Two Lake County Major Crimes Task Force Officers entered the room. They introduced themselves and then the first thing they asked each of us was the most shocking question we could ever imagine.
“DO YOU BELIEVE YOUR MOTHER IS CAPABLE OF MURDER?”
In just a short time, we all realized that the answer was irrelevant. The Task Force had already decided that our mom, Marni Yang, a hard-working single mother of three, was their target and they would do whatever it took to make her appear guilty, but first, they had to turn us against our mother.
“You better start telling us what we want to hear!” screamed the officer at teenager Andrew Yang. “One of you is going down, it's either going to be you or your mother! Your mother doesn't love you! No mother would put their kid in this position. So start talking, or you will go to prison for the rest of your life.”
“I'm not going to admit to something I didn’t do!” Andrew protested. “I also kept insisting that my mom was just as innocent as me. She was home with me the morning this murder took place,” but that was not what the police wanted to hear.
“It took the police seventeen months to pin this murder on my mother,” says Emily Yang “And they did it by dividing all of us and destroying our family.”
“I was the closest one to my mother,” Brandon Yang states “I saw how the harassment, wore my mother down. We were a family under siege. The police never gave us a moment to recover from one attack before they launched another attack on us.”
Deceived into believing that her son would be put in prison for the rest of his life, Marni Yang confessed to a murder she didn’t commit. She was subsequently convicted and sentenced to life in prison. Most people would be surprised to learn that false confessions are the leading cause of wrongful convictions.
“My Mom Marni” is a shocking tale of injustice in America. This true story is compelling, gripping and heart-breaking. In the end, you will be challenged to wrestle with the question: could this happen to me? Yes, it could because none of us are immune to abusive and coercive interrogation techniques, false confessions, and wrongful convictions.
“My Mom Marni” is yet another wakeup call to the American public about the horrors of the justice “system” which miscarries far more often than it should. This begs the question: “WHY?” The answer, which three underage children and their loving mother learned the hard way, is: Lacking the proper investigative talent to solve a crime, junk science, and subterfuge are used to concoct a case against a scapegoat.
Ten years later, there is new evidence proving Marni Yang did not commit this heinous crime. In My Mom Marni, her children, Andrew, Emily, and Brandon, are setting the record straight as they bravely seek justice for their mother and punishment for the real killer of a Deerfield, Illinois woman and her unborn child, but will the Lake County Major Crimes Task Force admit they got it wrong? Probably not…they never have before!
