Good Kids, Bad City: After 39 Years of Wrongful Incarceration, Ricky Jackson and the Bridgeman Brothers Walk Free | Scene and Heard: Scene's News Blog | Cleveland Scene:
Ricky, along with Bitzie and Buddy — brothers Ronnie and Wiley Bridgeman
— were sentenced to death for murder. A white money-order salesman had
been robbed and shot at their neighborhood corner store. The police said
Ronnie and Ricky beat the man before Ricky pulled the trigger. Wiley
was the getaway driver. No physical evidence linked the defendants to
the crime. But police had a witness — a 13-year-old boy named Edward
Vernon who claimed to have seen it all. All at once, Ricky, Ronnie and
Wiley became strings of digits on a jailer's list: 144061, 143953 and
143810, respectively. They were 18, 17 and 20 years old.
The catch was that they were innocent. It would take nearly 40 years to prove that fact.