Wrongly accused of murder, he'd just gotten sprung from jail. He hadn't eaten for nearly two days, as anxiety sapped his appetite.
But when Kenny Woods walked free from the Delaware County jail yesterday afternoon, he didn't rush home to rest or run around reveling in his freedom.
He stopped to get his girlfriend a birthday cake.
"I love my family," he said simply, as his girlfriend, Victoria Walton, happily displayed the vanilla-cream cake Woods bought on his way home from prison.
Minutes after arriving at his West Philadelphia home, Woods, 21, spoke wearily of his two days as an accused killer, stopping sporadically to embrace relieved relatives.
He said he never met Donnie Sayers, whose confession prompted police to drop charges against Woods, until Sayers drove the stolen Range Rover to 40th and Parrish about 9 Tuesday night. He insists he never entered the car nor went anywhere with Sayers.
He said he never knew why police picked him up - or even that the Range Rover had been involved in a fatal wreck - until he saw himself on the TV news while he was in jail.
"I was lost. It was crazy. I had no clue what was happening," he said.
Then Bob Herdelin came along.
Woods' late grandmother worked for Herdelin, who owns the infamous Cheers bar in Upper Darby, for years. When Woods got arrested, his family called Herdelin.
Herdelin, a towering white-haired white guy with bad teeth and purple crocodile-skin shoes, has a lot of money and a lot of nerve.
He and some of Woods' relatives drove all over, talking with witnesses who told them Sayers was the right suspect. He called Haverford detectives and implored them to come interview them. He offered his $14 million Loveladies, N.J., house as collateral for Woods' $1 million bail. He insisted the police give polygraph tests to the witnesses whose words would exonerate Woods. And he went to collect Woods from jail, after authorities dropped the charges against him.
Yesterday, Woods thanked Herdelin for his efforts.
Reviled on TV newscasts and in headlines as a killer, Woods lost his job as a McDonald's grill cook, a job he'd just started the same day he was arrested.
Still, he holds no anger toward the Haverford police.
"They was doing their job," he said. "They did what they had to do. I'm home now."
And Herdelin praised Haverford police for "acting as expeditiously as possible to get this thing [exonerating Woods] done."
Outside his home yesterday afternoon, Woods snuggled with his 4-year-old son, Za'khi, and smiled at his own mother, Terry Cotton Woods, and Walton, 22, who's almost five months' pregnant.
"I'm just very happy to be home," he said.
