true crime

Everything we learned about Jay Wilds from The Case Against Adnan Syed.

 

There’s a scene at the end of the second episode of The Case Against Adnan Syed that made me laugh out loud in disbelief.

In the documentary, which is currently streaming on SBS on Demand, two investigators are mapping out Jay Wild’s arrests and charges since he testified against his friend Adnan Syed.

There were 25 arrests. Very few charges. Even less convictions.

Jay was the prime witness for the prosecution and his eye witness testimony directly led to Adnan’s conviction for the murder of his ex-girlfriend, Hae Min Lee.

In Serial, the podcast which originally brought the case into the public eye, Jay remained largely an enigma.

Watch the full trailer for The Case Against Adnan Syed here. Post continues below…

He refused to speak to host Sarah Koenig and no one could understand his motivation for basically crafting a narrative to fit the prosecution’s case.

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Now, in the second episode of The Case Against Adnan Syed, we finally find out more about Jay’s character and pattern of behaviour.

Here’s everything we learned about Jay Wilds:

1. Jay and Adnan weren’t that close.

Despite Jay claiming he helped Adnan bury Hae’s body in Leakin Park, the pair weren’t actually that close.

According to their mutual friends, Jay and Adnan would only hang out occasionally. Jay spent most of his time with his girlfriend, Stephanie McPherson, and his best friend, Jennifer Pusateri.

“Me and Jay would have met when we were in middle school. We used to ride bikes together. We would smoke weed together,” Adnan explains over the phone in the documentary.

“But then for a period of time we may not see each other. So that was my relationship with him throughout most of high school,” he continued.

“Me and Stephanie were always really close and then Stephanie started dating Jay. That’s really how I stayed in touch with Jay.”

the case against adnan syed episode 2
Jennifer Pusateri and Jay Wilds. Image: HBO.
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"I know Jay," explained Laura Estrada Sandoval. "From my point of view I saw no relationship between him and Adnan. Why would you even help him?"

"You don't even know him like that, you know? It's not like Jen calling and needing help."

2. Jay was known for telling lies.

In the documentary, several of Jay and Adnan's high school friends said Jay was known for telling lies and exaggerating stories.

"He would make you believe his shirt was green if it was blue," his former best friend, Jennifer Pusateri, explained.

"Jay picks and chooses what he wants to tell and at this point it's created such a mess," she later added.

"He played a sport and was social with people but he was odd," added one of the girls from the magnet program. "I now think of him as shady. I don't think I thought of him like that at the time."

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"If Jay gets pulled over and you're in a car with him and he's dirty or he feels like there's a chance that he's going to go to jail, he's going to try to dump every responsibility for anything onto you," Jay's close friend Christopher Lee Baskerville claimed.

"He'll trade places with you in a heartbeat," he continued. "Which is why people don't talk to Jay anymore."

3. Jay keeps getting away with stuff.

At the end of the episode, the two detectives ran Jay's name through civil litigation and criminal databases.

There were 25 police contacts. Only some of them led to arrests and even fewer led to convictions.

The charges included assault of a police officer and assault of a girlfriend. In most of these cases the prosecutors were reluctant to prosecute.

the case against adnan syed episode 2
Jay in high school. Image: HBO.
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4. Jay has a violent past.

In the final moments of episode two, we hear from Jay's ex girlfriend, Nikisha Horton.

Nikisha talks about the night Jay violently attacked her and then attacked a police officer who tried to intervene.

"He can go from zero to 100 really, really fast," she says.

"He was intoxicated, we were arguing, and I left. He saw me gone and he snapped. I saw him in the middle of the road and he just hit me, hit me.

Jay wasn't prosecuted for any of this.

"I think he knows ways to manipulate the law. From what I've seen the times he got arrested and came back so quickly, no bail, no call, no nothing."

You can watch the first two episodes of The Case Against Adnan Syed on SBS on Demand now.