Corey Gibbs

At around 12:30 a.m. on March 10, 2012, 39-year-old Robert "Rebo" Alvin and 46-year-old Michael Butler were shot to death outside the Tex III lounge on Susquehanna Avenue in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Alvin was shot three times in the arm, with the fatal shot passing through the arm and entering his chest. At the time of the shooting, Alvin was talking to Valencia Thrones and Denise Jackson. Butler was standing on a nearby corner when a bullet struck him in the face. Witnesses said the shooter rode off on a bicycle.


The investigation into the shootings was led by Detective Ronald Dove. He was assisted by Detectives Philip Nordo, Tracy Byard, Thorsten Lucke, James Burns, and others.


Thrones was brought in for questioning at noon on March 13. More than 16 hours later, between 4:45 a.m. and 6:15 a.m. on March 14, Thrones gave a statement to Dove and Burns implicating 33-year-old Corey Gibbs as the shooter.


Jackson was also brought in for questioning at 3:35 p.m. on March 13. She was held for nearly 17 hours, then released. Police files said that Jackson was "not interviewed" and that she "literally screamed for an entire day that she didn't see anything." Jackson returned to the Homicide Unit at noon on May 17. Nearly 29 hours later, after being interviewed by Byard and Lucke, Jackson signed a statement that said she did not see the shooter.


On June 15, Nordo and Lucke questioned Derrick Andrews, who had been arrested two days earlier on weapons and drug charges. Andrews said in a statement that he saw Gibbs, holding a gun, ride away from the shooting on a bicycle.


On July 3, Rhonda Alvin gave a statement to police. The statement said that her brother was friends with Gibbs and had been concerned that people were stealing from Gibbs because he was high all the time. The statement also said that the two friends had an argument about two weeks before the shooting after Gibbs accused Rebo of taking $20 from him.


Mark Holmes, a fourth witness, gave a statement implicating Gibbs on June 17, 2012.


Police arrested Gibbs on July 5, 2012, charging him with two counts of murder and several weapons violations.


Prior to his arrest, beginning on March 14, Gibbs had called the police department several times, asking to speak with the detective assigned to the case. No one had called him back. On March 21, he went to the Homicide Unit, where he waived his Miranda rights and spoke with Dove and Burns. He told the detectives that he had heard on the street that he was a suspect, but he did not shoot Butler or Alvin. Gibbs said he was inside the bar at the time of the shootings, high on "wet," the street name for marijuana cigarettes dipped in PCP. He did not give a formal statement, but the detectives typed up the interview.


At a preliminary hearing on August 22, 2012, Holmes recanted his statement and testified about the pressure police applied to get him to name Gibbs. He said that he had been interviewed twice by detectives prior to his June statement. He said that police held him for 24 hours in a locked room, allowing him only one trip to use the restroom. During the second interview, Holmes testified, Nordo "kept on pressuring me, kept on pressuring me, kept on pressuring me" and said he knew Holmes knew that Gibbs was the shooter, so "he was like, 'C'mon, man, I just want to bring the Philly out of you, to tell the truth,' and like, he just kept on saying that I know who did it."


There were no records of these interviews, but another detective testified at the hearing that the interview with Nordo occurred.


Gibbs's trial in the Philadelphia County Court of Common Pleas began on September 10, 2013. There was no physical or forensic evidence connecting him to the crime. Although the police recovered six shell casings from the crime scene-all .40 caliber Glock casings-the murder weapon was not found.


Thrones recanted on the witness stand. She testified that detectives drafted her statement, and that the police treated her as a criminal. The defense only learned of Thrones's initial statement, which didn't inculpate Gibbs, at trial.


"The only reason I signed all that stuff, because I wanted to go home and it wasn't my situation," Thrones said. "That's what I said. Now, I didn't care about what he was saying or nobody else was saying. I agreed to some stuff and I, you know. Yeah. I don't care. I just wanted to go home."


Thrones testified that Gibbs was wearing a light gray or white shirt on the night of the shooting. This was at odds with the initial witness descriptions, which said the shooter was wearing either a red jacket or a black hoodie. She also testified that the shooter, unlike Gibbs, had braids.


Jackson testified that the police questioned her for 10 hours during the first interview in an effort to get her to identify Gibbs as the shooter. After the second interview, Jackson said, she checked herself into a hospital, because "that's how bad they [interrogate] me trying to make me say something that I ain't want to say." Jackson never identified Gibbs as the shooter.


During his testimony, Andrews also recanted his statement to the police. He said that Nordo and Lucke picked him up from a Philadelphia County prison and told him what had happened outside the bar. He said that he repeated their account because he was tired after the detectives kept him in a holding cell at the police station for "like two days." Andrews also said the detectives didn't record his statement about not seeing Gibbs leaving the crime scene.


Holmes testified that in his first two interviews, he told the detectives that he did not see the shooting and that Gibbs was inside the bar when it happened. Holmes said that after the second interview, he visited his probation officer and was then held for two months at a county prison for a probation violation. It was during this incarceration that he gave a statement inculpating Gibbs.


According to Holmes, Nordo pressured him to give his third statement because he knew Holmes needed to be released from the county prison to care for his partner, who was recovering from a gunshot wound. He also said that Nordo promised him a job in exchange for his testimony against Gibbs.


Holmes had been detained on a probation violation on June 13, 2012, and released on August 23, 2012, the day after he testified at the preliminary hearing. Holmes testified that Judge Rayford Means had placed him in the county jail after the probation violation because he was a witness in the homicide case. Both the prosecutor and the defense said this could not be true. Andrews also recanted and testified that he never saw Gibbs flee the scene on a bicycle.


"I said yes just 'cause I got tired of them just keep asking me about the crime scene, so I just started to agree and stuff," Andrews said. "But I really ain't see [Gibbs] or no guns being involved that night, for real for real. I just saw them two bodies out there and went back in the bar and mind my business."


Andrews's statement and the others naming Gibbs were introduced at trial. Lucke testified that Andrews "wasn't happy and he was, you know, hesitant. But he did tell us what he told us."


Latorya Rainey testified that the shooter she saw leaving the scene on a bicycle had black clothing and a hood over his head and that he looked like a skinny young Black teenager.


Jillian Gay-Johnson testified that Gibbs came to her home after the shooting. She said he was acting strange and appeared to be under the influence of drugs. She said Gibbs was with two other men, and one of them said to Johnson, "Tell him I need that stuff." She said that Gibbs went upstairs to get something. Gay-Johnson said she saw Gibbs a few days later. She said that Gibbs told her he was upset because his name was getting mentioned in the shootings. She testified he kept saying, "I don't think I did it."


During the trial and prior to her testimony, Rhonda Alvin approached Gibbs's attorney and said that she didn't believe Gibbs killed her brother. She said she believed the real assailants were Talley J. and Shyheed J. She said she had told a prosecutor that the shooter was Shyheed, and the prosecutor said, "I know." She also said she had told the police that there was a photo circulating of her brother and Gibbs, together and smiling, taken inside the bar on the night of the murders.


Neither Talley nor Shyheed was mentioned in the statement police prepared based on Rhonda Alvin's interview, but both men were questioned in the days after the shooting. Shyheed gave a statement naming Gibbs as the shooter, but he was not called to testify.


Rhonda Alvin testified that her brother and Gibbs had known each other since elementary school. She acknowledged their argument prior to the shooting but said that the two friends had made up. She did not testify on direct or cross-examination about Talley and Shyheed. During cross-examination, she testified about the photo of Gibbs and Rebo taken at the bar, which Gibbs had posted on Facebook. Gibbs was wearing a light gray or white zip-up jacket in the photo.


During his closing argument, the prosecutor asked the jury to look past the witness testimony and focus on their statements to the police.


The prosecutor said the detectives didn't coerce witnesses; the statements were the result of solid police work in a city with hundreds of murders each year.


"You cannot expect homicide detectives in our city ... to simply act like Dunkin' Donuts workers," the prosecutor said. "They're not going to simply sit there at their desk twiddling their thumbs waiting and hoping that someone comes in and says, 'Yeah, that's the guy that ambushed two unarmed men outside in front of a bar full of people last night.' They're not going to sit there and write down what you say and send you on your merry way and hope that someone comes forward. That's not real life and for better or for worse, that's not the circumstances and the way our city works."


On September 18, 2013, the jury convicted Gibbs on two counts of first-degree murder and several weapons charges. He received a sentence of life without parole.


Gibbs appealed, arguing that the state had failed to turn over the preliminary statement made by Holmes, where he said Gibbs was inside the bar at the time of the shooting. He also said the trial judge's ruling allowing the jury to see autopsy photos and the prosecutor's closing argument had prejudiced him.


The Pennsylvania Superior Court affirmed the conviction on June 5, 2015. It said the prosecutor's closing argument was acceptable, as was the judge's decision on the autopsy photos. The court said that the state had failed to turn over the earlier statement in a timely fashion, but the failure had been cured through Holmes's testimony at the preliminary hearing and the trial.


On July 5, 2016, Gibbs filed a pro se petition under Pennsylvania's Post-Conviction Relief Act (PCRA). The petition said his appellate counsel had been ineffective in handling the appeal. A trial judge dismissed the petition on June 29, 2018.


In 2017, while Gibbs's petition was before the courts, Gerald Camp was exonerated for two weapons convictions after his attorney presented evidence that Nordo had an improper relationship with the informant who named Camp. Nordo was placed on administrative duties in April 2017 and then suspended with intent to dismiss in August 2017.


In February 2019, Nordo was indicted on charges of sexually assaulting witnesses and suspects, including once in an interrogation room. On June 1, 2022, a jury convicted him on two assault charges, as well as obstruction of justice, and official oppression. He was later sentenced to 24 1/2 to 49 years in prison.


After Camp's exoneration, other defendants began filing their own successful motions for relief, arguing that Nordo had used coercive and illegal practices to obtain witness statements.


Separately, Dove had been fired in December 2013 after the police department found that he had interfered in a criminal case involving his girlfriend, Erica Sanchez, who had killed her former boyfriend on September 8, 2013. Dove was arrested on January 22, 2015, and charged with several crimes related to helping Sanchez evade arrest. He pleaded guilty to the charges on April 26, 2017, and received a sentence of 30 days in jail. After Nordo's arrest, the state asked the court to appoint an attorney to represent Gibbs in his post-conviction motions. Attorney Corey Reynolds began representing Gibbs and filed a PCRA motion on July 18, 2021.


The motion said that Gibbs's conviction was plagued by witness tampering and misconduct that was consistent with previous misconduct committed by Nordo and other detectives. It further argued that the state had failed to disclose this misconduct, which was deeply ingrained in police practices.


"Each of the four identification witnesses testified similarly that they initially told detectives that they did not see the shooter and that the detectives ignored them and did not record what they said," the motion said. "The detectives then engaged in conduct aimed at forcing the witnesses to implicate petitioner in the crime that included threats, coercion, periods of isolation, and lengthy periods of confinement alone in a room. The witnesses each finally surrendered and implicated petitioner because they realized that it was the only way they would be allowed to leave."


The Conviction Integrity Unit (CIU) in the Philadelphia County District Attorney's Office conducted its own investigation. On September 25, 2024, attorneys with the CIU filed a response that said Gibbs deserved a new trial, based largely on a failure to disclose evidence of misconduct by Nordo and Dove.


The CIU review also included interviews with Thrones, Holmes, and Andrews. Each said they did not see the shooter nor did they see Gibbs possessing a weapon that night. They said they were held at the Homicide Unit until they signed a statement. In the review of the prosecutor's files, the CIU found emails between Nordo and Judge Means. Nordo had asked the judge to hold Holmes until the preliminary hearing, and the judge agreed, despite an objection from Holmes's attorney. Other records indicated that Nordo talked with probation officers about detaining Holmes, possibly as a suspect who helped lure Butler and Alvin outside, where the shooter was waiting.


In addition, the response said that Nordo withheld exculpatory information provided by Rhonda Alvin. Consistent with her trial testimony, Alvin said she told Nordo that her brother and Gibbs were on good terms at the time of the shooting and that Shyheed and Talley stole from Gibbs when he was high. She also said that her brother had "smacked" Talley for taking advantage of Gibbs and that Talley had tried to shoot him but stopped because of the presence of police officers.


The CIU response agreed with Gibbs's motion that Nordo's actions tracked his misconduct in other cases, where he coerced witnesses into making false statements and abused his power and authority.


While Dove's criminal actions began on the eve of Gibbs's trial, the CIU response also noted that a potential homicide witness in an unrelated case filed a complaint against Dove in October 2013. The woman said that Dove and Detective James Pitts held her for two days, seizing her phone and barring her from calling her job or her 11-year-old son, who was home alone. An Internal Affairs investigation sustained the complaint in February 2015, after Dove's arrest.


The CIU response said that Dove ignored Gibbs's calls to the police department. It also said that the prosecutor didn't release Dove's notes of his interview with Gibbs until the trial.


"The cumulative effect of the suppressed information about Dove's and Nordo's mistreatment of witnesses in other cases, for which they were investigated, disciplined, fired from their positions and then criminally prosecuted and convicted, in light of the fact that no eyewitness actually identified [Gibbs] as the perpetrator at trial and no other evidence was presented that identified him as the shooter, fundamentally undermines the case against Gibbs," the response said.


On December 3, 2024, Judge Scott DiClaudio vacated Gibbs's convictions and then granted a separate motion to dismiss his charges. Gibbs was released from prison that day.


- Ken Otterbourg

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Posting Date: 02-12-2025

Last Update Date: 02-12-2025