UC-IMC, Smile Politely launch Carrington site

Posted in NEWS to Champaign by Smile Politely Editors on Monday, February 8, 2010 at 8:00 am

Above is a screenshot from http://timeline.chambana.net/, the Kiwane Carrington Timeline, a website which communicates a timeline of events and documents pertaining to the Kiwane Carrington incident. The website is a joint project of the U-C Independent Media Center and Smile Politely, and is being released to the public for the first time this morning. From the site's About page:

This site is intended to be a permanent home for documentation, articles, reporting, and discussion regarding the death of Kiwane Carrington and the investigation and events that followed.

Items are arranged in a timeline format for ease of use and linear clarity. You will notice that many documents are concentrated on and around October 9, 2009, when the incident occurred.

Users can navigate to find different items either by scrolling through the timeline, or by selecting a particular file type (audio, images, documents, etc.) from the top menu.

Much of the information compiled on the Kiwane Carrington Timeline has been publicly available before now, and the site will function as a permanent home for those documents. For instance, most of the Illinois State Police investigation documents are posted on the site; we're working to get the video files uploaded as soon as possible. Many of these documents have been available on the News-Gazette's site before now, but they were first put behind a pay wall after a month, then they took it out from behind the pay wall, and as of last night, this is what their Carrington page looked like:

They'll certainly get it back up and running when they get the bugs ironed out from their redesign, but we feel that it's important to have a separate, permanent online home for these documents.

The Kiwane Carrington Timeline will also be a place where new information will be posted as it becomes available, both from UC-IMC and Smile Politely, as well as site users. Today, we're releasing for the first time a later interview interview of Deborah Thomas, who lives at 906 W. Vine St., the house that Carrington was shot outside, and the house that Carrington had been staying at frequently. Here's an intro to the interview, written by the Public i's Brian Dolinar:

On December 8, State’s Attorney Julia Rietz released a 13-page report concluding that Kiwane Carrington had been shot “accidentally” by Champaign police officer Daniel Norbits. While dedicating only one paragraph to Norbits’ history, and failing to mention his involvement in the 2000 death of Gregory Brown, Rietz spends several pages discrediting the black witnesses. After reviewing the interviews with Deborah Thomas, who lived at 906 W. Vine where Kiwane was killed, Rietz said her statements “were not considered to be credible.” In particular, Rietz said Thomas initially stated that Kiwane was not allowed to be in the house. In this interview on Dec. 11, 2009, conducted by Melodye Rosales, Chris Evans, and Martel Miller, Thomas responds to the claim that she changed her story, explains how police lied to her, and says Kiwane was always permitted in her home.

The transcript of the interview is available here. The interview is more than an hour long, and the audio file had to be broken into several pieces. Here are links to the audio clips:

Part 1 -- Part 2 -- Part 3 -- Part 4 -- Part 5 -- Part 6 -- Part 7 -- Part 8 -- Part 9

Please take some time to familiarize yourself with the site, and don't hesitate to offer us some feedback. You can sign up for a user account, which will allow you to comment on postings on the site, as well as upload your own content, whether it be a story, a blog post with additional information, or whatever else you would like to share.

We'll have more information on this endeavor in the coming days.