Retired cop: Greene’s killer may be in prison
Mike Carlisle spent the last year of his career investigating the Tamara Greene killing.
And the retired Detroit cop says he thinks he found the killer.
The problem is that Darrett King, 37, known as Little D, is locked away in prison on an unrelated charge for up to 25 years. He has no reason to talk.
King is the man police say they believe punched Greene in both eyes during a Southfield bachelor party two weeks before her death. He then tussled with her boyfriend, Eric (Big Nose E) Mitchell.
Mitchell was wounded when Greene, nicknamed Strawberry, was gunned down April 30, 2003, at 3:45 a.m. while sitting in her parked Buick Skylark at Roselawn and West Outer Drive.
Carlisle, a decorated detective who retired from the force last year, says he came pretty close to breaking one of the city’s most notorious unsolved murders as he investigated King’s background. But after all his digging into Greene’s killing, Carlisle — Detroit’s police officer of the year for 2007 — said he had found “no evidence of her dancing” at the rumored Manoogian Mansion party.
He said he took no offense when new Detroit Police Chief Warren Evans earlier this year turned over the Greene case to the multi-jurisdictional Violent Crimes Task Force.
“They’re great investigators and very qualified to look into this,” Carlisle said. “I believe that they are going to come to the same conclusion that I reached last year.”
Jurors convicted King in February of two counts of assault with intent to murder for the unrelated 2004 shooting of two men, who survived, outside a west-side Detroit gas station during a failed robbery. As an investigator on the case before he retired, Carlisle testified at the trial against King.
King’s lawyer Carl Jordan declined comment, but he argued at King’s trial that Carlisle targeted him only because he wanted to question him about the Greene case.
Carlisle said he stumbled across King’s name while investigating Greene’s death. At his trial, King described himself as a drug dealer who was friends with Greene and Mitchell.
King said he had argued with Greene, but denied hitting her or blackening her eyes. He shoved her, he admitted, but only because “she pushed me first.”
King also testified that Carlisle was lying about the 2004 case as a ploy to get him on the Greene killing.
Birmingham attorney Norman Yatooma rejects the notion that King could be the killer. He said his investigators interviewed Mitchell, who admitted he knows King, and Mitchell told them he got a good look at the gunman and it wasn’t King.
Yatooma is representing Greene’s family in a lawsuit against Detroit officials, including former Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick. The federal lawsuit alleges officials conspired to thwart any investigation into her death.
“Darrett King getting into a fight with her is one thing, but killing her is a really big leap,” Yatooma said.
