Three and a half years after a Houston man was released from prison for a crime he did not commit, police arrested him on a murder charge.
Lydell Grant, 46, is currently being held at the Harris County Jail on a $1 million bond. He was formally booked on April 9, according to jail records.
Police accused Grant of being responsible for the shooting death of 33-year-old Edwin Arevalo in a suspected road rage incident.
“Mr. Arevalo was driving a Toyota Yaris northbound near the above address when he struck a white Lexus sedan in a minor crash. The male driver of the Lexus exited his vehicle, shot Arevalo, and then fled the scene in the Lexus. Further investigation identified Grant as the suspect driver in this case,” according to a report written by Houston Police Department homicide detectives.
Grant was previously exonerated after spending more than seven years in prison for the stabbing death of 28-year-old Aaron Scheerhoorn outside a bar in Houston back in 2012. At trial, six witnesses testified that it was Grant who was responsible for Scheerhoorn’s death. The jury declared he was guilty of first-degree murder, and he received a life sentence on December 6, 2012, according to the Innocence Project.
However, in May 2021, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals declared Grant innocent after a DNA analysis indicated that the DNA found under the victim’s fingernails did not match Grant’s. He was released on bond in 2019 and then exonerated in 2021.
Scheerhoorn’s actual killer was a man named Jermarico Carter. He confessed to authorities that he stabbed Scheerhoorn after getting into an altercation with him. Carter is currently serving a life sentence in prison.
Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg said in a statement to NBC News back in 2021, “The exoneration of innocent individuals is as important as the conviction of guilty ones.”
Houston has long suffered from a high rate of criminal homicides. Last year, 435 were murdered in the city, according to Houston Public Media. When accounting for population, Dallas’ crisis is comparable, clocking 214 in 2022, per the City of Dallas Open Data crime analytics dashboard.
The problem has only gotten worse, with murders up by roughly 25% year to date as of Saturday, April 15, according to a crime report by the Dallas Police Department.
