A 163 Year Sentence

himself.
At the center of it all
The man prosecutors were after says he has never broken the law. You can see in Dominic Okongwu the
strict bearing of the Nigerian Army officer that he was when he fought in the Nigerian Civil War, also
known as the Biafran War, in the late 1960s.
He’s not a large man, but he speaks with a deep voice that serves him well in his church choir. At 64,
Okongwu is no longer apple-cheeked and vibrant. He tries to dress sharp on limited means, but he often
looks weary.
Okongwu’s English is excellent, but a thick accent makes him difficult to understand. When he worked as
a teachers’ assistant in prison, he was amazed at the poor math skills he saw. He says some of his inmatestudents
came to like him and would protect him. “Africa,” they would call him. Other inmates would call
him “Rape-O.”
As Okongwu tells his story, his face pinches, like he bit into a lemon, at the thought of anyone molesting
children, especially their own children. He then becomes angry about the parade of lawyers who
suggested he take a plea, either for the initial trial or for the retrial that never occurred. Like his codefendants,
he refused each time.
“You are a stubborn man,” one lawyer told him, according to Okongwu.
“Yes,” he responded. “I am stubborn for my innocence.”
He earned a bachelor’s degree from the University at Buffalo, then a master’s in business administration
from the University of New Haven, Conn., in 1984. That year, his twin daughters were born prematurely
in Women and Children’s Hospital in Buffalo. When their mother’s bad health forced her back to Nigeria
and the care of her family, it fell to Okongwu to raise young Chendo and Nnedi – pronounced Ned-E –
and earn a living.
He says he spent most of his time working to support them – during the day as a substitute teacher in the
Buffalo school system and in the evening at Rich Products.
He left the children during the week with a sitter, and the girls came to know the sitter and her boyfriend
better than they knew their father.
The arrangement that caused Okongwu to be a distant father in the 1980s laid the groundwork for the
wrongful convictions of him and his co-defendants late in 1993 – because when prosecutors first heard
the allegations of rape, they soon learned Dominic Okongwu had a history.
The first case of abuse
In 1988, when the girls were still 3, their father was suspected of abusing them. Their hymens were
examined and deemed atypical for toddlers. The abnormalities, which included scarring on one child,
could mean they were abused, doctors said. But suspicions shifted from Okongwu to the sitter’s
boyfriend, a man later convicted of stabbing a woman to death.
“There really was a legitimate reason to lay it upon him,” attorney Paul V. Hurley, a former prosecutor,
said of the boyfriend.
Hurley, now retired, represented Okongwu in the matter at the request of local Nigerians and people
from Okongwu’s Catholic church at the time, the Newman Center at Buffalo State College.
No one was convicted of sexual abuse. But Family Court Judge John J. Honan found Okongwu guilty of
neglect for boarding out the twins five or six days of the week.
While county lawyers continued to suspect Okongwu, he was forced to attend counseling and to learn
better parenting skills. His daughters were placed in foster care – in the bungalow-style home of Ollie
McNair on Poultney Avenue, near East Amherst Street, in Buffalo. On weekends, holidays and on the
girls’ birthday, their father could take them to his apartment on Debra Lane in North Buffalo. But the
visits had to be supervised throughout.
To oversee the visits, the court entrusted Louis Eze. He was a cousin of Okongwu and also from Nigeria’s
Igbo region. Eze had lived with Okongwu for months when he first came to Buffalo. The girls were fond