The story behind the hoax

By April M. Silvaggio  

JANUARY 18, 2010 9:51 a.m. (0)

“What happened?” the 911 operator asked.

“She, she wouldn’t let me touch her,” the caller answered in a voice that sounded young and effeminate. “I just thought she was pretty.”

That unleashed one of the most puzzling cases Mauldin Police have faced recently and left city residents unnerved for a week.

And it all fell into the hands of Det. Brian Wright, who got the call shortly before 10 a.m. on New Year’s Day.

Officers from his agency were running with blue lights and sirens to Sunset Park on Fowler Circle off West Butler Road. He left his wife, daughters, 2 and 3 weeks and relatives from out of town to head to the park.

From the first minutes he arrived, he saw simple inconsistencies. He began what ultimately became dual investigations into both a hunt for an assailant and the pursuit of the truth.

Officers had a 16-year-old girl where the 911 caller said she would be, unconscious on the ground near the covered picnic shelter that sits at the edge of the park adjacent to an apartment complex.

The girl’s cell phone, determined later that morning to be the phone the alleged attacker had used, was found nearby.

“I remember getting out at the scene, and at first being at a loss,” said Wright, who has been in law enforcement nine years. “I believed I was dealing with a situation where a 16-year-old girl had been killed or raped, and I was thinking this wasn’t the way I wanted to start the year.”

He climbed out of his car and spoke with patrol officers. The girl was in the ambulance being treated by paramedics. Wright climbed in the back to try and speak with her.

“One of the first things I asked her was who she was and if she knew what had happened,” Wright said. “She told me everyone was calling her Pearl.”

She couldn’t remember anything else. Her name, Wright learned, was Pearl Brown.

The EMS crew confirmed she’d taken a hard lick on the head. Wright said he asked one of the emergency medical personnel to be sure evidence was collected with a rape kit in the emergency room, in case the teen had been sexually assaulted.

He wanted to be sure he didn’t miss anything that might help identify a suspect.

As the ambulance pulled out of Sunset Park on its way to Greenville Memorial Hospital, Wright turned his attention toward the crime scene. He collected DNA swabs of the posts supporting the picnic shelter’s roof, as well as the tables.

And he glanced around for a rock or some other blunt object that might have been used by the attacker as a makeshift weapon. Then he headed to the station to drop off the evidence and speak with a few of the uniform patrol officers who’d interviewed walkers in the park.

A couple walking in the park that morning remembered seeing a young black man in a brown jacket and cap. They described his voice as high-pitched for a man. They’d heard it, they told one of the officers, when he waved to them and wished them “Happy New year!”

“Could be my guy,” Wright remembers thinking. “I knew it was going to be a long day.”

The clock was ticking toward lunchtime when he left the station and headed toward the hospital.

Brown’s memory was beginning to come back.

She told Wright her stepfather had told her that morning she needed to find a job. She said she left her family’s apartment and walked to the park. She said she was sitting at the picnic shelter when a man she’d seen before approached her and called her by name.

She told Wright she became increasingly uncomfortable, but offered few details to the detective about what actually happened, except to say the man grabbed her head and slammed it twice into the picnic shelter’s post.

The shortage of critical details was making Wright uneasy.

Other things bothered him too.

Doctors treating Brown in the emergency room said amnesia would rarely result from the type of blow to the head she had received.

And Brown’s cell phone, recovered from the crime scene, showed no incoming calls or texts.

“Things weren’t making sense,” Wright said. “What 16-year-old isn’t receiving texts on their cell phone? I walked out and told her stepdad he was my number one suspect.”

Later that day, when Brown began to provide Wright with more detail, describing her attacker’s goatee and beard, he decided to call a forensic sketch artist. Greenville County had no one available, he was told. So he asked the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division for help.

An artist drove from Irmo that evening to meet with Brown at the hospital, where she had been admitted for observation. That night, back at his office, Wright said he notified the news media about the case, and asked them to publish the sketch.

Other officers were growing skeptical, he said.

“But I knew I had an obligation to the victim and to the community, and I wasn’t going to doubt a victim until I had no other choice,” Wright said. “You can’t.”

Leads began pouring in to the police department and Crime Stoppers.

A tipster notified police when he saw a man he believed closely resembled the individual in the sketch leaving the Pizza Hut in Mauldin. When patrol units arrived on the scene, the individual was Brown’s older brother.

Wright explored Brown’s Facebook page, hoping to find some overlooked clue. One of her friends appeared to Wright to match the suspect’s description, so he paid him a visit. The young man had a solid alibi.

On Monday, Wright asked Brown to come to the station to be interviewed. He said he stressed the serious nature of the charges, and told her if she was having a relationship with her alleged attacker, it was time to speak up.

She told the detective she was telling the truth.

That afternoon, she retold her story for two television news reporters.

“I was shocked,” Wright said. “I told her she didn’t have to talk to them, but she said she wanted to. I couldn’t believe she wanted to do that.”

It was by mere circumstance that Wright was near a television that evening when one of the news stations played the recording of the 911 call, followed by footage of its interview with Brown.

The detective said he couldn’t believe what he was hearing.

It was at that point he knew.

“It was the same person,” he said. “It was the first time I’d heard her voice alongside the 911 tape. I asked myself if it would have even been possible for her to have knocked herself out. But I knew.”

On Tuesday afternoon, Wright made arrangements to meet with Brown once more. It was close to 5 p.m. when her stepfather dropped her off at the station. Wright didn’t mince words. He told Brown her story wasn’t adding up. She didn’t answer him.

In minutes, her mother arrived.

Wright stopped the interview, walked outside the room and told the mother about the inconsistencies that despite the best efforts of law enforcement couldn’t be explained.

Her story was unraveling.

Brown’s mother asked for a moment alone with her daughter.

Wright waited a few minutes, and then walked back into the room.

“I told her I didn’t believe her, and this was why,” he said. “Then I went through everything. How there was no motive. Then, looking directly at her, I told her it was time to tell the truth.”

The teenager’s eyes began to water, Wright said.

“It was a dare,” Wright said she answered.

Wright said if others are found to have been involved in the hoax, they too will be prosecuted.

Shortly after noon on Jan. 7, Brown was arrested and charged with

unlawfully using 911 and filing a false police report. She made her first appearance in Family Court Jan. 11.

Ordinarily, names of juvenile suspects aren’t made public, but Brown had voluntarily spoken with reporters.

Thirteenth Circuit Deputy Solicitor Betty Strom couldn’t confirm Brown’s name, but she said after the court hearing the juvenile involved in the Mauldin incident pleaded guilty to both charges, as well as a third charge of disrupting school stemming from an earlier incident.

The judge, before passing sentence, ordered the teen to undergo an evaluation, Strom said. That could take up to 45 days.

Authorities said the earlier charge against the girl had been pending in Youth Court, an alternative program to juvenile justice at Mauldin High School, where teen offenders are sentenced by a jury of their peers.

The new charges from New Year’s Day rendered her ineligible for that program.

Looking back, Wright described the situation as frustrating.

“If somebody wants attention, there are better ways of getting it,” he said. “This case involved a tremendous amount of resources, and pulled us away from real cases with real victims.”

For a week, Wright said, it monopolized the manpower of the Mauldin Police Department, and pulled resources from the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division, the Greenville Police Department and the Greenville County Sheriff’s Office.

“We have a responsibility to do that for every victim,” he said. “But when we are wasting our time on something that isn’t true, someone else could get seriously hurt.”

Wright said no decision has been made by the City of Mauldin as to whether financial restitution will be sought in a civil suit.

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