Texas This article is more than 11 months old

Exonerated US man buys his mom a home after she sold hers for legal bills

This article is more than 11 months old

Greg Kelley, who was exonerated in 2019, uses money from settlement to buy 1.3-acre Texas property for his mother

Years before Greg Kelley was freed from a wrongful conviction, the Texas man’s mother – Rosa Kelley – sold her home to help pay his legal bills.

But she once again has a home of her own after her son recently bought her one as a gesture of his gratitude for her support, which helped set the stage for his exoneration in 2019, his state’s capital’s daily newspaper, the Austin American-Statesman, reported this week.

A jury in Williamson county, north of Austin, found Kelley guilty in 2014 after he was accused of molesting a four-year-old boy at an in-home daycare. Kelley – who was staying at the daycare site with a friend – maintained his innocence, refused to accept a plea deal from prosecutors and ended up with a 25-year prison sentence that shattered his plans to play college football for the University of Texas at San Antonio.

The American-Statesman reported that Kelley, 27, was released from prison in 2017 after a judge ruled that a flawed police investigation deprived him of his constitutional right to due process. A state appeals court then tossed out Kelley’s conviction entirely after finding that there were two other viable suspects, including his friend who purportedly confessed to multiple credible witnesses that he had molested the boy at the center of the case, according to the University of Michigan’s National Registry of Exonerations.

The friend, Johnathan McCarty, was later convicted of unrelated crimes. Meanwhile, the local district attorney has said it is unlikely McCarty would ever be charged with molesting the boy at the daycare without “extraordinary” additional evidence emerging.

Ultimately, Kelley – whose plight was featured in a Showtime docuseries called Outcry – sued the authorities who pursued the botched case against him, saying they never properly investigated alternate suspects. He settled his lawsuit out of court for an undisclosed sum last year.

Kelley told the American-Statesman that he then used some of that settlement money to buy a 1.3-acre piece of property for his mother in January.

Rosa Kelley needed a new home because she traded her old one for cash ahead of his trial so that her son could afford good legal representation. She had spent the years since moving around apartments in the Austin area or staying in family members’ spare bedrooms, the American-Statesman reported.

Her new tract of land includes a mobile home that he is renovating, along with a pasture and two Spanish goats.

According to Kelley, he brought his mother to the property while making her think that he just wanted her to look at some land that he was possibly investing in. Then, after they looked around, he told her the property actually belonged to her.

Rosa Kelley, whose husband, Douglas, died in 2019 after a stroke, described to the American-Statesman how she reacted to her son’s revelation.

“I cried and cried and hugged him,” she said.

Rosa Kelley said she already knows exactly what she’s going to do when her home is completed.

“I’m going to … sit on the porch and read my Bible, which I do every day,” she told the American-Statesman.

Greg Kelley, for his part, stands among more than 3,200 people in the US since 1989 who were convicted of crimes and then were exonerated, according to the National Registry of Exonerations.

He has been taking classes at the University of Texas after enrolling in its business school’s entrepreneurship program. He has invested in his brother’s trucking company and runs a business which makes targets for ax throwing.

However, nothing mattered more to him than getting his mom a new home.

“Since my release from prison,” Kelley reportedly explained, “I had set up many goals to achieve, one of them being to repay my mother’s sacrifice of selling her home for cash so we could afford my legal representation.”

Kelley said he was finishing up plans to build an office for the target business on his mother’s new property just to maximize his time near her.

“After I was exonerated,” he said to the American-Statesman, “I always wanted to keep her close.”

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7tbTEoKyaqpSerq96wqikaK2jYrumw9JoaWlqY2Szpq6OaWton6KatG63xKWjnrFdmsWwusSrmK2dlGK9tr7CoZisnaNitbC5xGakqKyYmr9uuMSgmKVlkp65rb8%3D