Washington man walks free after murder conviction dismissed

Evaristo Salas is a free man. At last.

During 26 years of imprisonment, Salas always maintained his innocence in the 1995 slaying of a Sunnyside man.

And on a sweltering Thursday afternoon, he walked out of the Airway Heights Correctional Facility in khakis, a gray T-shirt and a pair of black sneakers. Prison guards waved and wished him good luck as he walked about 50 yards to the visitors parking lot and into the arms of his older sister Debbie Salas. Then he hugged his attorney, Laura Shaver. And then he embraced his father, Ruben Alvarado.

They never gave up on him.

After three days of court hearings, Yakima County Prosecutor Joseph Brusic asked that Salas’ murder conviction be dismissed as new evidence emerged undermining the case. A judge agreed and exonerated Salas, now 42.

A jury convicted Salas in 1995 of shooting Jose Arreola twice in the head on a foggy November night. Salas was 15 at the time of the killing and 16 when he was imprisoned.

The case hinged on testimony of a paid police informant who has since recanted his testimony that Salas was bragging around town about the killing; Arreola’s girlfriend at the time, who reportedly told the victim’s mother that she was only able to identify Salas from a photo montage following hypnosis; and evidence that the pickup truck Arreola was shot in was removed from the scene and cleaned before it was processed for evidence.

Police insist hypnosis was never used. And the girlfriend also said she had not been hypnotized.

After all this time, Salas’ first request upon release was to go to McDonald’s. So the Salas family climbed into a Subaru and drove to the nearest restaurant, where he ordered a double quarter pounder with cheese, large fries and a vanilla milkshake.

At one point, he was handed a smart phone to make a call, but he didn’t know how to use it.

The family then decided to head back home to Yakima to a new life before one person cracked, “Let’s get out of here before they change their mind.”

The Salas murder case was featured in the “Wrong Man” documentary television series on STARZ in 2018.

Amid family and his attorneys, Salas remained pleasant. He has a little goatee and wears prison-issued glasses.

In his motion seeking to free Salas, Brusic acknowledged that an appeals court was likely to grant a new trial, and that the case “has weakened considerably, beyond what would normally be expected with the passage of over 25 years since the case was originally prosecuted,” the Yakima-Herald reported.

He said the decision was based on the state’s inability to prove the case today.

“The nature of my decision wasn’t based on this defendant’s innocence,” Brusic told the Herald-Republic. “I’m not saying he was innocent.”

Shaver and John Marlow, of the Washington Innocence Project, argued that investigators withheld evidence and information.

“It’s incredibly hard to represent people who have been wrongfully convicted,” Shaver said. “For six years, I lived and breathed through ups and downs to right this wrong that robbed this 15-year-old kid of his entire future.”

Based on reporting from The Spokesman-Review and Yakima Herald-Republic.