The Clock Starts Ticking

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1:01That's all. Get runway ready for The Devil Wears Prada 2 on Disney Plus and Hulu. Rated PG-13.

1:12Who was Jesse Michelson? Jesse was an 18-year-old high school kid. He was an aspiring musician. He was kind of getting a little rap career off the ground. He was characterized by some of the detectives who wound up investigating what happened as just a pretty good kid. Jesse Michelson lived on the south side of Minneapolis with his family. On October 11, 2008, his family was throwing a party for his cousin's 13th birthday. A bunch of the kids were playing at the top of the alley behind his house, throwing a football around. Across the alley from Jesse's family's house was the house of a high school classmate of Jesse's, somebody he recognized.

2:00Jessica Lessenhop is a reporter for ProPublica. He sees this person he knows from high school. He goes over there, he crosses the alley to go say hi. His classmate was with some friends. A car then turned into the alley. It stopped in front of them. And then a passenger in the back seat reached his arm out of the window and started shooting. One person was shot in the leg, and Jesse was shot twice. One of the bullets hit him in the heart. A couple hours later, the homicide detectives from the Minneapolis Police Department arrived. We know what happened next because they were being followed by a reality television show.

2:41Here's how the episode began.

2:47For homicide detectives, the clock starts ticking the moment they are called. Their chance of solving a murder is cut in half. if they don't get a lead within the first 48 hours. The show was called The First 48. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal.

3:22Each episode typically centers around one or two homicide investigations. And sort of by the end of the episode, typically in many of the episodes, there is some kind of a resolution. Someone has been arrested. Someone has confessed. And so in that way, it is different than the sort of run-and-gun street cops. It's, you know, these more elite homicide detectives who are trying to, you know, solve a mystery. It's a very popular show. It's been on for 20 years, which is an incredibly long run for a television show. And police departments agree to this, agree to be followed around. Yeah, it's an agreement made between the show and the police department.

4:05The police department signs a contract with the show. The contract gives the show a lot of freedom. They're allowed to be in the police department building. They're allowed to ride around in police vehicles. They're allowed to be on the scene of homicides, crime scenes that are very active, that things have just happened. People have just died. those camera people are allowed to get this really up-close glimpse of investigations that typically the public is not allowed to see. Over the course of the show, the First 48 has entered into agreements with over 20 cities. They started filming with the Minneapolis Police Department in 2007, three years after the show first aired.

4:54And when Sergeant Robert Dale began investigating Jesse Michelson's murder, a camera crew was in the car with him. Sergeant Dale was new to the homicide unit he had joined just six months earlier. This is my first homicide investigation in which I'm one of the lead investigators. Admittedly, I'm a bit anxious about it, but at the same time, I'm also eager to get started with the investigation. In the episode, you can see Sergeant Dale arriving at the scene, where he meets with the other investigator, Sergeant Christopher Gators. The episode shows clips from the crime scene. It's roped off with caution tape.

5:37There's a shot of a football in the grass. Jesse's body is blurred out. They zoom in on his shoes. There's, you know, people taking crime scene photos. They interview Jesse's family, and that's kind of how the investigation kicks off. Here's Sergeant Gators. Looks like it's a drive-by with some kids who are playing football out on the street. Sergeant Gators was also new to the Homicide Division. He'd recently transferred from the gang unit. Sergeant Dale is shown interviewing the woman who called 911, Jessie's cousin She says she saw the car They offer their condolences to the family And eventually head back to the station to interview potential witnesses about the shooting The camera crew films Sergeant Dale as he drives He talks to them about what he thinks might have happened The neighborhood has seen an increase in gang activity You know, this was a drive-by shooting.

6:42Bullets flying everywhere. After the detectives interview the witnesses, the narrator on the show announces that no one was able to identify the shooter. We believe that this might be gang-related, and that could be the reason why they might be scared to come forward. We'll give the kids a little time for it to sink in, that Jesse's actually dead. But, you know, maybe then they'll be more open to telling us what happened.

7:11There's a 48-hour countdown clock in the corner of the screen. When there are just under 28 hours left, the detectives pay a visit to Jesse's father. He was such a good kid, he didn't get into trouble. He hung out and did positive things, and I was very proud of him. You shouldn't have to bury your kids.

7:38I can promise you this, we're going to work on it very hard, okay? Make sure justice is served, okay? Thank you. The next day, with less than five hours left on the countdown clock, Sergeant Dale and Sergeant Gators are shown interviewing one of the witnesses again. They press him for more information. After a back and forth, the witness says that the shooter was someone named Smokey. With less than two hours left on the 48-hour countdown, the investigators start following this new lead. Detective Gator says, let me call my friend over in the gang unit and see if he knows any Smokies. And they pull up, you know, every Smokie that they can find in that database.

8:25Hey, question for you. Smokey, did that ring a bell with you? You know his real name by chance?

8:40Edgar Barrientos? All right, thanks, brother. All right. Sergeant Dale and Sergeant Gators get a photo of Edgar Barrientos. And with less than 15 minutes left on the clock, they present a lineup to the witness. He identifies Edgar Barrientos as the shooter. With just minutes to spare, Sergeant Gators makes a declaration. Looks like we have our guy, so we're very happy about that. The police arrest Edgar and bring him in for questioning. I'm excited. It's the best part of the job, interviewing suspects. They interrogate him for many, many, many hours. he denies the whole time that he had anything to do with it.

9:28They lean on him very, very hard. And he says, you know, I had nothing to do with this, with Jesse's death. And then he also keeps saying, you know, I was in the suburbs. I was in Maplewood all weekend. Smokey says he was out of town staying with a family friend at the time of the murder. Well, she can tell you I was there all day. Part of his problem, though, was that his memory was a little shaky. You know, obviously it was consistent that he hadn't had anything to do with this. But then when he couldn't precisely remember where he was at every point in time, that wound up being a problem for him later on.

10:04The detectives wound up interpreting that as being evasive and untruthful. And then you see the detectives leave the room and say, well, we're going to make a phone call. We're going to call the woman he was staying with, this, quote, family friend, and ask her if he was really there the whole weekend. It's not looking so good for Smokey. She said that he was there the whole time, except for a four-hour span, which coincides with the time of the murder. And she also believes that he was in Minneapolis at that time. Edgar says he's innocent. The episode cuts to him being handcuffed. The show implies that with this single phone call, Edgar's alibi has completely fallen apart.

10:49You know, it just seems so clear-cut. It seems very definitive that they've obviously got the right person here. Then, Sergeant Dale and Sergeant Gators go to see Jesse Michelson's family. We wanted to let you know before y 'all wake up tomorrow and see it on the morning news. We have made an arrest. Yes. Okay? Thank you.

11:14You know, maybe a little bit of closure here. but just trying to keep in mind that there is still some work to be done here. So we can just hold steady. Right. Hold steady. Thanks a lot, man. Thanks a lot. The episode aired in April of 2009, a month before Edgar's trial. What did you think about the episode with Jesse and Edgar? It was a complete misrepresentation of what happened. And a dangerous one.

11:53We'll be right back. To listen without ads, join Criminal Plus.

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13:09Support for this show comes from Odoo. Running a business is hard enough, so why make it harder with a dozen different apps that don't talk to each other? Introducing Odoo. It's the only business software you'll ever need. It's an all-in-one, fully integrated platform that makes your work easier. CRM, accounting, inventory, e-commerce, and more. And the best part? Odoo replaces multiple expensive platforms for a fraction of the cost. That's why over thousands of businesses have made the switch. So why not you? Try Odoo for free at odoo.com. That's O-D-O-O dot com.

13:50Carrie Sperling is an assistant attorney general at the Minnesota Attorney General's office. She started looking into Edgar Barrientos Quintana's case in 2021. One of the first things she did was watch the first 48 episode. I mean, how close would you say the episode was to the reality of the investigation? Well, I mean, let's start with the premise of the first 48. Between the time that the crime occurred and when Barrientos was actually arrested was 10 days, not 48 hours. and this 48-hour model that the first 48 has, I guess it's good TV, you know, and it fits their title and their premise. But nothing about the case fit that premise.

14:42One significant thing that's missing from the first 48 episode is that every witness who saw the shooter the day of the shooting, described him as bald. Barrientos at the time had a full head of dark hair. So when something like that doesn't fit, you have to ask yourself, well, is there more that doesn't fit? In the lineup where Edgar Barrientos had been identified as the shooter, investigators used an old photo of him. In it, he had a shaved head. The episode also didn't mention that at least some of the people who were at the scene on the day of the shooting were affiliated with a gang clique called Southside Raza.

15:32Jesse's classmate, who he had recognized the day of the birthday party, was the leader of the Southside Raza, a clique within a gang called Serenios 13. He was 16 years old and went by the name Puppet. Puppet had formed the Southside Raza without permission and was fighting with other groups in Minneapolis because of it. Just five months before Jesse was killed, Puppet had been shot in the same place. Sergeant Dale and Sergeant Gators started their investigation focusing on Puppet and his friends. They were questioned for hours, none of which was mentioned in the episode. Puppet told detectives that he'd heard that the shooter was a rival gang member named Sharky and that he fit the description witnesses gave.

16:23He was bald. The day after Jesse was killed, someone on the police force suggested another name, a Serenios gang member nicknamed Sandwich. Sandwich lived a block away from where the shooting happened. Sergeant Dale and Sergeant Gators kept interrogating the Southside Raza members and Puppet named another suspect, someone named Smokey. Then Puppet's brother told Sergeant Gators that Smokey was the one who had been in the backseat of the car that day and shot Jesse. Did the detectives follow up on any other leads, you know, this guy Sandwich or Sharky? Yeah, so they did do a lot of interviewing and talking to people.

17:09Sharky became a really important witness to the crime. I would argue that you could almost see him as the star witness of the ultimate trial against Edgar. Sergeant Dale and Sergeant Gators interviewed Sharky three times. In the first interview, he said he hadn't heard that Edgar was involved. In the second interview, they told him he could either be a witness or a suspect. If he was a suspect, he could spend a lot of time in prison. But if he was just riding in the car and saw the shooting, they would help him out. In the third interview, Sharkey said he had been in the back seat and that Smokey was the shooter.

17:56At some point, the detectives really did seem to make up their mind that, hey, all roads lead to Smokey, and so we're just going to use Sharky as sort of a witness and someone who's going to help us convict Smokey. He was the only person who said, I was in the car, I saw Edgar do it with my own eyes. Another problem that Carrie Sperling found was that the detectives had discounted Edgar Barrientos' alibi. Edgar had told detectives that he'd been in the suburbs all weekend, with someone who the First 48's narrator described as a family friend. But his family friend was actually his girlfriend. Her name was Itzel, and she'd also been involved with Puppet.

18:45Recordings of calls made in jail from Edgar to Itzel showed they were trying to remember what they did on the day of the shooting. Itzel remembered that they had gone to Cub Foods that evening, a grocery store, to pick up limes for her mother. Edgar asked his attorney to get video footage from the grocery store. The video placed Edgar and Itzel in the grocery store at 6.20 p.m., about half an hour before the shooting. They didn't get the video until months later, And the video at Cub Foods is so essential because not only does it show him with Itzel and with, you know, a full set of hair, but just walking slowly, laughing, joking, it looks like, you know, just kind of walking out of the store with a bag of limes.

19:44and to think that he goes from there, changes clothes, dumps his girlfriend without a ride home and takes off as fast as possible to South Minneapolis to carry out a shooting. It's just doesn't fit. It doesn't fit the scene at all. The detectives hadn't requested the grocery store video footage during their initial investigation. Like, the whole premise of the first 48 is that all this stuff is happening in the early days of this investigation. And those are the most important days, those are the most important hours. And in a way, that kind of discounts everything that you're going to find out afterwards, which sometimes are going to be pieces of evidence that take a while to develop, such as security camera footage.

20:34What Edgar's case sort of illustrates is that, you know, a really important key piece of evidence may emerge months later. The trial was scheduled for May of 2009. At this point, the investigation had no physical evidence connecting Edgar to the crime. The murder weapon had never been found. At the trial, prosecutors argued that Edgar had shot at Puppet and his friends because they were part of a rival gang, and also because his girlfriend, Itzel, had been spending time with Puppet. What did the defense say happened? Well, that's one of the problems in this case. The defense really dropped the ball.

21:18They didn't seem to have investigated the case. You could tell reading the transcripts that they were caught off their feet many, many times in trial. They didn't really have a strategy. They just were kind of absent. It's a serious, serious case, and he had really just no representation. After three days of deliberation, the jury found Edgar Barrientos guilty. He was sentenced to life without parole.

21:58We'll be right back.

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23:17Carrie Sperling had been reinvestigating Edgar Barrientos' case for Minnesota's Conviction Review Unit, a unit that looks into the cases of people who claim they were wrongfully convicted. And when you looked at his case, how long had he been in prison for? He had been in prison for about 12 years, I think. Carrie Sperling and her team put together a report. It was 180 pages. It listed a number of issues with the investigation and trial. One was that the First 48 had been filming during the investigation, and that they had aired Edgar Barrientos' episode before his trial. The First 48 set up a narrative that the prosecutor really had to follow, because it was aired.

24:20And so you have this trial where they're having to sort of fit everything into this narrative that played on TV just weeks before the trial, because presenting it any other way would call into question the entire investigation. It airing before trial was sort of a huge problem, kind of for everybody. Jessica Lessenhop. It wasn't just a problem for Edgar. The prosecution was actually very dismayed, it turned out. It caused all kinds of problems for them. And we know that because the Conviction Review Unit was able to obtain a memo that they wrote where they outlined a bunch of different issues with the episode coming out ahead of the trial.

25:04For instance, they had a witness they intended to put on the stand. That witness saw clips of the show and got so scared that he ran away from home and left a note for his parents saying, I'm too scared. And when they managed to track him down and arrest him, he still refused to cooperate because of the effect of just seeing like, oh, my God, like this case is getting so much publicity. This is really, it's really scary for me. And so he wound up not testifying. In their memo about the episode, prosecutors also mentioned that the show had presented footage of the investigation out of order, which distorted how the investigation unfolded.

25:43And they decided not to have Sergeant Dale testify, quote, in hopes of avoiding cross-examination that would have been damaging to our case. Carrie Sperling's report added that parts of the episode had also been staged. they could not put on the lead detective, couldn't put him on the stand at trial because he had staged certain things in the first 48 and had read a script that they provided him for part of it. And the prosecutors felt like, you know, he could be impeached on that. But what happened as a result is they put on the other investigator who often wasn't there, like for particular interviews, or wasn't the one doing the things that he said he was doing at trial.

26:42And the defense didn't do a good job of making this jury question, why wouldn't the lead investigator who did this be here testifying before you? or objecting to the things that the other detective did that he didn't really do. And so it was damaging in so many ways. You know, it had the potential to be a real problem on cross-examination if you have a detective saying, oh yeah, and also a television producer was telling me what to do while I was investigating this case. So normally you would have someone like Sergeant Dale testify at trial, and he didn't. And he didn't testify at trial directly because of the first 48 and concerns about whether or not they had, again, quote, scripted things for him to say.