Crawford family: "Since he's been gone a piece of the puzzle is missing."

Two decades ago, the Crawfords lost a member of their family to the carceral system.

On a February night in 2004, Oliver Crawford Jr. was in Streamwood, Illinois spending the night at the home of his cousin Shirley, according to court documents. Later that morning he would get ready to head to the hospital to visit his grandmother.

Thirty-six miles away in front of a liquor store on Chicago's south side, a noon-hour shooting would leave one man dead, three others injured.

Despite five witnesses who testified that Crawford was miles from the crime scene, at a bench trial nine months later a judge convicted the father of two on murder and weapons charges, sentencing him to 30 years in prison.

In 2015 an appeals court reversed a circuit court decision to dismiss the first stage of his post-conviction appeal.

As he serves the sentence the state has imposed, Crawford is enrolled in the Northwestern Prison Education Program, which Northwestern University launched in 2018 to provide coursework and credits to enable incarcerated students to study liberal arts and earn a bachelor's degree.

The Crawford family shared their story of loss in a 12-minute documentary film produced with undergraduate students as a collaboration between NPEP and the Medill School of Journalism Documenting Carcel Injustice program.

"I got arrested February 14, 2004, falsely accused, wrongfully convicted. At that time my daughter was nine and my son was seven years old. That was detrimental to my children," Crawford said.

"He was that family member that everyone depended on," Crawford's daughter Olivia said.

"Since he's been gone....there's a piece of the puzzle that's missing," Crawford's parents Oliver Sr. and Doris said.