In 2003, Scene chronicled the nightmare tale of how Bob Gondor and Randy Resh were
convicted of a rape and murder they didn’t commit.
Last week, the two men finally found justice after spending the past 17 years in prison. On April 27, a judge threw out Gondor’s case just after Resh won his retrial.
As they adjust to their new lives outside of prison, their innocence now unquestioned, there will still be more challenges ahead of Gondor and Resh. They will wonder why Troy Busta, the state’s star witness, continued to pin the crime on them for the past two decades. They will likely ask themselves why they lost almost 20 years of their lives and who, in fact, they served those years for.
But one of the biggest questions Gondor and Resh say they can’t answer yet is whether or not they are going to seek damages for their wrongful imprisonment. According to a story in Saturday’s Akron Beacon Journal, both men are
eligible to receive $40,000 for every year they were wrongly incarcerated.
The problem is that they must now prove that they, in fact, didn’t kill Connie Nardi in 1988. Despite their recent victories in Portage County, it won’t be an easy task without any conclusive DNA evidence exonerating them from the murder. But they do have patience on their side. After all these years of fighting to prove their innocence, what’s one last battle for a combined total of $1,360,000?
– Denise Grollmus
