Kai Spears was an eighteen-year-old walk-on basketball player at the University of Alabama when New York Times reporter Billy Witz published an article connecting him to a murder scene. The problem: Spears wasn't there. Wasn't in the car. Had nothing to do with any of it.
A Tuscaloosa jury just told the Paper of Record what that kind of journalism costs: $9.25 million.
The shooting happened on January 15, 2023. Jamea Harris, a twenty-three-year-old Birmingham woman, was shot and killed in the front passenger seat of a black Jeep in Tuscaloosa. Her boyfriend, Cedric Johnson, was also in the vehicle. Former Alabama basketball player Darius Miles was charged, and Michael Davis was ultimately found guilty of capital murder.
The car at the center of the case belonged to Alabama basketball player Brandon Miller. The person actually in that car — the one the NYT meant to identify — was Alabama basketball team manager Cooper Lee. Not Kai Spears. Not even close.
But Billy Witz and the New York Times didn't bother to check. On March 15, 2023, they published a story falsely identifying Spears as an occupant of Brandon Miller's car at the time of the shooting. One unnamed source. Zero contact with Spears before publication. That's the entire verification process the most famous newspaper in the world used before publicly linking a college freshman to a homicide.
The Times, in its infinite grace, said it was "disappointed the jury found the paper liable for an honest mistake."
An honest mistake. That's what they're calling it when a reporter uses a single anonymous source to put a teenager's name next to a murder and never picks up the phone to ask if they've got the right kid. Most professions would call that malpractice. The Times calls it Tuesday.
Consider what Spears lived with for three years. Every Google search of his name returned a connection to a killing he had nothing to do with. Every coach who might recruit him, every employer who might hire him, every person who might date him — all of them one search away from reading the New York Times say he was at a murder scene. That's not a typo. That's a life altered.
The NYT's defense tells you everything about how the institution thinks. They didn't argue the story was right. They argued the mistake shouldn't cost them anything meaningful. It was, in their framing, an oopsie — the journalistic equivalent of bumping someone's cart at the grocery store.
The jury saw it differently. Twelve people in Tuscaloosa looked at a newspaper that couldn't be bothered to make a single phone call before attaching a teenager's name to a murder, and they decided $9.25 million was the appropriate price tag for that level of carelessness.
The Times will appeal, because that's what institutions do when accountability arrives. They'll frame this as a threat to press freedom, because that's what newspapers do when they get caught being sloppy. The entire media class will rally around the principle that honest mistakes shouldn't carry consequences.
Meanwhile, Kai Spears spent three years as the kid the New York Times said was at a murder scene. As reported by Not the Bee, the actual occupant of that car was a team manager — a fact the Times could have confirmed with one call they never made.
One source. No verification. No phone call. The standard for ruining someone's name at the Paper of Record is lower than the standard for returning a pair of shoes at Nordstrom.