MAN WANTS NAME CLEARED IN CASE INVOLVING GUEVARA
It was June 12, 1991, and the city was about to be enveloped in the madness of winning its first NBA championship.
An insanity of a very different sort would soon take hold of 15-year-old Demetrius Johnson’s life, he says, after he was charged with a murder that occurred in Wicker Park that same night.
“My world was rocked. Being 15 [and] getting grabbed for something I knew nothing about, I’m thinking it’s a joke or something,” Johnson, now 44, said Wednesday.
Johnson was convicted of murder and spent 12oe years in prison before being released in 2004. He says he was wrongly accused and framed by now-retired Chicago police Det. Reynaldo Guevara.
Dozens of defendants have claimed they were victims of similar frame-ups by Guevara, and Johnson’s attorney, Joshua Tepfer, has represented many of them.
But Wednesday, Tepfer described the evidence in Johnson’s case as “nothing short of extraordinary.”
For the first time, Tepfer said, he has written proof of the sorts of things Johnson and others have been saying about Guevara: a report of a police lineup soon after the shooting that showed someone other than Johnson was identified as the man who shot Edwin Fred near North Avenue and Claremont Avenue in 1991.
A different suspect was arrested the night of the shooting and was included in an original lineup conducted by Guevara, according to Johnson’s lawsuit. Johnson, arrested about six weeks after the slaying, was not in that original lineup, according to his attorney.
Guevara was the detective assigned to investigate the murder. For reasons that remain unclear, the police lineup report remained hidden, Tepfer said, until it surfaced during a federal civil trial last year. Tepfer also said Guevara lied about the report during Johnson’s criminal trial.
“That information was hidden from everyone in the system. The only person, seemingly, [who] actually knew the truth [was] Reynaldo Guevara,” Tepfer said Wednesday, speaking to reporters at the George Leighton Criminal Courthouse. “The results were incomprehensible for [Johnson] . . . . He was 15 years old and placed on trial for a murder he did not commit.”
Based in large part on the hidden police lineup report, Johnson is trying to get his conviction overturned. Tepfer appeared briefly in court on the issue Wednesday, but the case was postponed until Oct. 8 to give prosecutors time to review the old case file.
Johnson has argued he was nowhere near the site of the murder the night it occurred. He, like much of the rest of the city, was watching the Bulls game, he says.
But for years, he felt like no one was listening.
“I was a cry in the dark for a long time,” he said Wednesday, standing beside his attorney in the courthouse lobby.
“I never thought this moment would happen. I thought I had to accept that.”