Tuesday, August 25, 2015

E.W. Has an Update for the 'Serial' Obsessed

Posted By on Tue, Aug 25, 2015 at 10:30 AM


I was so late to the Serial* bandwagon. I listened to the entire series in two days, only taking a break when coworkers would approach my desk demanding attention. When I finished the final episode, I was unsatisfied. I, having been a big reader/television watcher all my life, wanted a satisfying answer. A well throughout, all encompassing final chapter. But this is "real life" and this story isn't over just because we're ready for a Law & Order-style recap. 

Though Serial is done with the story that kept us so entranced last season, the story is still developing. Through Undisclosed, more details of the case are being discovered. This time around, there's no This American Life level production and the narrator is firmly on Team Anon. Its content will be interesting for Serial fans, but Undisclosed is absolutely a different experience. 

Entertainment Weekly has been kind enough to keep up with this for us and wrote something up giving us a Serial recap, the facts relevant to each claim and (!!!) five new things that have come up since the original podcast ended.  

Head over to EW to read the whole thing, but I'll leave you a taste here: 
3. The cell phone tower pings mean nothing

If Gutierrez had paid closer attention to an AT&T cover sheet that included information about the cell phone towers pinged by Adnan’s phone on Jan. 13, the trial may have ended differently. The cover sheets stated, “outgoing calls only are reliable for location status. Any incoming calls will NOT be considered reliable information for location.” One of the reasons for this disclaimer was due to a glitch with AT&T at the time, which had incoming calls ping the tower near the person making the call rather than the person on the receiving end. The two key phone calls in the case, at 7:09 p.m. and 7:16 p.m., pinged the tower that covers Leakin Park and the surrounding areas. The State claimed the pings from those calls placed Syed in the park, where he allegedly buried Hae. However both of those calls were incoming calls, thus making it impossible to determine the location status. According to Syed’s current attorney, C. Justin Brown, the fax cover sheet was included in Gutierrez’s file, but she “simply failed to act on it.”

*I'm not going to summarize it for you, you just have to listen to it. I'm obsessed with it, everyone is obsessed with it, just do it. You've put it off long enough.

Chelo Grubb

Bookworm, cat lady, journalism enthusiast.