Juror, victim family members call for release of Minneapolis man serving life sentence for murder

A juror who sent a Minneapolis man to prison for life and the sister of the man he was convicted of murdering sat side-by-side at the Hennepin County Government Center Monday and said a grave injustice has taken place.

Fifteen years ago, Edgar Barrientos was convicted in the drive-by shooting death of Jesse Leon Omar Mickelson. Mickelson, an 18-year-old Minneapolis Roosevelt High School student, was playing football in the alley behind his house when he was killed. Barrientos was 26 years old when he was sentenced to life in prison a year later.

“Everybody wanted it to be [Barrientos] 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,” said Mickelson’s sister, Tina Rosebear. “I hope they can release him as soon as possible.”

The case against Barrientos came under heavy question after the Minnesota Attorney General’s Office Conviction Review Unit (CRU) released the results of a three-year investigation into his conviction last month.

In a scathing review of the case, the CRU blamed Minneapolis police, Hennepin County prosecutors and Barrientos’ defense team for a “confluence of errors” that led to a wrongful conviction. They argue that “because his conviction lacks integrity, the CRU recommends that his conviction be vacated, and the charges dismissed.”

Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty said at a news conference that Barrientos should be a free man and if Judge John McBride agrees to post-conviction relief, her office will dismiss all charges.

Sarah Wolf was one of the jurors who convicted Barrientos. She developed a lasting connection with Rosebear after the trial. 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 to the crime. Surveillance video showed Barrientos with his girlfriend in a grocery store in Maplewood 33 minutes before the shooting in south Minneapolis. Barrientos 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 for the jury.

During the investigation, police recreated the route Barrientos 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 MPD 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.”

Wolf pointed to what she said were three glaring issues with how evidence was presented to the jury: the manipulation of the mugshot of Barrientos, specifically the description of his hair; the inadequacy of the defense team that represented Barrientos; and that the jury was not instructed about giving proper weight to eyewitness testimony.

“Of course we now know that eyewitnesses get stuff wrong or they’re set out to actually pin it on somebody else,” Wolf said.

Every eyewitness to the shooting said the suspect was bald, so police used old photos of Barrientos with a bald head in photo arrays, even though they knew grocery store surveillance video from the night of the shooting showed Barrientos 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 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 the shooter. They threatened another juvenile who was a victim in the shooting by implying that if he didn’t name Barrientos they could label him an accomplice to the crime. Another eyewitness, who was not gang affiliated, picked someone other than Barrientos out of the lineup.

Investigators also failed to use proper protocol for giving witnesses photo arrays and Barrientos’ 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.”

Moriarty called into question the tactics used to gain the initial conviction.

“Prosecutors from this office and investigators from the Minneapolis Police Department ignored the obvious evidence before them and failed to follow known best practices to convict the man they convinced themselves was responsible for the murder,” she said. “We are sorry to both Mr. Barrientos and his family and to the family of Jesse Mickelson.”

The two police investigators involved in the case were Robert Dale and Christopher Gaiters. Gaiters is now one of the second-highest ranking officers at MPD, 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, 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.

When this review comes to a conclusion, Moriarty said her office will be inviting members of MPD to sit down and discuss how they can work together to ensure this doesn’t happen again.

The HCAO sent a letter to the court Monday in support of releasing Barrientos, writing that, “We do not reach this decision lightly and we do not reach it with any joy. This has been a terrible process for Jesse Mickelson’s family.”

Rosebear said reliving the pain of her brother’s death has been a trauma, but it doesn’t change how she feels about what needs to happen next.

“It’s been 16 years but I would rather have no conviction than the wrong conviction,” Rosebear said. “I want to apologize to Edgar and his family for everything they have endured. ... I want to apologize most importantly because I held a lot of anger for a man who had nothing to do with it.”

Wolf said she didn’t feel manipulated by the criminal justice system as a juror taking part in the conviction, but her voice shook as she explained the feelings that have washed over her since reading the CRU report.

“I would not have made that decision having known what I know now,” she said. “But I wish I would have known then, because we can’t take back what we did.”

Moriarty said if the case is dismissed, an investigation could be opened into other suspects in the slaying.

Barrientos, 41, is serving his life sentence at the Minnesota Department of Corrections Facility in Rush City.