Science Weekly (Guardian) · The Guardian

Off Duty: The Crime

March 21, 2026·27 min·2 clips

Alone in the interrogation room, Melvin DeYoung looks into the camera and whispers, it was a lie.

Off Duty is a Guardian Investigates series reported by Melissa about the 2011 killing of Chicago police officer Clifton Lewis and the conviction of Alex Villa for the crime. Lewis was moonlighting as a security guard at the M&M Mini Mart on the West Side when two men walked in and shot him. Over 200 officers gathered at Stroger Hospital as he was pronounced dead. Tips initially pointed to the Four Corner Hustlers gang, but within a week police arrested four men affiliated with the Spanish Cobras. Three of those cases fell apart, but Alex Villa remained in custody. He was tried in February 2019, more than seven years after Lewis's death, and convicted after a four-day trial. His family describes a courtroom lined with Chicago police officers staring them down. Prosecutors Andrew Varga and Nancy Adusa showed surveillance footage, presented a confession from an alleged accomplice, and called three witnesses who said Alex admitted the killing. Alex's brother Stephen, himself a former Spanish Cobra, swore his brother would not have done it. The family acknowledges Alex was no angel, including a hit-and-run conviction 11 months after Lewis's murder. After the conviction, Alex's sisters struggled to find appellate counsel because of the cop-killing charge. Alex eventually asked them to approach Jennifer Blagg, an attorney who had defended Jason Van Dyke, the Chicago officer who killed Laquan McDonald. Blagg grew up in Hamburg, Arkansas, and moved to Chicago after night law school. The sisters presented their case against the conviction: the mini-mart was not Cobra territory, Alex's left hand had permanent nerve damage from a previous shooting that made vaulting the counter implausible, and Alex's text-message alibi. Jennifer also disclosed she was friends with prosecutor Nancy Aduza. Her associate Eric Bisbee initially thought the case was open and shut. Then he watched an interrogation tape of Melvin DeYoung, who, when left alone in the room, whispered into the camera that his confession was a lie.

As heard by us

A murder in Chicago that becomes a close look at a 12-year fight for innocence.

A Chicago police officer is shot dead on the West Side, and the story opens outward from that killing into a 12-year fight to prove innocence.

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Why you'd press play

You want a murder case that turns into a hard look at justice.

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