Freed Youth Will Forgive but Never Forget : Courts: Kenya Hunt says spending time in jail for a crime he didn’t commit has left him bitter but ready to go on with life.

Nineteen-year-old Kenya Hunt reflected Thursday what it was like to be convicted by a jury of armed robbery--and to spend 29 days in jail--only to be freed after prosecutors had second thoughts about his guilt.

He talked first of bitterness, of outrage, of now being paranoid about cops and of how the criminal justice system nearly failed him.

But, in the next breath, he talked of the support of his mother and his Oceanside High School baseball coach and his attorney, and of his faith in God that he’d eventually get out of this jam.

And then came the say -what?

He says he wants to get back in the college classroom and pick up where he left off--majoring in criminal justice.

“I want to be a correctional officer, or a deputy,” he said, jail experience notwithstanding.

He mused about the irony.

“If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em,” he said, laughing.

Indeed, Hunt, a sharp-looking young man with an endearing smile, says he is ready to look the other way and move on with life. But he will never forget that morning about eight months ago.

Police from three agencies--the Escondido and Oceanside police departments and the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department--were staking out his home in Oceanside. They pulled him over on his way to classes at Palomar College at 6:30 in the morning, ordering him not to move or he would be shot.

They were acting on an anonymous tip that Hunt might be the suspect in the armed robberies one night last January of a gas station in Escondido and a pizza store in Vista. The two suspects were a Mutt and Jeff, a tall guy and a short guy, and Hunt is tall--6-foot-5--and a buddy of his is short. So the cops moved in, in unmarked cars and with guns drawn, and pulled over Hunt’s blue Mustang.

“One minute I’m driving to school thinking about baseball and playing center field and batting third or fourth or fifth, and the next thing I know I’m in handcuffs,” he said.

The outrage has now mellowed. “It was a mistake. Everybody’s entitled to make a mistake,” he said. “But it just shouldn’t have gone this far.”

And this is how far it went: Today, Hunt was to have been sentenced to up to 13 years, eight months in state prison.

On Wednesday, though, Hunt was released from the county detention center in Vista after the district attorney’s office agreed that maybe they had the wrong man--even after a jury was sure he was guilty.

An investigator from the public defender’s office had been pursuing a tip that the real crook was some other fellow who’s now in jail in Riverside. And this week, the D.A.’s office--conviction in hand--said that, “given an abundance of caution,” Hunt should be released rather than risk sending an innocent man up the river.

Hunt went home to a steak dinner Wednesday night.

“That’s 29 days I’m never going to get back in my life,” Hunt said Thursday. “Days of being locked up, of being unable to sleep at night, of having to ask my momma what the weather was like, of breathing recycled air--for something I didn’t do.”

“Yeah, I’m bitter. That’s a scar I’m going to carry around for a long time,” Hunt said. “If this could happen to me, it could happen to you. It could happen to anybody.”

He said Oceanside police already knew him--not just because of his exploits on the baseball field, where he was such a ferocious hitter that he had already been drafted by the Montreal Expos. But there once was this shooting, involving a man driving a Mustang, so local detectives interviewed him and took his picture. They finally found the other Mustang, but Hunt’s photograph went into a police file nonetheless.

When his name was offered by the tipster this time, the picture resurfaced and was used in a photo lineup. Then, at a live lineup, Hunt was the only man whose picture had also been previously shown to witnesses. Hunt’s attorney, John Jimenez, called it “suggestive.”

There was no other forensic evidence linking Hunt to the crimes. At the trial, friends--his coach, his high school principal, the man at the batting cages where Hunt helped youngsters on their stroke--testified about Hunt’s character. And the defense tried to point the finger at the other suspect. Jimenez even had a jailhouse snitch--the man who fingered the other suspect--take the witness stand. Hunt figured he’d be acquitted.

“My mom told me: ‘Tell the truth. The truth will set you free,” Hunt said.

So the jury’s pronouncements were like sharp slaps. The jurors couldn’t bring themselves to believe a jailhouse informant.

“They took me into custody. Mr. Jimenez just started shaking his head in disbelief. He told me to relax, that he wasn’t going to give up. But I couldn’t believe I was going to do time for something I didn’t do.”

In jail, other men asked him what he was in for. Armed robbery, he said, but I’m innocent. Yeah, sure, they chuckled. When’s your trial? I’ve already been convicted, he said. They laughed even harder.

At home, Hunt’s mother, Linda Thompson, was heartsick. Rather than face dinner without her son, she would just go to bed.

Then, Tuesday night, she got the call from Jimenez that the district attorney’s office was reconsidering the case against her son--and was going to ask the judge to let him go, based on the information passed on by Jimenez about the other suspect. Better late than never, Jimenez shrugged.

Now Hunt is talking about moving to Northern California. “Around here,” he said, “I’m always looking in my rearview mirror for cops. I don’t have anything against them, personally, but I guess you can say I’m a little paranoid now.”

He said he hasn’t received an apology from the district attorney’s office. Maybe they don’t do that kind of thing. And really, it doesn’t matter now, Hunt says, “now that I’ve got my freedom. I just want people to know I’m out, that I didn’t do it.”

Said Jimenez: “My advice to him is to try to get it behind him, to just chalk it up. If he can forgive those people who put him in this situation, he’ll be that much stronger of a person. And I give the D.A.’s office a lot of credit for having the courage and the conscience to do this.”

Says his mother: “He’s scarred, but he’ll pull through it. He’ll get over the hurdles--because I’ll push him.”

And for his part, Hunt says he’s ready to play ball.