Who Killed Garrett Phillips?

Who Killed Garrett Phillips?, an engrossing true crime documentary series from HBO in 2019, offers a deep dive into a gripping and tragic tale of murder investigation that gripped a small town in upstate New York.

The two-part series is focused around the murder of 12-year-old Garrett Phillips, which took place in Potsdam, a small town nestled straddling the county line of St. Lawrence County, New York, in the fall of 2011. More harrowing in its depiction is how there is less closure to the case, and more of an exploration about what went wrong in the criminal justice system and the societal biases deeply entrenched in our society.

Beginning on a fateful day in October 2011, when Garrett Phillips is found brutally murdered in his mother's apartment, the series shows how the subsequent hunt for the murderer ensnares a man whose only "crime" — in the eyes of the outraged town — appears to have been dating Phillips' mother.

The series doesn’t just chronicle a horrifying event, but cunningly takes the narrative a step further – it takes us onto a journey into the American legal system, the mishandlings of the murder investigation, and the effect of racial prejudice inherent in the law and order process. It becomes a microscope, peeling back the layers of a small town's underbelly, showing us a grim image of the interplay between justice, racial prejudice and societal expectations.

The documentary series’ chief figure of intrigue is Oral “Nick” Hillary, a black man in a majority white community, who was coaching soccer at Clarkson University at the time. He also happened to be the ex-boyfriend of Garrett's mother, Tandy Cyrus. Hillary quickly becomes a person of great interest in the case. In revealing the obsessive pursuit for Hillary's conviction, the documentary underlines hard-hitting truths about racial bias and profiling deeply embedded within the law enforcement and legal system, despite slim and circumstantial evidence pointing towards him.

Crafted by Emmy award-winning filmmaker Liz Garbus, known for her discerning documentaries like "What Happened, Miss Simone" and "The Fourth Estate", Who Killed Garrett Phillips? showcases her signature style of creating an engaging narrative around a potent societal issue. Alongside every unexpected turn in the case, Garbus is successful in keeping the viewer engrossed with interviews, police footage, and court videos.

As the audience gets deeper into the two-part series, it becomes evident that the title doesn’t allude to the murderer but to the ignored legal, racial and social issues that contribute to the questionable prosecution of Hillary. Although carrying an emotional narrative, Garbus avoids exploiting the victim and his family for melodramatic effect, instead focusing on the tragedy’s ripple effect on Potsdam’s tight-knit community.

Interviews from family members, friends, investigators, lawyers, and townspeople, get woven into the narrative. The viewer travels along the journey of the case, with details being meticulously presented and dissected. It even questions the professional conduct of the investigators involved in the case, and the prosecution that seemed to be donned with prejudices and discrimination.

In an era of documentaries that lay out cold cases and wrongful convictions, Who Killed Garrett Phillips? stands out with its careful balance of examining sensitive racial issues and the nuances of the American legal system. The series could easily have focused solely on the who-done-it aspect, but instead Garbus uses this the opportunity to broadly scrutinize the American court and legal system, casting a spotlight on its frequent inability to champion the truth over bias.

Who Killed Garrett Phillips? is an intriguing watch, not just for those interested in true crime documentaries, but also for those seeking insightful explorations of societal, racial, and legal frameworks in contemporary America.

In the end, the absorbing nature of the HBO series isn't determined by expecting to find an answer to the titular question - ‘Who Killed Garrett Phillips?’, but rather by attempting to interrogate the processes and prejudices that plagued this tragic case. Despite its true crime label, the two-part series is an evocative probe into systemic racism and the potential failures of the American justice system.