dashing investor who drove a white bentley. and then in july, 2007, nailah attended an art gallery opening, and he came. this lawyer from milwaukee, andre wright. she had big beautiful smile. she was a very pretty woman. very warm personality, and we just kind of walked around the space looking at different pieces, talking about my interests. what i was looking for in a piece of art. obviously, i tried to engage her. suddenly this is a different search than it was before. i mean, the artwork became of little interest to me at that point. just like that, it was all over. for both of them. you know, i don t want to go all hallmark card on you or anything like that. that s okay. but i mean, this was clearly kind of a transcendental moment or something. yeah, absolutely, definitely. nailah s family loved andre. what family wouldn t? she brought him to my child s first birthday party.
life without parole. take him away. so that was justice. the most nailah s family could hope for. terribly important. and strangely empty. it s still not done. she s still not back. you still can t talk with her. no. they tried to remember nailah not as a murder victim but as a beautiful young woman she was. the vibrant center of her family. but grief, real and painful, comes to visit every day. you know, people say, oh, well, she s your spirit and she s your angel and she s in a better place and all this other stuff. i m like yeah, but i want her here. i don t want my 28-year-old sister to be my angel. i want her to be right here in the thick of it with me. that s all for this edition of dateline extra. i m tamron hall. thanks for watching.
reginald potts used every resource at his disposal to delay the process. nbc chicago s reporter watched in something like amazement as reginald turned speedy justice into something else all together. he hired lawyers, fired lawyers, tried to act as his own attorney. at each step of the process, the trial had to be reset. one, two, three years passed that way. in the fourth year after the murder, illinois abolished capital punishment so that was off the table. and still, reginald s actions forced delays. this is one of the most bizarre cases we ve seen in chicago. just as nailah s family had reached out to the media, reginald potts tried to launch a p.r. campaign from behind bars. his family reached out trying to convince people that there may be some way that he s not associated with this crime, that it might be someone else, that there was a rush to judgment.
something. definitely. her family loved andre, what family wouldn t? she brought him to my child s first birthday party. he brought my baby a gift. who does that? he was a nice quality person. they liked you. i think so, yeah. yeah. due to her influence, though. you started planning on moving in together, huh? we did. it was happening fast. it felt good, though. it felt natural. it was long distance, he in milwaukee, she in chicago. they stayed connected by phone and e-mail and text, all day long. i would call every morning. and no one seemed to notice any dark force, any unseen thing festering in the heat of that hot, late summer. didn t feel the warning. didn t know who said what to who. it was september 18th, a tuesday. that tuesday morning, i thought i had called her on my way to work, but i was
you don t know if it s her or not. but you have an idea because it s a female body. they had to resort to dental records to confirm. it was nailah. i think this type of death it doesn t just kill that person, it kills a lot in the family. it s the absence of a piece of you because that person is not here. i can t describe it. it s like you know it s happening, but it just doesn t feel real. it just feels like you re in literally like in a nightmare. an autopsy confirmed the death was by asphyxiation. so now it was homicide. but who was the killer? not andre. confirmed he was in milwaukee when nailah vanished. everything with him checked out. as for being questioned were you upset by it? not at all, no. they should have done that. that was part of doing their job. so what about that investor reginald potts, the one who had been so helpful? well, this was curious. when the detectives went to visit his high-rise apartment, they couldn t help but notice the exteri