Garnett v. State

308 A.3d 625

Aaron GARNETT, Defendant Below, Appellant,

v.STATE of Delaware, Appellee.

No. 376, 2022

Supreme Court of Delaware.

Submitted: July 26, 2023

Decided: October 24, 2023

Court Below: Superior Court of the State of Delaware, Cr. ID No. 2003009148 (K)

Upon appeal from the Superior Court.

AFFIRMED.

ELLIOT M. MARGULES, Esquire, (argued) and NICOLE M. WALKER, Esquire, OFFICE OF DEFENSE SERVICES, Wilmington, Delaware, for Appellant Aaron Garnett.

ANDREW J. VELLA, Esquire, DELAWARE DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE, Wilmington, Delaware, for Appellee State of Delaware.

Before SEITZ, Chief Justice; VALIHURA, TRAYNOR, LEGROW, and GRIFFITHS, Justices constituting the Court en bane.

TRAYNOR, Justice, for the Majority:

After arresting Aaron Garnett in whose care were three young children, the police promptly sought to locate the children’s parent or guardian. This search, initiated before sunrise on a cold and rainy day, led the police to a house where they were told the children’s mother lived and was sleeping. Once there, the police knocked, then banged, on the front door and loudly announced their presence. When no one answered, one of the officers went to the rear of the house where, after another round of knocking and announcing, the officer noticed the back door was unlocked. He pushed open the unlocked door and, peering into the interior of the residence with the benefit of a flashlight, saw a motionless body under a blanket at the foot of a stairway. Joined now by his fellow officers, he entered the residence and found the lifeless body of Naquita Hill, the mother of one of the children whose welfare had motivated the police’s efforts. Seven or so hours later, Garnett confessed that, during a heated argument, he had choked Hill until she slumped to the floor and beat her with his fist after that. After a jury trial, Garnett was convicted of Naquita Hill’s murder, and we now consider his appeal.

Although the officer was not looking for contraband or other evidence when he opened the unlocked back door, Garnett contended below—and the State tacitly conceded—that the opening of the door and all that followed it was a search implicating the Fourth Amendment. Hence, he moved to suppress the evidence police seized following their warrantless entry of the residence. This, according to Garnett, included Hill’s body and the resulting forensic testing of it, He also moved to suppress his confession, arguing that it was derivative of the illegal entry. In two separate opinions,¹ the Superior Court denied Garnett’s motion. The court found that the body and physical evidence found in the residence would have been discovered through lawful means in the absence of the illegal entry and, therefore, under the inevitable-discovery exception to the exclusionary rule, should not be suppressed. Likewise, the court concluded that Gar- nett’s incriminatory statements to the police were admissible under the same inevitable-discovery exception and that, even if they were not, they were sufficiently attenuated from the illegality and thus not subject to exclusion. Garnett appeals both rulings.

For the reasons that follow, we conclude that the evidence Garnett asked the Superior Court to exclude was properly admitted at Garnett’s trial. Consequently, we affirm his convictions.

I

Because Garnett’s appeal challenges the Superior Court’s denial of his motion to suppress physical evidence and his confession and does not claim any error at trial, our discussion of the factual background, unless otherwise noted, is drawn from the suppression-hearing record.²

A

Shortly after 5:30 in the morning on March 15, 2020, several officers of the Dover Police Department responded to the Wawa convenience store on Forest Avenue in Dover, having received a report of an apparent "domestic incident" in progress there. The report was described variously as "a physical altercation between a parent and a child"³ and an "adult male … grabb[ing] a juvenile by the neck."⁴

Corporal Anthony Toto was the first officer to arrive on the scene. When Corporal Toto entered the store, a store employee pointed to Garnett, who had three children with him. The oldest child, M.S.,⁵ was ten years old. The next oldest was F.L., who was five years old. And Garnett was holding his five-month-old son, A.G. Corporal Toto described Garnett’s demeanor at the time of their encounter as "very strange."⁶ Among other things, he was holding his infant son not as "a normal parent would hold a baby"⁷ or "cradling the baby like a normal parent";⁸ instead, with his arms "extended out,"⁹ he was holding the baby away from his body. Although it was a cold and rainy morning, none of the children was "dressed for the weather."¹⁰

Corporal Toto asked Garnett to step outside the store, leaving the children with other officers. Once outside, Garnett identified himself as Aaron Edwards and stat- ed that his date of birth was July 18, 1995. He said that he came from Maryland to take custody of the children because their mother was in prison, but he was either unable or unwilling to provide the mother’s name. Oddly enough, Garnett had no diaper bag, stroller, or other gear one would expect to see upon confronting an adult preparing to travel with three small children.

When Corporal Toto was unable to locate any records of an individual named Aaron Edwards born on July 18, 1995, he confronted Garnett with that fact. Garnett promptly admitted that he had provided "a fake name."¹¹ Around this time, Sergeant Jennifer Lynch joined the conversation. Garnett told Corporal Toto and Sergeant Lynch that the infant was his son and the other two boys were his nephews. He said that he and the children had walked from an area Sergeant Lynch recognized as "the Towne Point neighborhood"¹² to the Wawa store on Forest Avenue. As the children soon disclosed, Garnett and the children had walked from 32 Willis Road, which is adjacent to Towne Point and over three miles from the Wawa store. Because Garnett had misidentified himself, Corporal Toto arrested him for criminal impersonation, placed him in handcuffs, and asked Patrol Officer Brandyn Clancy to transport Garnett to the Dover Police Department for processing.

Meanwhile, Patrol Officer Alicia Corrado took control of the children. When Officer Corrado first approached the children, M.S., who appeared nervous, was holding the baby. She noticed that none of the children was adequately dressed, given the weather. M.S. and F.L. related to Officer Corrado that Garnett had woke them up that morning "to take a walk."¹³ The two young boys together were able to provide their address—32 Willis Road—with M.S. providing the street name and F.L. recalling the house number. They also told Officer Corrado that their mother—Naquita Hill—was at home sleeping. (It was later learned that Hill was A.G.’s mother and that, although the two older boys referred to Hill as their mother, she was actually their aunt). Officer Corrado noticed a scratch on M.S.’s neck and asked where it came from. M.S. said that Garnett had caused the mark.

After Officer Corrado and Corporal Toto brought the children back to the police station, she noticed two large items in M.S.’s pockets. M.S. shared that Garnett had given him the items and "told him to hide them in his pockets."¹⁴ In short order, M.S. took the items out of his pocket and handed them over to Officer Corrado; they consisted of Garnett’s cell phone and credit card and Naquita Hill’s Social Security Card and driver’s license. M.S. did not know why Garnett gave him these items to hide.

Meanwhile, three officers—Sergeant Lynch, PFC Joshua Krumm, and Patrol Officer Dale Starke—having learned where M.S. and F.L. resided, went to 32 Willis Road in the hope of locating the children’s parent or custodian. The residence at that address is an end-unit row home. As Sergeant Lynch "stood off in the grass in the front yard,"¹⁵ PFC Krumm and Officer Starke went to the front door and knocked on it, according to Sergeant Lynch, for "[o]ff and on … probably about two or three minutes."¹⁶ These knocks, Officer Starke testified, were not "gentle knocks,"¹⁷ and as he and PFC Krumm knocked they announced their presence as members of the Dover Police Department. They also shined their flashlights in the windows but to no avail.

Frustrated by his inability to elicit a response, Officer Starke made his way to the back door, while PFC Krumm and Sergeant Lynch stayed out front. Officer Starke knocked on the back door several times while announcing his presence but, as in the front, so in the back: no one responded. This caused Officer Starke, who understood that he was performing a "welfare check," to be concerned, so he checked the back-door handle; it was unlocked. Officer Starke radioed to Sergeant Lynch and PFC Krumm to let them know of the unlocked door. As PFC Krumm came around to the back door, Officer Starke pushed it open. Remaining outside, he peered inside with the aid of his flashlight and saw "a limb that was partially covered with a blanket."¹⁸ Officer Starke and PFC Krumm again announced their presence, "calling from the door, trying to make announcements[.]"¹⁹

By this time, Sergeant Lynch had come to the back door. She described how the officers then discovered Naquita Hill’s brutally battered body:

I peek in. And pretty much from the back door, you can look straight through to the front residence. It’s a row home. It’s not very big. As soon you open the door, you are in the kitchen and in the living room and then the front door. And there are steps that go upstairs right at the front door. So as soon as you open the back door, you have a clear view of the victim that was laying on the ground. …

So … I saw someone covered in a blanket. I saw fans of feet. I saw a right arm of someone. And I saw a reddish stain on the front of the blanket where, if it was a person, it would be where their face and head would be.

Immediately I thought we needed to check on this person.

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