You are listening to the Robertta Glass True Crime Report, putting the true back in true crime.

From New York City, Roberta Glass is now on the record. On October 24th, 2011 in Potsdam, New York, 12-year-old Garrett Phillips was found in the home he shared

with his mother and half-brother hanging on to life, suffering from what would become fatal injuries.

His mother's Jamaican ex-boyfriend, Oral Nick Hillary, was tried and acquitted of Garrett's

murder in 2016. However, in 2019, HBO released a documentary entitled Who Killed Garrett Phillips?

The documentary depicted Nick Hillary as a victim of a racially motivated witch hunt, but like so many true crime documentaries, left much of the prosecution's case and the

evidence against Mr. Hillary on the cutting room floor. Joining me to discuss the murder of

Garrett Phillips and Mr. Hillary's legal odyssey is Thomas J. Mortati. A graduate of Fordham in Albany Law School, Tom has been a practicing

civil attorney for over three decades. Mr. Mortati made news in 2019 when he obtained a record,

$7.4 million verdict in the St. Lawrence County Supreme Court in a medical

malpractice case. He has been featured in the aforementioned HBO documentary who killed

Garrett Phillips, as well as the 2020 episode rear window about Garrett Phillips. And that's the subject of today's episode. Welcome, Tom Mortati.

Thank you. Happy to be back. So, yeah, we've been through it with this case. So just for those who

don't know, what was the circumstances? How was Garrett Phillips murdered and how was he found? Sure. So, you know,

Garrett was, as it turned out, he suffered from asphyxiation, which is ultimately what led to his

death. And when he was, you know, initially found, again, one of the intricacies of this case is that Garrett's not

laying on the ground with, you know, a gunshot wound or a knife sticking at his chest. He's found

partly inside one of the back bedrooms in this apartment on the second floor of this building on

Market Street and Potsdam, old Victorian kind of style of sorts. And he's unresponsive.

He's he's not dead. He's unresponsive. He's hardly breathing, if at all. And so the initial reaction

when the police, and it's, and again, I know you and I've been down this road, it wasn't a circumstance

where the police come bashing the door down. They basically get a phone call, not even to 911, but to the, you know, to the main dispatch line from the next door neighbor, Marissa Vogel, who says, gee, I think I heard something, a crash, a no or an O or in help. And she's not, she's almost apologetic when she calls if you listen to the recording.

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