Mathias, J.
Here, the evidence shows that when the Evansville police officers arrived at the Henderson, Kentucky homeless shelter Hicks was staying in, Hicks was sitting outside, smoking a cigarette, with a Henderson police officer standing nearby. The Evansville police asked Hicks if he would speak to them about Jochum’s death, and he agreed to go to the local, Henderson police station to speak with the police. [Footnote omitted.] The officers did not restrain Hicks, nor did they order him to go to the station.
Once at the station, the officers took Hicks to a small interview room and began to interview him. They did not inform him that he was free to leave, see tr. p. 70, and the interview room was in an area that was accessible only through a locked door. From this, the trial court could have reasonably concluded that Hicks was not free to leave and was therefore in custody. Indeed, the trial court did suppress the statements Hicks made prior to his being advised of his Miranda rights. See King v. State, 844 N.E.2d 92, 97 (Ind. Ct. App. 2005) (concluding that statements made during custodial interrogation but prior to suspect being advised of his Miranda rights should have been suppressed). But even if we assume arguendo that Hicks was in custody, this does not mean that the trial court should have suppressed Hicks’s statements.
Once the interrogating officers discovered that Hicks had been in an argument with Jochum before he left the apartment, they clearly read him his Miranda rights and Hicks signed a waiver of these rights. Hicks does not deny this. Instead, Hicks claims that the police engaged in the sort of “question-first, Mirandize-later” approach that was condemned by the United States Supreme Court in Missouri v. Seibert, 542 U.S. 600 (2004). In that case, the Court disapproved of an interrogation technique in which interrogating officers purposefully withhold Miranda warnings until after a suspect has confessed, and thereafter, give Miranda warnings and secure a waiver before obtaining a second, similar confession. Id. at 611-14; see also King, 844 N.E.2d at 98 (summarizing the Seibert holding).
As the Court in Seibert explained:
Upon hearing warnings only in the aftermath of interrogation and just after making a confession, a suspect would hardly think he had a genuine right to remain silent, let alone persist in so believing once the police began to lead him over the same ground again. A more likely reaction on a suspect’s part would be perplexity about the reason for discussing rights at that point, bewilderment being an unpromising frame of mind for knowledgeable decision. What is worse, telling a suspect that “anything you say can and will be used against you,” without expressly excepting the statement just given, could lead to an entirely reasonable inference that what he has just said will be used, with subsequent silence being of no avail. Thus, when Miranda warnings are inserted in the midst of coordinated and continuing interrogation, they are likely to mislead and “depriv[e] a defendant of knowledge essential to his ability to understand the nature of his rights and the consequences of abandoning them.” By the same token, it would ordinarily be unrealistic to treat two spates of integrated and proximately conducted questioning as independent interrogations subject to independent evaluation simply because Miranda warnings formally punctuate them in the middle.
542 U.S. at 613-14 (internal citations omitted) (emphases supplied).
. . . .
According to the interrogating officers, they simply asked Hicks basic questions during the initial “pre-interview,” and Hicks did not admit to killing or harming Jochum. He instead simply stated that he had gotten into a verbal argument with her. Although Hicks contested this at the suppression hearing, and claims on appeal that the officers were untruthful, we cannot judge the credibility of witnesses or reweigh evidence on appeal. Fuqua, 984 N.E.2d at 713. Thus, the facts of the present case are unlike those in Seibert, and the Indiana cases cited above, where the police obtained a second, post-Miranda-warning confession immediately after first obtaining a pre-Miranda-warning confession.
Instead, this situation is more like that in Maxwell v. State, 839 N.E.2d 1285, 1288 (Ind. Ct. App. 2005), where the defendant did not confess to committing the crime prior the officers advising him of his Miranda rights. On appeal, this court declined to extend the holding in Seibert to prohibit any pre-Miranda warning conversations with the police. Id. Therefore, we cannot agree with Hicks that the incriminating statements he made to the police after he had been read and waived his Miranda rights should have been suppressed. [Footnote omitted.]
BRADFORD, J., and PYLE, J., concur.