Minnesota Attorney General’s Office recommends overturning conviction in 2008 drive-by shooting

The Minnesota Attorney General’s Office Conviction Review Unit has concluded after a three-year investigation that a man sent to prison for life without parole in 2009 was wrongfully convicted and should be freed.

Edgar Barrientos was convicted by a Hennepin County jury on eight counts of first-degree murder in the drive-by shooting death of 18-year-old Jesse Leon Omar Mickelson, a student at Minneapolis Roosevelt High School who was playing football in the alley behind his house when he was killed in 2008. Barrientos was 26 years old when he was sentenced.

The shooting was believed to have stemmed from rival gang activity between the South Side Raza clique and the Sureños.

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.”

The Hennepin County Attorney’s Office will file a response to the CRU findings in court. Judge John McBride will review the filings and decide whether to grant post-conviction relief to Barrientos.

Julie Jonas, the former legal director at the Great North Innocence Project, has worked pro bono on the case for 11 years. She said in a statement that, “[Barrientos] is absolutely innocent. I am so grateful to the Attorney General and the Conviction Review Unit for their report recognizing this and supporting his release from prison.”

According to the report:

No physical evidence tied Barrientos to the crime. Surveillance video showed Barrientos with his girlfriend in a grocery store on the East Side of St. Paul 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 and police investigators manipulated to make him seem guilty.

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.”

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 unit 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.”

The CRU also listened to jail calls between Barrientos and his girlfriend and other family members that show him struggling to recreate what he was doing the night of the shooting, because it had been such a regular day. The prosecution used selective audio clips of those calls, without context, to say Barrientos was lying. The CRU report notes scientific evidence shows these kind of conversations are a common way for people to reconstruct memory, not evidence of guilt.

Hennepin County prosecutors also failed to give the defense crucial evidence in a timely manner. That included photo arrays where witnesses openly said other suspects looked like the shooter, not Barrientos. On top of that, a camera crew had been following police and prosecutors during the investigation for an A&E TV show called “The First 48,” which aired one month before the trial started and “almost certainly interfered with the fair administration of justice and contributed to Barrientos’s wrongful conviction.”

The two police investigators involved in the case were Robert Dale and Christopher Gaiters. Gaiters is currently one of the second-highest ranking officers of the Minneapolis Police Department, 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 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.