HONOLULU (AP) — One of the first places Gordon Cordeiro visited when a judge ordered him released after spending 30 years in prison for a killing he always maintained he had nothing to do with was his mother’s Hawaii gravesite.
In a videoconference interview with The Associated Press on Saturday, Cordeiro reflected on his first day of freedom after new DNA evidence led to the overturning of his conviction in the 1994 shooting of Timothy Blaisdell on the island of Maui.
Paulette Cordeiro died in September 1994, and her son was arrested the following month.
“Thanks for looking over me,” the son recalled saying at her grave, hours after walking out of the Maui Community Correctional Center. “Keeping me safe.”
A photo provided by his sister showed Cordeiro kneeling at their mother’s grave, with a lei he was given upon release draped over the headstone. Inscribed on it were the words, “You were the wind beneath our wings.”
Cordeiro said he thought constantly about his mother — who died at age 49 from ALS, often called Lou Gehrig’s disease — during his years behind bars. He and his sisters had taken turns caring for her, and he said he was with her and building shelving units for the family when Blaisdell was fatally shot during a drug deal robbery.
After a steak dinner and the gravesite visit, he celebrated with family at his father’s house and then found himself unable to sleep much. The following day he went to other relatives’ graves and planned to go to Costco, he said.
“It feels normal,” he said.
But the Maui he once knew has changed a lot, Cordeiro said, noting that the historic town of Lahaina was destroyed by a wildfire in 2023.
Another thing that has taken some getting used to: “Everybody is looking at their phones.”
Cordeiro had just a pager before he went to prison, he said. He now has a smartphone, but “I’m not staring at it yet. It keeps beeping and messages coming in, and it’s different.”
There were gasps and cries in the courtroom Friday when Judge Kirstin Hamman announced that his sentence was vacated and he was to be released from custody. She ruled that new evidence, including DNA test results, would likely change the outcome of another trial.
Maui County Prosecuting Attorney Andrew Martin says he plans to appeal and seek to have bail imposed on Cordeiro’s release.
Cordeiro’s first trial ended in a hung jury, with only one juror voting to convict him. But he was later found guilty of murder, robbery and attempted murder and sentenced to life without the possibility of parole.
After Cordeiro’s conviction, new testing on physical evidence from the scene excluded him as the source of DNA on Blaisdell’s body and other crime scene evidence, the Hawaii Innocence Project said, and a DNA profile of an unidentified person was found on the inside pockets of Blaisdell’s jeans.
The judge agreed.
“Thank God for new DNA,” Cordeiro said Saturday. “Technology is awesome.”
The Zoom interview with the AP was the first time he used the platform and an iPad outside of prison.
Someone who knows what Cordeiro is going through reached out to him Friday to offer support in adjusting: Ian Schweitzer, who was freed in 2023 after more than 20 years for a 1991 killing and rape on the Big Island that he says he did not commit. The two met in prison at one point, according to Cordeiro.
“We followed each other’s cases as we were going along,” he said. “We were both living in the same prison, so we both kept up with each other as the process was going.”
For now, Cordeiro said, his immediate plans include fixing cars, helping with his dad’s house and “maybe giving back to the community a little bit.”
