CEDAR PARK, Texas — Former Leander High School football star Greg Kelley has filed a lawsuit against the City of Cedar Park and two law enforcement officials over his wrongful conviction.
In 2014, Kelley was convicted of sexual assault of a child and sentenced to 25 years in prison after a 4-year-old boy said he was assaulted by a teenager at a home daycare. In 2017, Kelley's case was reopened after his defense attorneys showed new evidence that someone else was responsible for the crime. In November 2019, Kelley was declared innocent and was fully exonerated.
Kelley is suing the City of Cedar Park, former police chief Sean Mannix and Christopher Dailey, the lead investigator in the case.
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The lawsuit states that the investigation was "incompetent, in bad faith and fundamentally flawed."
Dailey did not talk to Kelley before he arrested him and he never went to the location of the incident and, therefore, did not see that the assault happened in a room where Johnathan McCarty resided, the lawsuit alleges. McCarty was named as a possible alternative suspect in the child sex assault, KVUE reported in October 2017.
McCarty was a friend of Kelley's, and his parents operated the home daycare. Kelley's attorneys said he had not lived with McCarty since June of 2014, about a month before the assault took place.
In addition, the lawsuit stated Dailey did not receive any information about other adults in the daycare and he did not interview McCarty.
"Had Detective Dailey gone to this effort, he would have, at the least, discovered that Johnathan McCarty bears a striking resemblance to Greg Kelley," the lawsuit alleged.
According to the lawsuit, Dailey "did nothing to investigate the dates of the offense," and his reason was that "he believed the statements of the 4-year-old in the CPS interview."
“Nothing was going to stop Detective Dailey from proceeding with baseless allegations against Greg Kelley, not even the district attorney’s office,” Kelley’s attorneys stated in the lawsuit.
The lawsuit claimed Dailey and the CPS investigator deleted their emails regarding Kelley's case.
"Detective Dailey admitted to intentionally deleting the emails because he did not feel they had evidentiary value. At the evidentiary hearing on the writ, he could not specifically recall what they said," the lawsuit stated.
The lawsuit stated former Chief Mannix was responsible for Dailey's police training, techniques and duties – "all of which he failed."
According to the lawsuit, after Kelley was found innocent, the Cedar Park Police Department continued to "torment" him by spreading false information about him in the community.
Kelley is seeking monetary damages for mental anguish and emotional distress and the impairment of his reputation, among other things.
The City of Cedar Park released the following statement regarding the lawsuit:
"We have not been served the lawsuit. It is our policy not to comment on legal matters."
KVUE is reaching out to Mannix and Dailey for a statement. We will update this story when we receive them.
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