The second trial of former NOPD Officer David Warren comes to a very different end tonight.
“It’s a wonderful; joyous feeling, but I’m almost numb at the same time,” says Warren.
For the first time in nearly four years tonight Warren will sleep in his own bed.
“It’s been 3.5 years, and I think enjoying my family, hugging my kids; the kids, they weren’t supposed to grow while daddy was gone,” says Warren while sitting next to his attorneys and his wife moments after being acquitted.
After deliberating for two days jurors found Warren not guilty on all charges. Just 45 minutes before the verdict jurors were deadlocked, telling the judge tension were getting thick during deliberations.
This was Warren’s 2nd trial. In 2010, he was convicted and sentenced to 25 years for shooting an unarmed man, Henry Glover, in the days following Hurricane Katrina, but an appellate court found he was unjustly tried alongside others who burned Glover’s body and covered up the crime.
This time warren was tried alone, maintaining he thought Glover had something in his hands. Reminiscing tonight he said he has no regrets.
“I still believe that the course of action that I took that day, and the actions that I took that day were the proper actions, and that does not change,” says Warren.
The Glover family was present during both trials and walked outside moments after Warren was acquitted.
“He is going to take care of him. The lord is going to take care of him,” says Henry Glover’s mother Edna Glover, “My baby, he killed him and got away. It’s wrong.”
“And you are going to walk free? That’s alright because somebody is going to do you. You’re going to get yours back,” says Henry Glover’s aunt Rebecca Glover, “He wasn’t supposed to take my nephew’s life.”
Warren says, “I can understand completely the tragedy of what they feel and the loss of what they feel as a family, so to them I can sympathize with the tragedy that they feel and the loss that they feel.”
Warren says he has no interest in returning to law enforcement and is not sure if he and his family will stay in the city.
“I don’t know for the long term what we are going to do. Honestly, we are at the point of literally starting our lives almost in a sense over again,” says Warren.