language required the facilities to at least consider placing the detainee in “general housing consistent with the non-citizen’s gender identity.”

It also required the facilities to consider special safety measures, provide appropriate clothing and hygiene products, conduct strip-searches in private, refer to detainees by their preferred pronouns, and have access to “transgender-related health care based on medical need.”

Moreover, the committees considering the transgender detainee’s conditions were supposed to regularly reconvene and review reports of mistreatment.

 

The sample contract reflects a memo issued by Trump border czar Tom Homan during an earlier part of his career in 2015, when he was executive assistant director of ICE’s Office of Enforcement and Removal Operations under Barack Obama.

That memo laid out protections for trans people in custody, including the committees, and stated that “Discrimination or harassment of any kind based on a detainee’s actual or perceived sexual orientation or gender identity is strictly prohibited.”

The memo vanished in February from its long-standing address on ICE’s website, according to Internet Archive captures. ICE did not comment on whether it remains effective.

Dire Need

Transgender people make up a tiny fraction of those in immigration custody — perhaps a few dozen on any given day. But there have been long-standing reports of physical and sexual assault, prolonged solitary confinement, verbal abuse from staff and fellow detainees, and the denial of medical care such as HIV medication and hormone therapy.

Immigration Equality and other groups issued a report last June, based on interviews with 41 people who are LGBTQ or living with HIV, calling for the government to phase out immigration detention entirely.

While many advocates saw Homan’s 2015 memo as imperfect, they said that at the very least it should be included in binding contracts with the corporations and local governments that own or operate detention facilities for profit. The Biden administration amended numerous contracts in 2022 and 2023.

Homan’s memo, and the contract language, provided detainees with something to point to when they filed complaints with the Department of Homeland Security’s Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, attorneys said.

Muffling the Watchdog

That office was charged with investigating complaints about civil rights violations, including those related to gender orientation.

However, Immigration Equality says the office recently closed a case related to gender identity discrimination by citing Trump’s executive order.

That raised the disturbing possibility that the agency will no longer investigate complaints based on gender identity discrimination, Immigration Equality lawyer Liza Doubossarskaia said.

DHS did not respond to a request for comment.

Even if DHS policy has not changed to prevent trans people from lodging discrimination complaints, there may be no one around to investigate them. Last week, DHS said it would be reducing staff in the civil rights office to a bare minimum.

“There isn’t anyone to complain to who can take meaningful action right now,” Doubossarskaia said. “It’s scary. I’m just worried about what is going to happen to people.”

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Yale University’s investments in weapons manufacturers violate Connecticut state law, organizers at the school allege in a complaint filed Wednesday with Connecticut Attorney General William Tong.

The complaint asks the attorney general to investigate Yale’s refusal to heed campus protesters’ calls for divestment from military weapons manufacturers and suppliers amid Israel’s ongoing war on Gaza.

“Financially prudent investments may be ineligible for investment if they are deeply incompatible with the University’s mission and purposes,” the complaint says, citing state law and the university’s own investment policies.

“Financially prudent investments may be ineligible for investment if they are deeply incompatible with the University’s mission.”

Universities around the country are facing lawsuits and federal complaints over their handling of protests against the war. This is the first complaint seeking a state investigation into a university over its refusal to divest from the military industry in relation to the war, according to the organizers. 

The organizers allege that Yale trustees breached their fiduciary duties by maintaining investments that expose the university endowment to profit from military weapons manufacturers and suppliers aiding war crimes by Israel.

While Yale Corporation, which manages the university endowment, does not disclose the vast majority of its $40.7 billion endowment, organizers say at least $4 billion of that is tied to manufacturers and suppliers of military weapons. The scant public filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission — 99.7 percent of Yale’s endowment is not publicly disclosed — show that the university has more than $110,000 invested in military weapons manufacturers and contractors with the Israeli military, Yale Daily News reported last year. 

The investments include money in funds that hold shares of weapons companies like Raytheon, Boeing, and Lockheed Martin. 

The complaint alleges that these investments violate both the fiduciary duties of institutional investors outlined in state law and the university’s own investment policies, which call for divestment from companies that “violate, or frustrate the enforcement of” domestic and international law. (Neither the Connecticut attorney general’s office nor Yale immediately responded to requests for comment.)

Almost every state has a law requiring that institutions managing money for tax-exempt nonprofits have to consider the purpose of those charitable organizations in making its investment decision, meaning that the spirit of those choices must be in line with the Internal Revenue Service’s general understanding of charity as providing relief for those in need, or supporting public, educational, or religious work. 

The law does not explicitly prohibit investments in any specific industry like defense or weapons manufacturing, said attorney Ellis Carter. 

“The only exceptions would be if a donor-imposed restriction expressly limits certain investments with respect to a particular gift or the university has adopted an internal policy incorporating ethical, environmental, or social considerations into its investment strategy,” Carter said. 

Yale’s investment guidelines are outlined in “The Ethical Investor,” a 1972 book written by a former Yale Law School professor which the university endowment advisory committee uses to guide its work. Yale University has previously interpreted its own investment guidelines to require divestment from companies assisting in genocide; violating domestic, international, and humanitarian law; or denying students and teachers a safe educational environment, organizers argued. In 2021, Yale Corporation divested from two major private prison companies, CoreCivic and GEO Group. 

“Military weapons companies develop, manufacture, and sell products used in the commission of war crimes and violations of international law, including the destruction of Palestinian schools, universities, faculty, students, sites of cultural preservation, and whole communities,” the complaint says. “Since these companies are diametrically opposed to the University’s mission, due consideration of Yale’s charitable purposes by a prudent and reasonable fiduciary would bar these companies from investment.”

Drive for Divestment

Students launched protest encampments at Yale last year to call on the school to divest from weapons manufacturers supplying Israel. Last April, Yale’s Advisory Committee on Investor Responsibility, which supports ethical management of the university endowment and reports to university trustees, refused to recommend divestment. 

Yale Police arrested close to 50 protesters as demonstrations escalated in response to news that the university would not divest.

That same month, the advisory committee updated its policies to specify that a prohibition on investment in assault weapons retailers adopted in 2018 applied to assault weapon manufacturers that sell and mass advertise to the general public, but not to military weapons manufacturers. 

University organizers again presented their proposals for divestment to Yale’s advisory committee on in November. Last month, in response to the presentation, the committee declined again to divest from military weapons manufacturers and suppliers in an email to a university organizer. (Yale’s Advisory Committee on Investor Responsibility did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

“If the complaint alleges that the university has violated its own investment policies or fiduciary duties, or violated a donor restriction, then the state may evaluate whether trustees or investment managers have acted inconsistently with UPMIFA’s prudence and loyalty standards,” said Ellis, the attorney. “However, absent a clear statutory restriction, investments in military contractors or similar industries are generally a matter of policy discretion rather than a legal violation.”

Taran Samarth, a graduate student organizer with the Yale Endowment Justice Collective, which put together Wednesday’s complaint, said the university’s endowment policies showed the Palestine exception in action. 

“Instead of following state law, community voices, and their own investment policies, the trustees have let a Palestine exception to endowment management prevail at Yale,” Samarth said. “Abandoning their own divestment precedent and arresting students en masse isn’t just bad policy by the trustees. It’s bad-faith leadership.”

“The Yale Corporation has breached its fiduciary duties of loyalty and due consideration of the charitable purposes of the institutional fund by providing capital to the military weapons industry,” the complaint says. “Continued investment in military weapons companies violates the Yale Corporation’s duty to consider an asset’s special relationship or special value, if any, to the charitable purposes of the institution.” 

In recent years, there has been some success in getting universities to divest from fossil fuels through a similar strategy. Organizers at Cornell and Harvard filed complaints alleging that their schools’ investments in fossil fuels violated fiduciary duties. In 2019, Cornell issued a moratorium on fossil fuel investments, and in 2021, Harvard said it would end its investments in fossil fuels. That same year, Yale announced it would be “applying its ethical investment policy to the fossil fuel industry.”

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In late April 2024, a mob attacked a pro-Palestinian student encampment at the University of California, Los Angeles. Police and campus security stood by and watched the assault for nearly five hours before intervening. Pleas to university officials went nowhere. And the next day police returned, only to violently and unlawfully clear the encampment and arrest protesters. These are the allegations of a group of students and faculty who are suing the people they blame for the attack, law enforcement agencies, and university officials for violating their civil rights.

The lawsuit, filed Thursday in Los Angeles Superior Court, comes as the federal government deploys all of its might to restrict speech on Palestine in the name of eradicating antisemitism on college campuses. The Trump administration has begun arresting and revoking the visas of students and scholars over their advocacy for Palestine. It has also launched a Department of Justice investigation into the University of California system for allowing “an Antisemitic hostile work environment to exist on its campuses.” And this week, the DOJ threw its support behind two Jewish students who are suing UCLA for alleged antisemitism, accusing the school of trying to avoid responsibility in the case, according to legal filings.

The sprawling 96-page complaint, which identifies 20 alleged members of the mob by name, accuses university officials and police of violating their civil rights, carrying out unlawful arrests, firing less lethal munitions at protesters at close range without just cause, as well as negligence for failing to protect students and faculty from violence in late April. Plaintiffs said the mob incident followed a series of “physical attacks, threats of violence, and harassment” against Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim students on or near campus throughout the school year.

“The events at UCLA highlight systemic anti-Palestinian bias and the administration’s failure to uphold its obligation to protect the rights of students and faculty to engage in peaceful protest and expression,” the complaint said. “This action seeks to hold UCLA accountable for its failure to address and prevent Islamophobic, anti-Palestinian and anti-Arab discrimination, its violation of civil rights of all pro-Palestinian protesters — a group comprised of a wide range of people including Jewish people — and to demand systemic changes to ensure the safety and equity of all members of the university community.”

“It’s really important to know UCLA did nothing to stop them on that night.”

The complaint alleges in stark terms the violence that the school allowed against protesters, said attorney Thomas Harvey, who is working on the suit.

“There’s this notion, broadly speaking, in the media, that there’s some kind of violence from the pro-Palestinian protesters,” Harvey said. “In this case, it’s four-plus hours of unmitigated violence is coming from the counter-protesters, whose problem is pro-Palestinian or anti-genocide speech.”

There were multiple police agencies present, but none stopped the attacks on protesters, Harvey added. Officers from the University of California Police Department, Los Angeles Police Department, California Highway Patrol, and private security were present, he said, but none intervened. “It’s really important to know UCLA did nothing to stop them on that night.”

Amid a wave of university protests in solidarity with Palestine, UCLA students set up the encampment in front of Royce Hall in late April to amplify their demands for the school to stop investing in companies and institutions that fund or profit off of Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. The encampment organizers also hosted talks and education sessions featuring professors and journalists.

In the days leading up to the attack, Zionist counter-protesters began to disrupt the protest, attempting to break in and sabotage the encampment and setting up a jumbotron and speakers to play on loop the Israeli song “Meni Mamtera,” a children’s tune used by the Israeli military to torture Palestinian captives, the complaint said. When they arrived on the night of April 30, some of the counter-protesters carried fireworks and chemical agents, the plaintiffs allege. 

In the lawsuit, the 32 plaintiffs — a group that includes students, faculty, journalists, legal observers, and community members who showed up in solidarity with the encampment — detail the specific moments in which they allege members of the mob punched, swung metal rods and wooden boards, aimed and shot fireworks, sprayed chemical agents, harassed and sexually assaulted plaintiffs, as campus law enforcement and security stood by. Others recalled the aggressive tactics used by police to dismantle the encampment. Plaintiffs recounted physical injuries, such as broken bones, nerve damage, and bruises. Some were diagnosed from post-traumatic stress disorder and their mental health continues to be affected by the incident, the complaint said.

Among them was Thistle Boosinger, a Taiko drum instructor and lifelong resident of Los Angeles who had grown up visiting UCLA for its museums, sports games, community events, and is a patient of its hospital system. She joined the encampment in solidarity with the demands of students and had volunteered to help hand out masks and other supplies to protesters. During the attack, a member of the mob repeatedly hit Boosinger’s hand with a metal rod, shattering her bones and severing a nerve in her ring finger, the complaint said. 

Her injuries required three unsuccessful surgeries, as she continues to experience reduced mobility and strength in her hand, Boosinger alleges. Due to her injuries, she can no longer teach music.

“I have a right to protest safely and make my voice heard,” Boosinger told The Intercept, “And because of events that transpired with aggressors attacking the encampment — which up until that point was incredibly peaceful and beautiful and inspiring on the inside — because of damages that I sustained emotionally and physically, I felt that it was necessary to hold the aggressors accountable.”

Graeme Blair, a political science professor at UCLA and plaintiff in the suit, said he hopes that during the litigation process attorneys will be able to find more information on who led, organized, and possibly funded the mob attacks on protesters and plan to amend the complaint as more alleged actors are identified.

Blair was among the faculty members who had volunteered to keep watch at the encampment after students put a call out to professors for help. He arrived on April 30, just as the mob started its violent attack, in which he was sprayed by chemical agents, according to the complaint. He and other faculty immediately sounded the alarm to school officials, including then-Chancellor Gene Block, who, according to Blair, said police were called and that he could do no more. As TV news stations broadcast the attacks, police stood by watching the violence unfold without intervening.

“I was standing just a few feet from these people who were throwing metal barricades and punching and kicking and using their spray and tear gas, and had been shooting fireworks,” Blair recalled to The Intercept. “And it was just a surreal scene because the California Highway Patrol was standing, you know, 100 feet away in a formation and weren’t advancing.”

When police returned on May 2 and began their sweep of the encampment, faculty had formed a human chain around the students. Blair was among the first of dozens to be arrested. In this roundup, officers fired less-lethal munitions at students and struck their legs, the complaint said.

Police again responded to a UCLA encampment with violence on June 10. In one instance, officers shot a protester in the chest with a less-lethal munition, within 10 feet. The student sustained a heart and lung injury, causing him to cough up blood and to be hospitalized, the complaint said.

In the wake of protests following the police killing of George Floyd in 2020, UCLA changed its guidelines to minimize police presence on campus and use deescalation tactics before calling outside law enforcement to campus. The school violated those new guidelines during protests against the war on Gaza, Harvey said, by calling multiple outside law enforcement agencies onto campus early in response to student encampments. “They went through all these protocols in response to the George Floyd uprising, and then they violated them because of pro-Palestinian speech,” Harvey said. 

“Knowing I am a safer target and can provide help in that way, I want to be able to assist in the fight.”

Also at the June 10 encampment was Benyamin Moryosef, a fourth-year student studying English at UCLA. A plaintiff in the case, Moryosef, who is Jewish and is the son of an Israeli immigrant, joined the encampment in solidarity with Palestinians. Officers arrested Moryosef by violently grabbing him without explanation, zip-tying him, and forcing him into a painful position that made it difficult for him to breathe, the complaint said. 

Moryosef said he hoped the lawsuit would help protect the free speech rights of other protesters moving forward amid the federal government’s broader crackdown on free speech rights. He said he wanted to use his privilege of having been born in the U.S., since international students may be more at risk for speaking out.

“Our rights to free speech feel very heavily under attack,” he told The Intercept. “Knowing I am a safer target and can provide help in that way, I want to be able to assist in the fight.”

In response to threats from Trump against universities for pro-Palestine speech — including the revocation of $400 million in federal funding from Columbia University — UCLA announced an initiative last week meant to combat antisemitism. The program has been criticized by Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim students who say their calls for more safety on campus have been ignored. The new lawsuit follows three separate reports from a task force on anti-Palestinian, anti-Muslim, and anti-Arab racism set up by the school last year, which found long-standing harassment and punishment of students and faculty who have advocated for Palestine. The complaint draws heavily from these reports. Blair, one of the plaintiffs, said the university has yet to implement any of the recommendations from the reports. Instead, the school has only tightened protest restrictions throughout the school year, including a ban on face coverings, and last month, the school suspended pro-Palestinian student groups — Students for Justice in Palestine, and Graduate Students for Justice in Palestine at UCLA — after protesting outside the home of a UC regent’s Brentwood home. 

Harvey said plaintiffs were concerned that the school is bowing to external pressure to crack down on free speech in support of Palestine. “We believe that UCLA knows that its students are not violent people, they’re not antisemitic,” Harvey said. “But we’re concerned, as always, that they’re bowing to outside political pressure. And we’re even more concerned now with the Trump administration.”

Boosinger hoped that she and other plaintiffs would find some relief from compensation, but she also wanted the lawsuit to help shift focus back to the initial demands of the encampment. 

“It’s devastating that such a simple message,” Boosinger said, “to end the genocide and to divest UC funds from companies and weapons manufacturers that have stakes in genocide was such a controversial issue.” 

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