GIST: "It was a prime-time moment for Amy Klobuchar. Standing
in the glare of television lights at a Democratic presidential debate
last fall, she was asked about her years as a top Minnesota prosecutor
and allegations she was not committed to racial justice. “That’s not my record,” she said, staring into the camera. Yes,
she was tough on crime, Klobuchar said, but the African American
community was angry about losing kids to gun violence. And she
responded. She told a story that she has cited throughout her
political career, including during her 2006 campaign for the Senate: A
little girl was killed by a stray bullet while doing homework at her
dining room table in 2002. And it was Klobuchar’s office that put Tyesha
Edwards’ killer — a black teen — behind bars for life. But what if Myon Burrell is innocent? An
Associated Press investigation into the 17-year-old case uncovered new
evidence and myriad inconsistencies, raising questions about whether the
teen was wrongfully convicted. The AP reviewed more than a
thousand pages of police records, court transcripts and interrogation
tapes, and interviewed dozens of inmates, witnesses, family members,
former gang leaders, lawyers and criminal justice experts. The
case relied heavily on a teen rival of Burrell’s who gave conflicting
accounts when identifying the shooter, who was largely obscured behind a
wall 120 feet away. With no other eyewitnesses, police turned to
multiple jailhouse informants. Some have since recanted, saying they
were coached or coerced. Others were given reduced time, raising
questions about their credibility. And the lead homicide detective
offered “major dollars” for names, even if it was hearsay. There
was no gun, fingerprints or DNA. Alibis were never seriously pursued.
Key evidence has gone missing or was never obtained, including a
convenience store surveillance tape that Burrell and others say would
have cleared him. Burrell, now 33, has maintained his innocence, rejecting all plea deals. His co-defendants, meanwhile, have admitted their part in Tyesha’s death. Burrell, they say, was not even there. For
years, one of them — Ike Tyson — has insisted he was actually the
gunman. Police and prosecutors refused to believe him, pointing to the
contradictory accounts in the early days of the investigation. Now, he
swears he was just trying to get police off his back.
“I already
shot an innocent girl,” said Tyson, who is serving a 45-year sentence.
“Now an innocent guy — at the time he was a kid — is locked up for
something he didn’t do. So, it’s like I’m carrying two burdens.”
Asked
for comment on the case, a Klobuchar campaign spokesperson said Burrell
was tried and convicted of Tyesha’s murder twice, and the second trial
occurred when Klobuchar was no longer the Hennepin County attorney. If
there was new evidence, she said, it should be immediately reviewed by
the court. Minneapolis police declined to comment for this story.
Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman’s office said it’s confident the
correct person was convicted but it’s always open to reviewing new
evidence. Questions about the case come at a difficult time, as
Klobuchar and other presidential hopefuls, including Joe Biden and
Michael Bloomberg, face scrutiny for their records on racial justice in
the 1990s and early 2000s. Black and brown communities were being
decimated by the war on drugs, and the since-discredited
“super-predator” theory prevailed, predicting that droves of poor,
fatherless young men devoid of moral conscience would wreak havoc in
their neighborhoods. Democrats joined Republicans in supporting
harsher policing and tougher sentencing, leading to the highest
incarceration rates in the nation’s history. Some
politicians have tried to distance themselves from the period’s
perceived excesses. In January, for instance, Klobuchar returned a
$1,000 campaign donation from Linda Fairstein, who prosecuted New York’s
infamous Central Park Five, four black teens and one Hispanic who were
later exonerated in the rape of a white jogger in 1989. While
campaigning to be the top prosecutor in Minnesota’s most populous county
in 1998, Klobuchar advocated for harsher penalties for juvenile
offenders. In Minnesota, allegations of gang affiliation or motive played on the fears of mostly white jurors and led to harsher sentences. “If
you were young and black, and your case was tied to gangs or drugs, it
was an especially scary time,” said Mary Moriarty, a public defender in
Hennepin County for nearly three decades. “I do firmly believe that
there were people convicted of crimes that they did not do.” She said that the murder Burrell went down for was problematic from the start. “In
the case of Myon Burrell — where you had a really high-profile shooting
of an innocent girl and you put a lot of pressure on the system to get
someone to be responsible for that — I think a lot of corners were
probably cut.” In Minneapolis, soaring homicides had briefly
earned the city the grim nickname “Murderapolis.” By the time Klobuchar
took office in 1999, crime rates had started to drop. But tensions
remained high. Tyesha’s death set off an uproar. Police pulled out all stops, deploying more than 40 officers and gang task force members. Despite the lack of physical evidence, they all but wrapped up their case against Burrell in four days. Ike
Tyson, 21, and Hans Williams, 23, were easy. Several people saw them
roll by in their car minutes before the attack, and a 911 tip from one
of their girlfriends helped seal the deal. Burrell, then 16, was
arrested only after a tip from an often-used jailhouse informant. During
his lengthy legal process, Burrell hired and fired six attorneys as
they failed to cross-examine witnesses, pursue alibis or challenge
glaring irregularities in the investigation.
In the end, his sentence stuck: Natural life in prison. Assistant
County Attorney Jean Burdorf, the only prosecutor left who was directly
involved in the case, insists that Burrell received justice. “I’ll
tell you what I’ve told a lot of people over the years. I have a lot of
confidence in Minnesota's justice system,” she said. “Certainly, he's been through the court process, and his conviction has remained intact.”
For
years, many caught up in Burrell’s case have insisted police got the
wrong person. Some say they initially lied to protect themselves or
their friends. Others say they told police what they wanted to hear to
get deals on their own sentences or to punish a rival. Even though
some have changed their stories more than once, they insist they are
now telling the truth because they have nothing to gain. They say it’s
the system that refuses to listen. Burrell’s co-defendants were
members of the Tyson Mob and the Vice Lords. They say drugs and guns
were a way of life in their rough neighborhood. But the shooting wasn’t
gang warfare as police claimed, they insisted — it was personal. Tyson
said he and Williams were driving in south Minneapolis when they
spotted a group of guys hanging out. Among them was 17-year-old Timmy
Oliver, a member of the rival Gangster Disciples, who had menacingly
waved a gun at them weeks earlier. The pair slowed down, scowled
at Oliver, then continued on. They picked up an unidentified
acquaintance, got a gun and headed back. Tyson said it was his idea, and
the intention was to scare Oliver, not to kill him. The three
parked a block away, with Williams waiting in the driver’s seat for a
quick getaway. Tyson and the third man jumped out, cutting through an
alley and ducking between houses. Shielded by a wall, Tyson said he
could clearly see Oliver standing in the yard across the street with his
back turned. He
said he fired off eight rounds, the last few as he was running backward
toward the car. It wasn’t until later that evening that he learned one
of his bullets killed Tyesha in the house next door. “There was only one weapon, one set of shells,” said Tyson. “I’m the one that did this. I did this.” Soon
after the shooting, he was telling friends, his attorney, fellow
inmates and even a prison guard that Burrell was not at the scene, court
records show. But he said his lawyer told him he’d never see the
outside of a prison unless he implicated the youth. Eventually he
buckled, but only after being promised his plea would not be used
against Burrell. Tyson doesn’t want to name the other man who was
with him, saying he doesn’t want to pull in a person who was only
peripherally involved. The getaway driver, Hans Williams, did
identify a third man — by his full name and in a photo lineup. Police
initially said they didn’t want to “muddy up the case” with an
unverified name, later that they didn’t believe him. They made no real
effort to follow up. After getting a denial from the suspect in 2005,
the chief homicide detective “permanently checked out” their recorded
conversation and gave it to the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office. It
has since gone missing. The
gun was never recovered and officers said prints on the magazine and
the car were not sufficient for identification. Ballistic tests on
Tyson’s jacket were not carried out to verify claims that he was the
gunman. The killing of Tyesha Edwards topped television news that night. That’s
how a prison inmate first heard about it. Desperate to get money or
time cut off his own sentence, he quickly reached out to Oliver, a
friend and fellow gang member. Minutes later, the often-used informant
gave the cops Burrell’s name, helping steer their investigation, the AP
found. Oliver, who had his own troubles with the law, didn’t go to
police that day, as he promised. He said one of the bullets had pierced
his pants, so he threw them away and went to buy a new pair. But
three days later, he was picked up by officers following another,
unrelated shooting. Police now had their sole eyewitness in custody,
interviewing him for more than eight hours. Though recordings are
mandated by law, the interrogation was not recorded. Police later said
they “made a mistake.” Well after midnight, Oliver signed a
statement saying he saw Burrell standing across the street in an open
lot between two houses, shooting until he emptied his weapon. Later,
Oliver’s story would change. He said his diminutive, 5-foot-3 rival was
firing from behind a 5-foot wall, 120 feet away, but that his hooded
face was still clearly recognizable. Oliver’s best friend, Antoine Williams, said when the gunfire stopped, he ran to his side.
“I
asked Timmy at the time, ‘Who, who did the shooting?’” Antoine Williams
recalled in a recorded interview with a private investigator hired by
one of Burrell’s attorneys. “He said, ‘I couldn’t see where it was
coming from.’” He later asked Oliver — who died in a shooting in 2003 — why he’d lie to police. Antoine
Williams said Oliver told him police threatened him. “[They] kinda put
it like, ‘It was your fault because you were there. You were the
intended target.’” With a new trial date approaching and their key
witness, Oliver, gone to the grave, the police turned to informants in
the jails and prisons. Some were offered generous sentence reductions,
cash and other deals for those willing to come forward with a story
about what happened in the shooting, even if it wasn’t true, inmates
said. There were at least seven jailhouse informants, two of whom
had coughed up information in more than a dozen other cases. Another
went by 29 different aliases.
Terry Arrington, a member of a rival gang, was among those who talked. He
said he was approached by four officers and the prosecutor at a federal
correctional facility where he faced 19 years in prison and was told he
could knock that down to three if he was willing to cooperate. He
said he knew nothing about the case: “They basically brought me through
what to say. Before I went before the grand jury, they brought me in a
room and said … ‘when you get in, hit on this, hit on this.’ I was still
young and I had fresh kids that I was trying to get home to, so I did
what they asked.” He got his deal, but now lives with that burden. “Like,
I don’t wish jail on nobody,” he said, now back in prison at Rush City
correctional facility on other charges. “Even though we was enemies ...
that’s still a man. ... So it really bothers me right now.” He
says at least three other men who were locked up with him in the same
unit also cut deals with police. One other has recanted. As far as Arrington knows, “everybody told a lie to get time cut.”
Like
many young black men in his neighborhood, Burrell’s distrust of police
came early. He was 12 when a drug addict drew a switchblade, slashing
his sister in the hand and drawing blood. His mom called the police, but
they assumed the boy was the assailant, threw him up against a sharp
fence before hauling him to the station in cuffs. Only then did they
realize they had the wrong person.
Soon after, he was caught
selling drugs and hanging out with the wrong crowd. Worried he might end
up in jail, like his dad and oldest brother, his mother packed up the
family and moved to Bemidji, a small city 3 1/2 hours away. But the
13-year-old struggled to fit in and found himself coming back to the
Twin Cities often. In 2002, the family traveled to Minneapolis to spend Thanksgiving with his grandmother. Less than 24 hours later, Tyesha was dead and police were desperate to find her killer.
They decided early on it was Burrell, though he had not had any serious brushes with the law.In
a video taken by police hours before his arrest, the chief homicide
detective, Sgt. Richard Zimmerman, is seen talking to man brought to the
station following another shooting. The officer says he is ready to pay
“major dollars” for information about Tyesha’s murder — even if it’s
just street chatter.
“Hearsay is still worth something to me,”
Zimmerman tells the man, offering $500 a name. “Sometimes ... you get
hearsay here, hearsay there. Sometimes it’s like a jigsaw puzzle, things
come together, you know what I mean?” The man gave up three names, but Zimmerman paid for just one: Burrell’s. The
afternoon of the shooting, Burrell said, he was playing video games
with a group at his friend’s house. Hungry, they decided to walk to
Portland Market on 38th Street. When they didn’t see anything they
liked, they continued on to Cup Foods, just a few hundred yards from
Tyesha’s house. During his nearly three-hour interrogation,
Burrell identified two people he saw at Cup Foods — Latosha Evans and
his friend, Donnell Jones. Police never followed up. But Evans and
Jones told the AP they were with Burrell at Cup Foods, either as shots
were fired or immediately after, when sirens were blaring. Though
the store itself was under police surveillance because of allegations of
drug dealing and weapons sales, it appears officers never recovered
video surveillance tapes. Evans remembers worrying that Burrell would get caught up in a police sweep and told him he better leave.
“I’d hate to you get blamed for this,’” she remembers telling him. “I hugged him and he went his way.” Burrell was picked up four days later. He was not in a gang database, and had never been tied to a serious crime. During
the interrogation, he never asked for an attorney, but he did ask for
his mother 13 times. Each time he was told, “no, not now,” though she
was in a room next door. A police officer told him that he was a
huge disappointment to his mother, and that she had told officers she
thought he was capable of the shooting. “Are you kidding?” Burrell responded. “That’s a lie. ... That’s not truthful. ... I don’t believe that.” Meanwhile,
officers told his mother, falsely, that they had several eyewitnesses
saying Burrell was the one and only shooter. Sinking into tears, she
asked again and again to see him. “Not yet,” they said. One month
later, the day before Burrell’s indictment, his mother was driving back
to Bemidji after a prison visit. She swerved off the road, crashing into
a tree. The car burst into flames, killing her. Klobuchar denied Burrell’s request to go to his mother’s funeral. He was, she said, a threat to society. Burrell
has spent most of his life in prison. He says he believes authorities
knew that he was innocent all along: “They just didn’t feel like my life
was worth living.” If he had told police he was there, but had
been an unwilling participant, as officers seemed to want, his nightmare
might have been over by now. But he says he wants justice not just for
himself, but for Tyesha. He could never admit to a crime he didn’t
commit, he says. “That’s something I struggle with to this day,
you know. I could (have) been home,” said Burrell. “At least I can look
in the mirror and I can still be proud of who I see looking back.""
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