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On the 24th of September 1988, a jogger found the body of 19-year-old Tony Klann
floating in Doan Creek, at the edge of Lake Erie, near Cleveland, Ohio.
His throat had been slit and he had 3 large stab wounds in his chest.
Three landscapers who knew the victim were arrested for the crime.
And during interrogation one of the suspects accepted a plea bargain.
He testified that the other two men, including Joe D'Ambrosio,
had kidnapped the victim and driven to the creek
before cutting his throat and then stabbing him in the water.
Joe was sentenced to death for the crime,
even though the testimony against him was riddled with inconsistencies.
The date and location of the *** were disputed
and no physical evidence was found at the supposed crime scene.
Joe spent over 20 years on death row
before a priest helped him get legal representation.
Eventually his conviction was overturned and he was released,
with all charges dismissed on the 5th of March 2010.
I was on death row for 22 years. I was locked up for 24 years.
The Berlin Wall came down. The World Trade Center happened.
I lost my sister, my mom, many aunts, uncles, cousins.
A lot of them died off while I was in there.
My sister came down with leukemia. My oldest sister.
And we wanted to see if I was gonna be a bone marrow match.
So I wrote the prison asking if we could do this.
They wrote me back saying I was a dead man. No.
In my eyes, the State murdered her.
By putting me on death row for a crime I didn't commit,
I couldn't save my sister's life. And she died at the age of 49.
80% of the stuff that freed me was in 3 files:
the prosecutor's files, the coroner's files and the police files. Was there all along.
They had it in 1998 when I was going to trial.
If they would have given us that I'd never have been convicted.
And that's exactly what the federal judge said.
She said, "Mr. D'Ambrosio, you are free."
And with that, she banged her gavel and I got to walk out.
I'm back in my hometown. So many things are different.
There are not that many people that are left from when I was here. They all moved on.
They had, you know, got married, had families, and moved away, bought houses someplace else.
When I first got out, my nephew was running a coffee shop.
He was trying to have a fundraiser for me, so I invited my whole family.
Well, who's left of my family; not a single one showed up.
So, in my mind, since they left me there to die anyhow,
I have nothing left to do with my family.
The way this has affected my future is in every aspect that you can think of. Everything.
Getting a house, getting credit, trying to find somebody to spend the rest of my life with.
Plus, I've lost the ability to have a kid. I'm 51.
But ten years ago, Social Security sent me a notice saying,
"If you were to retire right now, we'd give you a grand total of" get this, "36 bucks a month."
Because I haven't been paying in to Social Security for 24 years.
So I have no retirement money whatsoever,
so I'll have to work until I die.
I want to do something besides maintenance work for the rest of my life.
Because I make it from paycheck to paycheck, I drive a '97 Ford Ranger that was stripped down.
But the older you get, the harder it is to learn.
Everything is computer-based, and I'm still trying to learn, I'm like an infant.
Technology went on so fast in those 24 years, it was ridiculous.
I was watching a PBS show and they say the memory that's in a cell phone nowadays
is the same amount of memory that was in the rocket ship, they shot to the moon with Neil Armstrong.
And it's like, really?
You know, how can they take something that was in a rocket ship
and now it's got the same amount in that itty bitty cell phone.
I was locked up for 8170 days.
8170 days.
That's decades.
My revenge will come within the court system.
We filed two lawsuits, a State lawsuit and a Federal lawsuit.
But no amount of money will ever give me back what they stole from me. None.
Every little minute aspect of my life has been altered by this.
And not for the good.
I'll be running from this for the rest of my life. And it will always chase me.
And there's nothing I can do about it.