Amy Klobuchar's office successfully prosecuted a young defendant in a girl's death, sending him away for life. But an AP, apmreports investigation raises doubts.
Myon 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, stands for a photograph at the Stillwater Correctional Facility, Wednesday, Oct. 23, 2019, in Stillwater, Minn.
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.Election 2020 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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