Mary Moriarty vows to retry man whose conviction in Deshaun Hill killing was overturned

Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty said her office will seek a second trial against the man charged in the 2022 murder of Minneapolis North High quarterback Deshaun Hill Jr. after his conviction was overturned on appeal earlier this year.

The Minnesota Supreme Court declined to review the case this week after an appellate court ruled in May that statements Cody Fohrenkam, 32, made to police while under questioning after the shooting of Hill, who was 15, should have been inadmissible at trial. The state’s high court noted that its decision to not review the case had nothing to do with the fact that Justice Theodora Gaïtas was on the appeals panel that overturned the initial conviction.

The Hennepin County Attorney’s Office plans to charge Fohrenkam again with two counts of second-degree murder. The Hill family’s attorney, William Walker, said they will once again be faced with a tremendous burden.

“We’re going to get another conviction,” Walker said. “My clients they have suffered tremendously. They have endured a lot more than most people can handle.”

A new court date for Fohrenkam has not been set.

Hill, a beloved student and star athlete at Minneapolis North, was shot and killed Feb. 9, 2022, during a chance encounter while he was walking to a bus stop. Hill passed a man on the street and appeared to brush shoulders with him before the man turned and shot Hill in the head.

The randomness of the shooting and the loss of Hill rocked the northside community.

Fohrenkam was allegedly searching for someone who had stolen his cellphone at knife point earlier that morning. He was charged with second-degree murder two weeks after the killing. He was sentenced in March 2023 to a 38½-year term after a jury took less than an hour to convict him following a four-day trial.

Fohrenkam appealed that conviction, arguing that several statements he gave to police investigating the shooting death of Hill were made after he should have been released from custody in Carlton County, where he was being held for an unrelated crime. Carlton County police had tipped off police in Hennepin County that Fohrenkam might be a suspect in the shooting and kept him in custody an hour past when he was supposed to be released.

A subsequent interview with Fohrenkam was used as evidence to convict him.

In May, the appeals panel explained its decision to reverse the conviction and send the case back to Hennepin County district court for trial. “Fohrenkam made his incriminating statements during this period of continued detention, which the state never justified. Fohrenkam’s statements must be suppressed as the product of an unlawful seizure.”

Moriarty said in a statement this week that Hill’s “tragic death due to gun violence shocked the entire community” and that her office will “prosecute Mr. Fohrenkam to hold him accountable for the murder.”

When the initial conviction was overturned, Chief Hennepin County Public Defender Michael Berger, whose office represented Fohrenkam during the trial, said the ruling was “directly related to his constitutional rights.” He also noted that in his 16 years of public defense it was “a very rare occurrence” to have a conviction like Fohrenkam’s reversed.

Fohrenkam, who said at trial that he was homeless, has a lengthy criminal history in Minnesota, including felony convictions for drug possession, gun possession, arson and robbery. He declined to testify.

Sacha Muller, a Minneapolis resident who served on the jury that convicted Fohrenkam, told the Minnesota Star Tribune after delivering the guilty verdict, “I don’t think there was any doubt. … The evidence was all clear.”

The appeals court ruled that at least some of that evidence was wrongfully used to convict Fohrenkam.

Walker, the attorney representing Hill’s family, said that although it’s disappointing that the family must sit through another trial, the ruling is “what makes America, America.”

“I understand where the judge is coming from,” Walker said. “It’s one of those cases that upsets people — people getting out on this, that and the other, on ‘technicalities,’ but they’re not technicalities, it’s the law.”