With conviction vacated, Minneapolis man serving life for teenager’s murder released from prison

After years of fighting to prove his innocence, Edgar Barrientos-Quintana was released from prison Wednesday after his conviction and life sentence for the murder of a Minneapolis high school student 16 years ago were vacated.

The Great North Innocence Project announced that retired Anoka County Judge John McBride investigated the case and found that Hennepin County prosecutors violated Barrientos-Quintana’s rights and that his defense counsel was flawed to such a degree that it undermined the jury’s guilty verdict in 2009 in the shooting of 18-year-old Jesse Mickelson.

McBride’s findings followed recommendations from the Minnesota Attorney General’s Office and the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office that Barrientos-Quintana be released from prison.

Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty submitted the dismissal of the charges on Wednesday, writing, “the State now believes Defendant is innocent.”

Barrientos-Quintana was convicted on eight counts of first-degree murder in the drive-by shooting death of Mickelson, a student at Roosevelt High School in Minneapolis, who was playing football in the alley behind his house when he was killed in 2008. Barrientos-Quintana was 26 when he was sentenced.

At the time, police used testimony from rival gang members to place Barrientos-Quintana at the scene of the shooting. Prosecutors at trial argued that he shot at a crowd of rival gang members in the alley because he was upset that his girlfriend had been spending time with them.

The Conviction Review Unit out of the Attorney General’s Office spent three years investigating Barrientos-Quintana’s conviction. In a scathing report on the case released earlier this year, the CRU blamed Minneapolis police, Hennepin County prosecutors and the defense team for a “confluence of errors” that led to a wrongful conviction.

A statement from the family of Barrientos-Quintana, posted in an online fundraiser, said, “We express our gratitude to God for granting Edgar’s freedom. He has missed out on so many precious moments, including watching his children grow up, attending graduations, birthdays, Thanksgiving, and Christmas celebrations with the family, and the loss of our beloved dad. He has a lot of ground to cover.”

The CRU report painted an overwhelming picture of a criminal justice system that failed Barrientos-Quintana and ultimately left Mickelson’s family to grieve his death again along with the years Barrientos-Quintana spent in prison.

“Everybody wanted it to be him so bad, but I want what’s right — and right is right and wrong is wrong and he wasn’t the man who killed my brother,” Mickelson’s sister, Tina Rosebear, said in September.

Sarah Wolf was one of the jurors who convicted Barrientos-Quintana. After the CRU report was released, Rosebear sent it to Wolf. She got to page 30 before realizing she convicted an innocent man.

“I don’t feel like I was duped. I’m a smart person and I make my own decisions,” Wolf said. “I get angry at the police for making such quick decisions and not following the evidence that was there. They made a decision to go after Edgar.”

The CRU report highlighted that no physical evidence tied Barrientos-Quintana to the crime.

Surveillance video showed Barrientos-Quintana with his girlfriend in a grocery store in Maplewood 33 minutes before the shooting in south Minneapolis. Barrientos-Quintana also had a credible alibi that he was in his girlfriend’s apartment in a suburb of St. Paul at the time of the shooting — an alibi his defense failed to properly argue before the jury.

During the investigation, police recreated the route Barrientos-Quintana would have taken from the grocery store to the scene of the crime and told the jury he could have made the drive with plenty of time to shoot Mickelson. The CRU worked with a retired officer from the Minneapolis Police Department who provided an expert report that rejected that investigation and said the drive likely would have taken more than 33 minutes, making it “improbable, if not impossible, for Barrientos to be the shooter.”

Every eyewitness to the shooting said the suspect was bald, so police used old photos of Barrientos-Quintana with a bald head in photo arrays, even though they knew grocery store surveillance video from the night of the shooting showed him with a “full head of dark hair.”

The lead investigator and Hennepin County prosecutors then lied during the trial, the CRU determined, by saying witnesses had described the suspect as having “short hair,” when they had actually said the shooter was bald or had a shaved head.

Police also had “conducted suggestive and coercive interviews with juvenile members of a rival gang” to label Barrientos-Quintana the shooter. They threatened another juvenile who was a victim in the shooting by implying that if he didn’t name Barrientos-Quintana, they could label him an accomplice to the crime. Another eyewitness, who was not gang affiliated, picked someone other than Barrientos-Quintana out of the lineup.

Investigators also failed to use proper protocol for giving witnesses photo arrays, and defense attorneys “failed to present the district court with substantive written or oral arguments regarding the unreliability of the lineups and the tainted lineup procedures.”

The two police investigators involved in the case were Robert Dale and Christopher Gaiters. Gaiters is a high-ranking MPD officers, serving as assistant chief of community trust. Dale retired in 2023 as a homicide sergeant.

Hilary Lindell Caligiuri, one of the Hennepin County prosecutors who tried the case, was appointed a Hennepin County judge by Gov. Mark Dayton in 2014. Her current term runs through 2028. Kristi McNeilly, who represented Barrientos-Quintana, was later found guilty of swindling one of her clients and sentenced to 180 days in the workhouse and ordered to pay $15,000 restitution. Her law license is suspended.