In Klobuchar's past, questions about a teen jailed for life
1 / 16Klobuchar Juvenile LiferMyon Burrell, convicted in the murder of Tyesha Edwards, an 11-year-old girl pierced in the heart by a stray bullet in 2002 while doing homework at her family's dining room table, walks back to his cellblock at the Stillwater Correctional Facility, Wednesday, Oct. 23, 2019, in Stillwater, Minn.
With no other eyewitnesses, police turned to multiple jailhouse snitches. 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.
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. While campaigning to be the top prosecutor in Minnesota’s most populous county in 1998, Klobuchar advocated for harsher penalties for juvenile offenders.
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’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.
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.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.
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. 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.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.
“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 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.
Evans remembers worrying that Burrell would get caught up in a police sweep and told him he better leave. 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.
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