Kai Spears was never in that car. The New York Times put him there anyway, and an Alabama jury just made them pay $9.25 million for it.
I have covered enough college basketball to know how fast a name becomes a permanent file. Spears was an 18-year-old freshman walk-on at Alabama in January 2023. He had been with teammates earlier that night. He left. He was blocks away when 23-year-old Jamea Harris was shot and killed near The Strip in Tuscaloosa. Three other Crimson Tide players were tied to the scene in various ways. Spears was not one of them. The passenger in Brandon Miller’s vehicle, the one hit by bullets, was student manager Cooper Lee.
On March 15, 2023, the Times published a story that said otherwise. Sportswriter Billy Witz, citing a person familiar with the investigation who spoke “on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters,” identified Spears as that passenger. Alabama athletic director Greg Byrne and Spears’s father denied it immediately. The paper still ran with the version that put a kid who had nothing to do with the shooting inside a car at a murder scene.
Spears went to social media the only way an 18-year-old can when the most powerful newsroom in the country just rewrote his life. “I have one thing to say — the report in the New York Times was 100% inaccurate and the writer had complete disregard for the truth,” he said. “I am trying to process and cope with these false statements that somehow have been published and then seen by so many. So thankful to Alabama Athletics for refuting it on my behalf. More than anything, I remain completely heartbroken by the tragic death that occurred that night.”
That is not a press release. That is a teenager watching his name get welded to a capital murder case he never touched.
The Correction Came After the Lawsuit, Not Before
Spears sued in late May 2023. Only then did the Times append a lengthy editor’s note, strip his name, and identify Lee. Witz later apologized from the witness stand during a nine-day trial and conceded the story “had a mistake, no question.” He described relying on a high-level anonymous source with access to case materials. The paper’s position after the verdict was pure institutional shrug. Spokesman Charlie Stadtlander said, “We’re disappointed the jury found The Times liable for an honest mistake. We thank the jury for its service, but believe the verdict and award of damages are contrary to law and not supported by the evidence.”
Honest mistake. I have heard that phrase my entire career. It is the language organizations use when they want the damage treated like a typo instead of a life sentence on Google. An eight-person federal jury in Tuscaloosa deliberated about five hours and rejected it. They found the Times liable for defamation and false light. They awarded $9.25 million. Roughly $7.5 million of that was punitive. Alabama law may shave more than $2 million off the top. The number still stands as a landmark. The Times itself reported it had not lost a U.S. defamation lawsuit over one of its articles in more than 50 years.
Matt Glover, one of Spears’s attorneys, said after the verdict that “this verdict will improve journalism throughout the country.” I believe him for a simple reason. Anonymous sourcing on criminal proximity is not a sports sidebar. It is a decision to attach a private citizen’s name to a dead mother and a capital case. When the subject is an 18-year-old walk-on with no public profile and no ability to fight back in real time, the power imbalance is the entire story.
A Walk-On’s Name Is Still a Career
Spears later transferred, played at Marshall, and landed at West Liberty. The basketball path continued. The association with the shooting does not simply evaporate because a correction exists two months later in an editor’s note most readers never see. In college basketball, where NIL deals, transfers, and coaching staffs live and die on reputation, a false murder-scene link is not a footnote. It is a permanent search result. I have watched kids lose opportunities over far less.
The Times will almost certainly appeal. That is their right. What they do not get to do is reframe this as a technical glitch that somehow victimizes the institution. They chose the anonymous source over the on-the-record denials from the athletic director and the player’s father. They chose the headline that made the Alabama shooting mess look even more entangled. They chose speed and exclusivity over the basic verification that would have kept an innocent freshman out of the story entirely.
I am not here to litigate every anonymous tip that ever ran in a major paper. I am here to say that when you get it this wrong about a kid who was not even present, and you only fully fix it after he sues you, the jury is allowed to treat that as more than a clerical error. Nine days of trial. Five hours of deliberation. $9.25 million. First loss in half a century. Those are the facts the Times now has to live with the same way Spears had to live with a false byline next to a murder.
The paper can keep calling it honest. The jury called it something else, and they put a price on it that every newsroom covering college athletes just felt.
