Evaristo Salas was imprisoned aged 16 for murder. At age 42, he’s been exonerated.

"Every part of you is screaming. Because usually when someone is saying something about you that is not true, your first instinct is to defend yourself...

"I couldn't do that. I was scared because of where I was [a court room], and I knew that if I would have got up and started yelling, they would have tackled me or handcuffed me or sprayed me...

"I kind of had the sense to know, I had to just sit there and take it. But there was a part of me that thought 'they're going to get up there and they're going to look at me and realise they got the wrong person'... they got up there and said the complete opposite. 

"I was so in shock by the whole situation, I couldn't make sense of it."

***

These are Evaristo Salas Junior's words, as told to Australian podcaster Jack Laurence for his show One Minute Remaining.

They are words that were said down a phone-line from prison just last year, as Salas served his 26th year behind bars for a crime he didn't commit. 

It's a story that starts with a troubled childhood.

Aged seven, Salas was kicked out of the troubled home he lived in with his mother and siblings in Sunnyside, Washington State, because she decided she couldn't handle him anymore and surrendered him to foster care.

He ended up under his step-father's roof, which was a much more stable home. But his dad worked long hours, and left to his own devices, Salas found himself joining a local gang alongside many other young people in town. He was just 10. 

Listen to Evaristo Salas Junior's story on True Crime Converstions. Post continues after podcast.

It started with throwing rocks, graffiti and petty theft, but it evolved in a matter of years to knives, guns and the daily threat of being 'jumped'.

Salas found himself constantly being picked up for questioning by local cops – particularly one detective called Jim Rivard. 

Aged 14, Salas watched his best friend get fatally shot. He held him in his arms as he died.

A year later, he was arrested by Rivard for murder himself, accused of shooting a man called Jose Arreola in the passenger's seat of his truck. 

Within a few months, Salas had been convicted of murder based on the testimony of a police informant and the victim's girlfriend, Ofelia Gonzalez, who had been walking away from the vehicle with their son when Arreola was shot. She saw his shooter for a few seconds at most in the darkness, and after six months of failing to pick out anyone from a lineup, she picked Salas. Her descriptions were at odds with numerous other witnesses on the street, some of whom identified seeing an adult man.

Rivard took three polaroid photos of Salas while he was at the station on an unrelated matter. Image: Jack Laurence. 

The informant, William Bruhn, initially told the jury he heard Salas bragging about the murder and identified him after seeing some polaroids that Rivard had on his desk. They'd been taken by the detective at random, because Salas had been at the station on another much less serious matter.

Salas' defence told the jury the teenager was actually at a local store buying a burrito three kilometres across town when the shooting occurred. But despite the shop attendant placing him there just 20 minutes after the murder, she was discredited as a witness as she was a known drug user.

Salas was convicted of first-degree murder in December 1996, just two days after his 16th birthday. He was sentenced to 32 years and nine months, and sent straight to an adult men's prison.

"He was angry, he was scared, he had a lot of anger for many many years and that anger came out as violence inside jail. He got into a lot of fights, spent a lot of time in solitary confinement and his life became about the gangs. Outside of prison he was sorta mucking around with gangs... inside prison he became a fully fledged gang member," Laurence told Mamamia podcastTrue Crime Conversations.

Even as he went to trial, Salas assumed the truth would prevail.

"The worst part of it all was the emotional struggle of it all... the suffering someone feels when they're wrongfully convicted as a child is traumatic. When I was going through the trial, the fear that I felt... the anxiety I felt, was overwhelming," he told Laurence.

After two decades spent in and out of solitary confinement, Salas found himself drawn to Buddhism. He decided he wanted out of the gangs, so the authorities moved him to a quieter work camp style prison full of ex-gang members to serve out the final decade of his sentence.

"He became a firefighter, started studying, bought himself an iPhone for Dummies book and was getting himself ready to be back on the outside," said Laurence.

His fight to clear his name started to gain real momentum in 2018 after the airing of bombshell evidence in the documentary The Wrong Man.

Watch: The trailer for The Wrong Man. Post continues after video.

The show revealed Gonzalez only picked out Salas' photo after undergoing hypnosis. 

As Laurence explained, "Anyone who is placed under hypnosis, their testimony is null and void – it cannot be used. Especially if it's something they come up with after hypnosis, it's inadmissible in court. But this was never brought up in trial so her testimony was allowed."

The pickup truck that Arreola was shot in was also removed by Gonzalez before it could be processed by investigators. It was requested that she be charged with rendering criminal assistance, information that was never disclosed to Salas' defence.

Bruhn also told the documentary he lied when he identified Salas from the photos and that Rivard told him to lie. He'd been working for the detective since 1993 after being charged with possession of a weapon and drugs, and would get paid for each assignment he carried out.

He said Rivard told him to sign a statement incriminating Salas, but 'not to worry,' because Salas would plead guilty and the case wouldn't go to trial.

The revelations got the attention of the Washington Innocence Project, and in 2020, attorney Laura Shaver filed a motion for a new trial based on new evidence of innocence.

Salas finally got his day in court in August 2023, after 27 years behind bars, and during those court proceedings Rivard was questioned at length before admitting under oath that he provided money to Bruhn for his supposed tip-off about Salas.

"That right there was the turning point," said Laurence. "It had nothing to do with the monetary amount he was giving to him... it had to do with the fact that he'd openly admitted to lying on the stand."

After three days of testimony, Yakima County Prosecutor Joe Brusic dismissed the charges with prejudice, meaning they cannot be refiled, citing the state’s inability to prove the case beyond a reasonable doubt.

It was more than Salas had hoped for. He had thought the best-case scenario was a retrial. Instead, he was exonerated and released immediately.

After spending his whole life being told where to go and what to do, that statement alone was overwhelming.

That was just the start.

His first few weeks were full of 'firsts', like swimming for the first time since he was a teenager. Even sleeping in a normal 'big' bed again was a bizarre experience.

"He kept waking in the middle of the night because he couldn't touch the sides and it felt weird. The other thing that freaked him out was how dark it was and how silent it was," said Laurence.

The now 42-year-old has big plans for his future. He is planning a life with his fiancé (who he met while in prison) and stepson, and already has a few jobs lined up.

But as ready as he is to make up for lost time, trying to make it in the real world is proving challenging.

"Although I had always hoped for freedom to come and did my best to prepare for this day, there is only so much that can be learned while sitting behind a steel fence and reading books," he wrote in a GoFundMe. 

"Unfortunately for me I lack even the most basic understanding of the world around me. This places me at a serious disadvantage when it comes to the most basic and common aspect of society.

"I have confidence that given enough time, I will be able to overcome these obstacle [sic], but that confidence will not provide me with the funds I need to pay for the daily transportation cost that I am acquiring, or the cost of obtaining the documents that are essential for functioning in society, such as an ID card, a social security card, and driving license," he continued.

"This situation has been made worse by the fact that I was incarcerated at such a young age, meaning on paper, I essentially didn’t exist."

He's asking for money to give him a kick-start because, as he told Laurence, he's not going to fight the system for compensation. 

"The state he's in you can get compensation, but it's a lengthy legal battle and he has spent 27 years fighting for his freedom in court... he doesn't want to go to a courtroom for quite a while," Laurence told True Crime Conversations.

"At this stage in his life, he doesn't have it in him to go and fight anymore – he just wants to get on with his life, which is completely understandable."

You can find out more about Salas' GoFundMe, here.

Feature image: Jack Laurence/GoFundMe.