Visited Mother’s Grave First Time After Spending 43 Years In Prison Because He’s Black

RESPECT YOUR ANCESTORS –

Nov. 24, 2021 – The first thing Kevin Strickland did after being exonerated for a triple murder he didn’t commit was visit his mother’s grave.

“To know my mother was underneath that dirt and I hadn’t gotten a chance to visit with her in the last years … I revisited those tears that I did when they told me I was guilty of a crime I didn’t commit,” Strickland told CNN’s Brianna Keilar Wednesday.

At the age of 19, Strickland, who is now 62, was convicted in 1979 of one count of capital murder and two counts of second-degree murder in a triple homicide in Kansas City, Missouri. He received a 50-year life sentence without the possibility for parole and served 43 years of that sentence behind bars at Western Missouri Correctional Center in Cameron, Missouri — until this Tuesday, when Senior Judge James Welsh filed his ruling to set aside Strickland’s conviction.

Strickland said he learned of his release through a breaking news report that interrupted the soap opera he was watching Tuesday.

All criminal counts against Strickland were dismissed. His release makes his confinement the longest wrongful imprisonment in Missouri history and one of the longest in the nation, according to The National Registry of Exonerations.