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The murder of Hae Min Lee occurred on January 13, 1999 in Baltimore, United States. Adnan Masud Syed, then 17, lured Hae Min Lee, his high school classmate and ex-girlfriend, then 18, to give him a car ride after school, then manually strangled her inside her car and stashed her body in the trunk of her car. Syed was convicted of first-degree murder, kidnapping, robbery, and false imprisonment. Court files described they had a "turbulent" ten-month high school romance, having broken up and reunited at least twice. Two weeks before the murder, Lee went on a first date with an older co-worker. Prosecutors determined Syed's motive was jealousy.

In 2014, this crime in Baltimore attracted international attention through the podcast Serial. The media is concerned that no physical evidence tied Syed to the crime, but a witness testified that Syed and he buried Lee's body. Media is also concerned about alleged bias in the bail process as Syed was denied twice for fear that he would abscond to his family in Pakistan. In 2016, Syed's conviction was vacated and a new trial was ordered, yet the Maryland Court of Appeals in 2019 decided not to hold a new trial by a vote of 4-3. The verdict remained to be life imprisonment plus 30 years.

Adnan Masud Syed
Adnan Masud Syed was born in Maryland, United States on May 21, 1981, seven months younger than Lee. Adnan's mother, Shamim Syed, came to Baltimore from Pakistan through an arranged marriage with Syed Rahman, who was an engineer. Adnan is the middle one of three brothers. After the murder case, Adnan's mother said they were isolated by the Muslim community in Baltimore.

Adnan Masud Syed was an honors student at Woodlawn High School in Baltimore, 2019. Syed played American football. In the podcast Serial, he revealed his habit of smoking weed. The New York Times said "by most accounts" he was a happy, charismatic man. While in court files, under a section titled "motive", it states "Both in conversations with friends and in her diary, Lee described Syed as possessive, jealous and overprotective."

Hae Min Lee
Hae Min Lee (October 15, 1980 - January 13, 1999) was born in South Korea and emigrated with her mother Youn Kim and her brother to the United States in 1992 to live with her grandparents.

Lee attended the magnet program at Woodlawn High School near Baltimore, Maryland. She was an athlete who played lacrosse and field hockey. Her teacher described her as “one of those rare people you meet in life who is always happy, always joyful and full of love”.

Their relationship
As The New York Times summarized, "Lee and Syed came from conservative immigrant families — Lee Korean, Syed Pakistani — and felt compelled to keep their romance a secret. (...) Part of what seems to have driven her and Syed apart was her frustration over not being able to bring their relationship into the open." According to court files, they frequently had sex in the parking lot of the Security Boulevard store of Best Buy, Baltimore, where this murder happened.

Murder and arrest
According to the court, on 13 January 1999, Adnan, then 17, lured Hae Min Lee, his high school classmate and ex-girlfriend, to give him a car ride after school, then manually strangled her inside her car and stashed her body in the trunk of her car. Then, as The Guardian summarized, "he called his friend Jay and said: 'That bitch is dead. Come and get me. I’m at Best Buy.' When Jay arrived, Adnan opened the trunk, showed him Hae’s body, and said: 'I can’t believe I killed her where I used to fuck her at.' The two boys buried Hae in a 6in-deep grave in woods three miles away. She was found three weeks later. A few weeks after that, Jay confessed to the police."

Lee's family reported her missing after she failed to pick up her younger cousin from daycare around 3:15 p.m. On February 9, 1999, Lee's partially buried body was discovered by a passerby in Leakin Park in Baltimore. Syed was arrested on February 28, 1999.

Key Witness
Jay Wilds was the prosecutor's key witness at trial. The court accepted his testimony. However, the podcast Serial (2014) and the HBO documentary The Case Against Adnan Syed (2019) question the truthfulness of his testimony.

Wilds frequently seemed to lose his way during one recorded interview, which was marked by knocking or tapping sounds. After hearing these sounds, Wilds seemed to remember what had happened. According to Wilds, Syed committed the murder. Attorney Susan Simpson commented the tapping was evidence that the police were feeding Wilds with elements of his story. As further evidence, the podcast notes that at one point in the interview, Wilds says "top spots", which has no apparent relevance to the case. But the next point Wilds makes appears at the top of page 2 of a police document entitled "Jay's Chronology".

In the HBO documentary The Case Against Adnan Syed in 2019, twenty years after the murder, Jay Wilds issued a statement to the director that "the police had coached him to say in his second taped interview that Syed first showed him Lee’s body, in the trunk of her car, at a Best Buy parking lot, not at a meeting point off Edmondson Avenue, as he had originally said." The Best Buy location matches a map drawn by the police based on cellphone geolocation records.

Trials and appeals
In the first trial, Syed's family hired defense attorney Cristina Gutierrez to represent him. On February 25, 2000, Syed was found guilty of first degree murder, kidnapping, false imprisonment, and robbery. Syed was sentenced to life in prison plus 30 years. Syed appealed his conviction in 2003, which was unsuccessful. He later made an appeal for post-conviction relief in 2010, based on ineffective assistance of counsel. This was based on Gutierrez's failure to investigate an alibi witness, Asia McClain, who maintained she was talking with Syed in the library at the exact time that prosecutors said Syed attacked Lee in a Best Buy parking lot several miles away. "The judge had ruled that Gutierrez's decision not to call McClain as a witness was part of her defense strategy rather than an act of incompetence. The judge said the letters McClain sent Syed in jail were weak and possibly damaging evidence for the defense, since they did not state the time she saw him at the library and contradicted Syed’s own account from that day". This appeal was initially denied in 2014.

On February 6, 2015, the Maryland Court of Special Appeals approved Syed's application for permission to appeal for a potential hearing on the admissibility of the alibi testimony of Asia McClain. On May 18, 2015, the Maryland Court of Special Appeals remanded the case to the Baltimore City Circuit Court. Syed's appeals lawyer, C. Justin Brown, filed a motion in court on August 24, 2015, pertaining to the cellular phone evidence, saying that a newly recovered document showed that the cell tower evidence used by prosecutors was misleading and should not have been admitted at trial.

On November 6, 2015, Baltimore City Circuit Court Judge Martin Welch ordered that Syed's post-conviction relief proceedings, to determine his eligibility for a new trial, would be re-opened, "in the interests of justice for all parties". The post-conviction relief hearing, originally scheduled to last two days, lasted five days from February 3–9, 2016. The hearing was attended by people from across the United States, including Sarah Koenig. Asia McClain testified that she talked to Syed at the library on January 13, 1999.

On June 30, 2016, Judge Welch granted Syed's request for a new trial and vacated his conviction, ruling that Gutierrez "rendered ineffective assistance when she failed to cross-examine the state's expert regarding the reliability of cell tower location evidence". Judge Welch denied Syed's defense team's motion for bail for Syed in the interim.

On March 29, 2018, Maryland's Court of Special Appeals, the second-highest court in the state, ruled that Syed deserved a new trial. The Court of Special Appeals' opinion said that Syed's counsel failed to contact a potential alibi witness, Asia McClain, who could "have raised a reasonable doubt in the mind of at least one juror".

On March 8, 2019, the Maryland Court of Appeals, on a 4–3 vote, reversed the lower appellate court's ruling, effectively denying the new trial. The Court of Appeals agreed that Syed's legal counsel was deficient, but ruled that it would have not been enough to have swayed the jury to change their decision because, the judges said, the evidence against him was strong. It "does little more than call into question the time that the state claimed Ms. Lee was killed and does nothing to rebut the evidence establishing Mr. Syed's motive and opportunity to kill Ms. Lee". They also ruled that Syed's right to reexamine claims about the cellphone tower evidence had been waived because the issue had not been raised as part of Syed's original petition.

On November 25, 2019, the Supreme Court of the United States rejected Syed's appeal for a new trial.

Serial podcast
From October 3 to December 18, 2014, the trial of Adnan Syed was the subject of the podcast Serial, hosted by Sarah Koenig. The podcast episodes generated international interest in the trial and were downloaded more than 100 million times by June 2016.

DNA testing
The Baltimore City Police ran forensic biology analyses between August and October 2018. Items tested included fingernail clippings, blood samples, a liquor bottle and condom wrapper. The forensic report was released to The Baltimore Sun on 28 March 2019 and shows none items tested positive for the DNA of Syed. Before the release of this forensic report, The New York Times wrote on 9 March 2019 that "Physical evidence collected in 1999 was not tested for DNA during the initial trial process."

Followup
In 2015, attorneys Rabia Chaudry, Susan Simpson, and Collin Miller began producing a podcast called Undisclosed: The State vs. Adnan Syed. Chaudry says she is Syed's friend from childhood and strongly believes in his innocence, while Simpson and Miller became interested in the case from listening to Serial. This podcast involved a detailed examination of the State of Maryland's case against Adnan Syed.

Investigation Discovery aired a one-hour special called Adnan Syed: Innocent or Guilty? on June 14, 2016, based on a new analysis of evidence brought up in the podcasts.

In 2016, two books were published about the case. Confessions of a Serial Alibi, written by Asia McClain Chapman, was released on June 7, 2016, and Adnan's Story: The Search for Truth and Justice After Serial, written by Rabia Chaudry, was released on August 9, 2016.

In May 2018, HBO announced it would produce a four-hour documentary based on the murder case called The Case Against Adnan Syed. The first part of a four-part series was released on March 10, 2019. The HBO documentary revealed that Syed turned down a plea bargain in 2018 that would have required him to serve four more years before release.

Lee's family remains convinced of Syed's guilt, saying that it is now "more clear than ever" that he killed their daughter.