A man who spent 28 years behind bars was released from prison Friday after a Pennsylvania judge vacated his 1996 conviction in the murder of a 4-year-old girl.

“I was glad to get out,” Walter Ogrod, 55, said.

He was freed with the help of the same Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office that prosecuted him back in 1988. This time, the office’s Conviction Integrity Unit, created in 2014, worked to disprove the case.

Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner welcomed the judge’s order, saying in a statement Friday, “On behalf of this office, I apologize to Walter Ogrod and his family. I hope he will soon be officially declared innocent of this horrendous crime.”

Judge Shelley Robins New ordered a new trial, and prosecutors have filed a motion to quell a retrial. If that motion is granted, Ogrod’s case will be closed. For now he’s out on bail.

Prosecutors now believe that Krasner was coerced into a false confession after 4-year-old Barbara Jean Horn was found dead in a cardboard television box near his north Philadelphia home.

Witnesses said they saw a man near the box, but he didn’t look like Ogrod. Jurors in his first trial voted 11-1 to acquit, but a second trial included the testimony of jailhouse informants, and Ogrod was convicted.

His lawyers said earlier this year that DNA found at the crime scene did not match his.

In an interview with NBC News’ Lester Holt in May, Ogrod said he believed he contracted COVID-19 and recovered while serving time in Pennsylvania’s State Correctional Institution Phoenix. But he was not tested.

“It’s remarkable that this occurred today, during a time when our country is experiencing so much unrest and so many questions about our criminal justice system and whether or not it is so demonstrably broke that you can’t get just results,” Assistant District Attorney Patricia Cummings said Friday.

Prosecutors vowed to put whoever killed Horn behind bars.

“To know that an innocent man has been in prison and the person that did this has been out, it’s just horrible,” said the girl’s mother, Sharon Fahy.

WASHINGTON — Thousands of people gathered outside Washington, D.C., monuments and the White House on Saturday protesting the killing of George Floyd, years of unanswered calls for police reform and President Donald Trump’s use of military personnel in response to largely peaceful demonstrations.

“I’m tired of the racism. Just tired,” said Rochelle Grate, a 58-year-old information technology specialist from Fort Washington, Maryland, who described the Saturday protest as “beautiful, peaceful and diverse.”

“This is different,” she said about the protests seen around the country over much of the past two weeks since Floyd, a black man, was killed in police custody in Minneapolis, Minnesota on May 25. “It snapped people not of color to say ‘Man, this is real and I’ve been blind to it.’”

After more than a week of protests in Washington, city officials said they expected Saturday to be the largest demonstration yet with potential for tens of thousands of people taking to the streets.

“We anticipate the largest demonstrations with regards to numbers that we’ve seen in the city to date,” said D.C. Police Chief Peter Newsham at a press conference on Thursday. “And we anticipate that the protesters will continue to be as peaceful as they have been over the past couple of days.”

Newsham said no arrests have been made during protests since Tuesday.

Earlier in the week police officers had lined the perimeter to Lafayette Square, moving closer to the fenced-off crowd as protests grew more rowdy.

There was no police line in Lafayette Square on Saturday and no cops were seen in the blocks surrounding the White House as people danced, painted signs, and marched around downtown. The demonstration remained peaceful hours after the time when just days ago a curfew would have been in effect.

Protests in the District at times turned more violent last weekend as police used tear gas and rubber bullets to disperse demonstrators outside the White House last weekend after some protesters threw water bottles and bricks across a barricade at law enforcement officers. Some protesters set fire to cars and broke the windows of office buildings in the blocks surrounding the White House.

The tension between protesters and law enforcement in Washington peaked on Monday when police and federal officers forcibly removed peaceful protesters from the street across from the White House so President Donald Trump could take a picture in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church, a congregation known as the Church of the Presidents, which was damaged by fire during demonstrations on Sunday.

Later on Monday, military helicopters were seen flying low over protesters. The D.C. National Guard has opened an investigation into the use of the helicopters.

“I’ve only felt fear once and that was on Tuesday when I went out to vote,” said Tom Roucche, 61, a D.C. resident who said he had to pass through hundreds of law enforcement officers to get to his polling location for the District’s primary earlier this week. “I felt we were living … somewhere not the U.S.”

“But I’ve never felt fear in the crowds,” said Roucche. “This has been great to see.”

Pamela Reynolds, a 37-year-old teacher from Washington who protested last weekend, said she could see the difference between Saturday and earlier protests.

“It was scary, heavy. It wasn’t this,” said Reynolds. When asked what changed the atmosphere, Reynolds said it was the arrests of the Minnesota police officers charged in Floyd’s death. “This feels powerful, like it may make a difference.”

People paid tribute to other victims of police killings outside the White House fence Saturday, tying their names to the fence and placing handmade signs along the walkway. Birthday balloons were left in honor of Breonna Taylor, the former EMT worker killed by police inside her Louisville, Kentucky, home who would have turned 27 on Friday.

“We now have allies,” said Che Washington, 30, a school counselor in D.C., pointing to how diverse the crowd was on Saturday. “Now it feels like everyone is fighting, they’re at least trying. It’s and affirmation to what we’ve been feeling.”

Trump’s actions on Monday motivated even more people to join in peaceful protests outside the White House, with thousands of demonstrators showing up throughout the week to call out aggressive policing tactics, racism and the militant approach the Trump administration has taken in response.

On Thursday the White House erected new fencing around its perimeter, adding to the 8-foot fence that was put up around the entrance to Lafayette Square earlier in the week. The parks immediately surrounding the White House, normally accessible to the public, are expected to remain blocked off until next week.

D.C. Mayor Mayor Muriel Bowser said it was a “sad commentary” that “the house and its inhabitants have to be walled off.”

“We should want the White House to be opened up for people to be able to access it from all sides,” she added.

Many D.C. residents have also expressed anger over Trump’s use of federal forces in the city, complaining that the presence of Humvees, Army helicopters and armed soldiers every few blocks has turned the city into a military zone.

Since D.C. is a territory and not a state, the District does not have the authority to override Trump’s use of the military and other federal forces.

On Friday, Bowser, who has been critical of Trump’s actions, renamed a street in front of the White House “Black Lives Matter Plaza” and had “Black Lives Matter” painted along the road in big yellow letters.

Bowser also took to Twitter on Friday night to ask governors to remove their National Guard from D.C., writing that they were brought “without my knowledge and not at my request.”

Unlike more recent large D.C. protests, such as the recent Women’s March or March for Our Lives, Saturday’s events were not organized by a single group and did not include a formal speaking program with a stage and a microphone.

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump had planned to spend this weekend in New Jersey at his Bedminster golf resort, but the White House opted to change course and cancel the trip a few days ago in large part due to the potential for “bad optics” of the president at one of his private clubs as national protests continue, according to two people familiar with the decision-making.

The original idea was to travel from Maine — where he visited a plant manufacturing coronavirus testing supplies — to New Jersey on Friday and spend it as “working weekend,” but the president ultimately agreed with his advisers that the plan could be problematic as thousands of demonstrators descended on the White House on Saturday for another day to protest the killing of George Floyd in police custody, the people familiar with Trump’s choice said.

This would have been the president’s first time back at Bedminster since last August. Trump is currently scheduled to be there, at least for one day, next weekend when he is slated to host an in-person fundraiser for his reelection effort.

Over Memorial Day weekend, Trump returned to one of his private properties for the first time in about 11 weeks due to the coronavirus pandemic, which marked the longest stretch of his administration without spending time at one. He golfed two days in a row at his course in Sterling, Virginia, that weekend.

Last Saturday, the morning after the protests first gained steam in Washington and directly outside the White House, Trump tweeted that they could have been “greeted” with “vicious dogs” and “ominous weapons” if they had breached the fence before traveling to Florida to spend much of the day at the SpaceX launch.

There’s currently no events scheduled for Saturday or Sunday and the White House already indicated they don’t expect any appearances from the president for the rest of the day.