| Snow was falling at about 10:30 p.m. on the night of January 27, 1995, as 18-year-old Yolanda Leal pulled her car to a stop in the 3700 block of North Christiana Avenue in Chicago, Illinois. Her boyfriend, 18-year-old Luis Figueroa, was in the front passenger seat and a friend, 18-year-old Aurelia Mojica, was in the back seat. They had just returned from visiting Lake Michigan and had dropped off two friends.
Before they could drive off, a car passed them. A gunman fired three or four shots out of the passenger window. The first one shattered the driver’s side window. The second struck Leal, a senior at St. Benedict High School, in the head.
She was taken to Illinois Masonic Hospital where she held on for a week, but on February 3, 1995, she died.
Figueroa and Mojica told responding police officers that they did not see the gunman.
The day after the shooting, Chicago police Detective Reynaldo Guevara visited Leal’s father, Willie Leal, and told him that the gunman was 21-year-old Angel Diaz. Guevara urged Willie to convince Figueroa to meet with the police.
On January 29, 1995, as Yolanda lingered near death, Willie told Figueroa that Diaz was the gunman.
On February 5, 1995, two days after Yolanda died, Figueroa and Willie went to the police station where they met with Guevara and his partner, Detective Ernest Halvorsen. Guevara would later testify that he showed a photographic lineup to Figueroa, who identified Diaz as the gunman.
Later that day, Guevara and Halvorsen arrested Diaz and put him in a live lineup. The detectives reported that Figueroa again identified Diaz as the gunman.
Subsequently, Figueroa signed a statement saying that he was a member of Spanish Cobras street gang, and that Diaz was a member of the Latin Disciples, a rival gang. According to the statement, Figueroa had gone to elementary and high school together with Diaz and they both knew that the two gangs were warring with each other at the time.
In the statement, Figueroa said that earlier on the day of the shooting, there had been another shooting during which Figueroa had shot at members of Diaz’s gang. The shooting that killed Yolanda was apparently retaliation for that shooting, the statement said.
Figueroa testified before a Cook County grand jury and identified Diaz as the gunman, saying that he saw Diaz hanging out of the passenger side of a passing Pontiac Bonneville and firing a gun at Yolanda’s car.
Diaz was indicted on charges of first-degree murder for the death of Yolanda and two counts of aggravated discharge of a firearm for shooting at Figueroa and Mojica.
In January 1996, Diaz went to trial in Cook County Circuit Court and chose to have his case heard by a judge without a jury.
Figueroa testified and recanted his identification of Diaz. Under questioning by Assistant State’s Attorney Nicholas Ford, Diaz said that he did not see who fired the shots, and that he had told Guevara and Halvorsen that he did not know who the gunman was.
Figueroa said that when he was shown the photographic lineup, Guevara asked him if he recognized anyone. Figueroa said he recognized Diaz because he had known him for years. Figueroa said he did not identify Diaz as the gunman, only as a person he knew.
Asked why he picked Diaz out of the live lineup, Figueroa said, “I picked him out because the police told me to pick him out.”
Figueroa said the statement that he signed was false and had been written by Guevara. He said his testimony to the grand jury was false as well.
Ford then introduced Figueroa’s statement and grand jury testimony to impeach his trial testimony. Guevara testified and denied Figueroa’s claims.
On January 17, 1996, Cook County Circuit Court Judge Michael Toomin convicted Diaz of first-degree murder and two counts of aggravated discharge of a firearm. Diaz was sentenced to 30 years in prison on the murder charge and seven years on each of the firearms charges to be served consecutively, for a total sentence of 44 years.
In March 1997, the First District Illinois Appellate Court upheld the convictions. The court noted that at the time of the crime, the two gangs to which Figueroa and Diaz belonged were at war. “At the time of trial, the two gangs were no longer in conflict,” the court said. “We believe the court was justified in finding the witness' prior identifications and statements more reliable than those given at trial.”
Diaz filed a post-conviction petition and in 2002, his sentence was modified: one of the firearms charges was dismissed and the remaining sentences were merged to be served concurrently for a term of 30 years.
In 1999 and during his incarceration, Diaz obtained three affidavits from Figueroa, one handwritten and two typed. In the affidavits, Figueroa said that Guevara told Figueroa that he “wanted to get [Diaz],” that Guevara forced Figueroa to identify Diaz as Yolanda’s shooter, and that Guevara coerced and coached Figueroa to falsely implicate Diaz during his grand jury testimony. Despite obtaining these affidavits, Diaz was denied post-conviction relief.
Over the years, evidence of misconduct by Guevara and other police officers, including Halvorsen, began to emerge in other cases. In February 2004, Juan Johnson, whose 30-year prison sentence for a murder conviction had been vacated in 2002, was acquitted at a retrial. Evidence showed that the original three eyewitnesses who identified Johnson all recanted their testimony and said they had been coerced to falsely identify Johnson.
On January 10, 2010, Diaz was released on parole.
In October 2011, Jacques Rivera was exonerated of a murder based on evidence that Guevara and other officers buried exculpatory evidence and pressured a witness to falsely identify him as the gunman.
The exonerations kept on coming. On August 9, 2022, the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office Conviction Integrity Unit (CIU) agreed to vacate and then dismissed eight homicide convictions related to Guevara’s misconduct. By the end of that year, more than 30 men and women whose convictions were based on misconduct by Guevara and other detectives working with him had their cases vacated and dismissed.
In November 2022, Diaz’s attorney, Jon Erickson, filed a post-conviction petition seeking to vacate Diaz’s convictions. The petition listed a litany of misconduct by Guevara and Halvorsen. By then, Guevara had retired without being disciplined. Halvorsen died in 2020.
The petition detailed how Guevara and Halvorsen wrote their reports to say that Figueroa had told Willie Leal about Diaz when in fact Guevara had told Willie about Diaz in the hope that Willie would pressure Figueroa to identify Diaz. “Guevara flipped one critical fact; he changed the direction of the flow of the information regarding the identity of the shooter,” the petition said.
The petition also said that Guevara had threatened Figueroa with a contempt charge “if he did not cooperate with Guevara's scheme and sign a fabricated statement.”
On April 25, 2023, the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office consented to the vacatur of the convictions and dismissed the charges.
That same day, Erickson filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against the city of Chicago, Guevara, and Halvorsen’s estate seeking damages for Diaz’s wrongful conviction. He also petitioned for a certificate of innocence.
On October 31, 2023, Cook County Circuit Court Judge Erica Reddick granted Diaz a certificate of innocence. Erickson then filed a claim for compensation from the Illinois Court of Claims. On June 6, 2024, the Court of Claims awarded Diaz $225,820 and $52,150 to Erickson.
“Mr. Diaz is yet another victim of disgraced Chicago Police Detectives Reynaldo Guevara and Ernest Halvorsen,” the Court of Claims declared. “We cannot give Mr. Diaz his years lost. But we can award him damages and do so in the maximum allowed by law.”
– Maurice Possley
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