Assessing Jay’s Claim of a 3:40ish “Come & Get Me” Call Based Upon His Pre-Interview

One of the very few consistent elements in Jay’s story is that Adnan placed the “come and get me” call to his cell phone at about 3:40 P.M. Given that there were no incoming calls to Adnan’s cell phone between 3:15 and 4:27 P.M., Jay’s timeline creates an obvious problem. I’ve seen three main explanations for this timing discrepancy: (1) Adnan did not make a “come and get me” call to his cell phone; (2) Jay is bad with time; and/or (3) Jay intentionally moved the “come and get me call” to 3:40ish so that he could use the Pusateris as alibis.

The obvious problem with scenario #1 is that it completely undermines the credibility of Jay’s entire story. The narrative that Adnan lent Jay his cell phone so that he could call him after the murder is at very heart of the State’s first-degree murder/kidnapping/false imprisonment case. If that story is a complete fabrication, how can we possibly believe anything that Jay said? This then takes us to scenarios 2 and 3, which in turn takes us to Detective Ritz’s pre-interview notes.

As noted, Jay has consistently claimed that there was a 3:40ish “come and get me” call. Jay initially made this claim in his first recorded interview on February 28, 1999 (page 6):

So, how do we explain away this “error”? Under scenario 2, the claim would be that Jay is making this statement a month and a half after January 13th, which could explain why he is about a half an hour or hour off (depending on whether you believe the 2:36 or 3:15 P.M. call was the “come and get me” call). Under scenario 3, the claim would be that Jay was either more involved in the crime than he’s claimed or simply aware that Adnan killed Hae before 3:40ish, meaning that a 3:40ish “come and get me” call received at the Pusateri residence gives him an alibi (corroborated by Jenn). 

The problem with either of these scenarios, however, is that they are belied by Detective Ritz’s notes of the pre-interview of Jay, which was conducted just before he gave the above statement. Here’s the pertinent portion of those notes:

So, in the pre-interview. Jay claimed that (1) Adnan called him at about 2:30 or 2:45 P.M., asking for a ride; and (2) Jay thereafter got a 3:00 P.M. ride from Jeff G. to Woodlawn High School, where he met his girlfriend Stephanie in the back parking lot.

This makes it really hard to believe scenario #2. If the “come and get me” call were the 2:36 P.M. call, then why didn’t Jay simply say in his recorded interview that this was the 2:30/2:45 call he referenced in his pre-interview? I’ll address the possibility that Jay was lying in a second, but it’s really hard to write this off as a mistake. How does Jay recognize that Adnan could have called him about a ride soon after school ended but then mistakenly place the actual “come and get me” call an hour or more later in his recorded interview? It doesn’t add up.

What about the 3:15 P.M. call? The problem here is that we have another timestamp. In his pre-interview, Jay indicates that he’s seeing Stephanie in the back parking lot of Woodlawn High School at about 3:15 P.M. This actually makes a good deal of sense given that Stephanie herself said that she (1) arrived home at 2:55 P.M.; (2) went back to school, which was about 3 miles away; and (3) got on the bus to her basketball game between 3:30 and 3:45 P.M.

If this meetup with Stephanie were a cover story for a 3:15 P.M. “come and get me” call, then why didn’t Jay simply place that “come and get me” call at 3:00-3:15 P.M. in his recorded interview? Again,  you might try to write the 3:40ish call timeline as a lie, but it would be pretty tough to write it off as a mistake.

I would also say, however, that it’s tough to write off this timeline as a lie to create an alibi. Again, in this 3rd scenario, the claim is that Jay was either more involved in the crime than he’s claimed or simply aware that Adnan killed Hae before 3:40ish. But if that were the case, then why in the world would Jay say in his pre-interview that he (1) went to Woodlawn High School at about 3:00 P.M.; and (2) saw Stephanie there?

If Jay had awareness of the crime, possibly because he had more involvement than he’s claimed, there is no logical reason that he would place himself at the Woodlawn High School at about 3:00 P.M. on January 13th. Indeed, even a simple awareness of the State’s timeline as of February 28th, which involved Hae being seen leaving Woodlawn at about 3:00 P.M., would have convinced Jay that this was a horrible idea. And yet, this is exactly what he did, in the process claiming that he saw Stephanie at this point in time, despite Jay saying that many of his lies could be explained by his desire to protect his friends and loved ones. 

-CM