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Leslie Merritt Jr. talks about dismissed freeway-shooting charges on 'Dr. Phil' Garrett Mitchell, The Republic | azcentral.com 4:12 p.m. MST May 26, 2016 Leslie Merritt Jr., who spent seven months behind bars in connection with a string of Interstate 10 shootings before charges were dismissed last month, had his first sit-down interview about the case with Dr. Phil in an interview that aired Thursday afternoon. In the prerecorded interview, Merritt, 21, a landscaper who has maintained his innocence since the beginning, tells the longtime talk-show host that he's still trying to put his life back together. He was released from jail April 20, after a Maricopa County Superior Court judge dismissed the 15 felony charges against him. "I may have been let out of jail, but I'm still kind of confined," Merritt said. "Anywhere I go, I don’t know if I’m going to get good or negative comments from people. I get harassing messages. I get people telling me that I’m worse than a terrorist and I should rot in jail. But I also get, ‘We’re so glad you’re home.’” Merritt spent 222 days in jail. The case against him began unraveling in early 2016 as doubts were raised about the ballistics evidence and the shooting timeline provided by the Arizona Department of Public Safety. DPS investigators said Merritt was forensically linked to four of the 11 incidents in which vehicles along Interstate 10 were struck by bullets or other projectiles in August and September. Merritt insists his gun could not have been involved in the shootings, because he was nowhere near the locations of the first three shootings, and at the time of the fourth shooting his gun was in the possession of a pawn shop. "How could I still be shooting at cars?" Merritt asks in the interview. "How could I be responsible for any of them?" Merritt was arrested Sept. 18 in a dramatic SWAT takedown in the parking lot of a Glendale Walmart with his fiancee and his 5-month-old daughter. [Cops love these SWAT team raids because it makes the person arrested look like a dangerous criminal, and gets big attention in the media.] Investigators insisted that Merritt was the shooter, he says, and he was interrogated by DPS detectives who bluffed by telling him they had highway surveillance footage of Merritt committing the crimes. [Bluffed??? A better word is LIED!!!! Lying is a stranded part of the "9 Step Reid Method", which is used by most police departments in the USA and for that matter in the world. As part of the "9 Step Reid Method" the police tell the person they are trying to extract a confession from that they have absolute proof he is guilty, in an attempt to get them to confess. The "9 Step Reid Method" starts out with the invalid assumption that the person being question is GUILTY. The "9 Step Reid Method" then goes on to say that if the person didn't confess, it's the fault of the cops who did the questioning, because it assumes the person being questioned is guitly. Just for fun Google "9 Step Reid Method" and read up on it.] An unfazed Merritt continued to tell them he was innocent, he said. Merritt thought he would be cleared and released shortly thereafter, but it wasn't until seven months later that he was allowed to return to his family after remaining in solitary confinement for the majority of his stay, he said in the program. "I was told I was looking at 188 years in prison for the rest of my life. That's what I thought about every single day — how can I beat this even though I know I didn't do it. I'm fighting the whole government." Merritt described his time in jail as "mental torture" alone and inside of an 8-by-12 room for more than half a year. A judge approved the prosecutor's decision to drop charges without prejudice in April after a ballistics expert could not definitively confirm nor dismiss whether Merritt's gun had been used in the shootings. Though now a free man, Merritt tells Dr. Phil that the accusation has had a great impact on his life. His former fiancee "moved on," and his now 13-month-old daughter did not recognize him, and his son has separation issues because of his absence. “It tore me up,” Merritt says. “My kids should not have had to go through that.”
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