Detroit man awarded $10 million after wrongful conviction

Alexandre Ansari, was wrongfully serving a life sentence over claims he shot and killed a 15-year-old girl and wounded two others in Detroit, according to the lawsuit.

A man who was wrongfully convicted and incarcerated for over six years was awarded $10 million in damages by a jury in Detroit.

Alexandre Ansari, who was awarded last Friday, was wrongfully serving a life sentence over claims that in 2012 he shot and killed Ileana Cuevas, a 15-year-old girl, and wounded two others in Detroit, according to a lawsuit filed by Ansari in the United States District Court, Eastern District of Michigan Southern Division.

"Once I got the verdict back, my heart dropped. And I'm like, 'Dang, I got to spend the rest of my life in here for something I didn't do.' And you know, I tried to kill myself," Ansari told Linsey Davis on "ABC News Live Prime." "It felt like nobody didn't put all the evidence together to see that I wasn't the person in the first place. So things started getting overwhelming for me."

Ansari, 39, was exonerated in 2019 by the Wayne County Circuit Court after it determined that Moises Jimenez, a former Detroit police detective withheld evidence for Ansari’s trial that would have implicated someone else as the shooter, according to the County of Wayne Office of the Prosecuting Attorney.

"Mr. Ansari’s criminal conviction was dismissed in Wayne County Circuit Court by Judge Thomas Hathaway in 2019," the county prosecutor told ABC News in a statement. "The jury found that Alexandre Ansari's constitutional rights were violated by a Detroit police detective by concealing evidence in the fatal shooting of a 15-year-old girl."