Antonio McDowell was among more than 40 men and women who were wrongly convicted based on misconduct by Chicago police detective Reynaldo Guevara and his partner, Ernest Halvorsen, and in some cases other detectives. The misconduct included coercing false confessions through violence and coercing false identifications from witnesses. McDowell was exonerated of two separate crimes —murder and robbery. A list of these exonerees is here.
At about 3 p.m. on December 21, 1996, 41-year-old Mario Castro pulled into the alley behind his Chicago home, returning from a hardware store where he purchased items to do some plumbing repairs. Neighbors and family members heard a gunshot and a man scream. Castro’s nephew, Alberto Varela, looked out a window and saw Castro on the ground. A Black man was rifling Castro’s pants pockets.
Varela ran out and confronted the man. Varela punched him in the face, but backed off when the man pulled out a gun and shot at him. The bullet missed and the man fled on foot. Castro’s brother-in-law, Juan Medina, had heard the gunshots as well. When he looked out a window, he briefly saw the gunman.
Castro died of a gunshot wound to the back.
Varela said the gunman was a Black man who weighed 125 pounds and had a medium complexion.
About 30 minutes later, Ruth Morales-Santana was carjacked at gunpoint a few blocks away. She said the gunman, who also took her purse, was a 28-year-old Black man with a medium complexion.
Police suspected that the same person had committed both crimes.
Detectives Reynaldo Guevara and his partner, Ernest Halvorsen, were assigned to investigate the crimes. Varela looked through photographs of robbery offenders, but did not make any identification. He helped create a composite sketch, though the drawing later disappeared from the police files.
The crimes were still unsolved on July 10, 1997, when 21-year-old Antonio McDowell was shot in the hand. When interviewed by police, McDowell said he did not see who shot him. McDowell later said that Guevara wanted him to identify a particular suspect as the gunman, but McDowell said he could not identify the gunman and would not identify someone to satisfy Guevara. McDowell did not fit the description of the suspect in the murder of Castro or the carjacking. He was a dark-skinned Black man.
On July 12, 1997, Guevara reported that he took a book of robbery offenders to Medina. Guevara said that Medina had selected McDowell, saying he “looked like” the gunman. But Medina also said he wanted to see a more recent photo of McDowell to be sure.
On July 21, 1997, Guevara visited Morales-Santana. He reported that she had identified a photograph of McDowell from a photographic lineup as the man who stole her car and purse at gunpoint. That same day, Guevara showed a photo lineup to Medina, who selected McDowell as the man who shot Castro. On July 22, Guevara reported that Varela had identified McDowell as well in a photographic lineup.
The photo array would later be exposed as highly suggestive. It consisted of McDowell and four fillers. One was Latino and was described in his records as “White Hispanic.” One of the other fillers was listed as weighing 240 pounds. All four fillers were more than six feet tall. McDowell was 5 feet 9 inches tall.
On July 23, 1997, police picked up McDowell and brought him to the police station where Guevara showed him the photograph of the person Guevara wanted to charge with shooting McDowell. McDowell would later say that when he refused, he was handcuffed to a wall in an interrogation room for several hours. Guevara, according to McDowell, threatened him with physical violence, and alternatively, promised to uncuff him and give him a ride home if McDowell would make the identification.
At one point, another detective came into the interrogation room and showed McDowell a photograph of himself. The detective, McDowell said, told him that was the photograph that Guevara had shown the witnesses so that they could identify him. The officer also cautioned, “You didn’t hear that from me.”
Guevara then arranged for Varela, Medina, and Morales-Santana to come to the police station. There, Guevara allowed them to look into the interrogation room to see McDowell. Then, all three separately viewed a live lineup and each identified McDowell.
After the lineup, Guevara interrogated McDowell in an attempt to persuade him to confess to the murder and carjacking. McDowell refused, insisting he was innocent.
McDowell was charged with the murder of Castro, the attempted murder of Varela, and the carjacking of Morales-Santana.
No physical or forensic evidence connected him to the crimes. Morales-Santana’s car had been recovered about two miles from her home and 13 miles from McDowell’s home about two hours after it was stolen. No fingerprints or any physical evidence had been recovered.
At the time, Detective Halvorsen requested that officers in that area go door to door with the composite sketch in the hope of identifying the carjacker.
On March 22, 1999, McDowell appeared before Cook County Circuit Court Judge Marcus Salone to begin jury selection. Defense attorney Robert Strunck told McDowell that if he waived a jury and chose to have Salone decide the case, the prosecution would not seek the death penalty. McDowell agreed and the case was postponed for a day.
On March 23, when the trial began, the prosecution said it would be seeking the death penalty.
Varela, Medina, and Morales-Santana each testified and identified McDowell. Varela testified that he found a dime and three pennies on the ground next to Castro’s body. His wallet was untouched.
By stipulation, the prosecution and defense presented evidence that Castro had been shot once in the back and at close range. A spent bullet and a shell casing had been recovered. Both were nine-millimeter caliber. Varela and Morales-Santana testified that the gun they saw was a black semi-automatic pistol.
Guevara testified and described how the three witnesses had identified McDowell. He was not questioned about the suggestive nature of the photographic lineups. He was not asked about his attempts to persuade McDowell to identify someone as the person who shot McDowell.
The only defense witness was Kenneth Beecham, a co-worker of McDowell. Beecham said that virtually every day at that time, he and McDowell got together after work at McDowell’s home where they drank beer and listened to music. He said that on the day of the crimes, he was at McDowell’s home at 2 p.m. where they remained until 5 p.m. when they went to the Brickyard Shopping Mall, returning to McDowell’s around 7 p.m.
On March 26, 1999, Salone convicted McDowell of first-degree murder, attempted murder and carjacking.
At sentencing, McDowell insisted he was innocent.
“I’m sorry [for] whatever happened to that man, but I didn’t kill him,” McDowell said. “I was framed. Police know they framed me. Because when they arrested me, I was a victim….You all know I was a victim…I got shot at [a] drive-by. When they arrested me, I was the victim. They placed me in the lineup.”
“I ain’t have no knowledge of Castro, his family,” he continued. “I didn’t murder him. Putting me under the jail [is] not going to make the family happy. Because the killer is still at large…I don’t even know what to say. I know I didn’t kill that man.”
Salone then sentenced McDowell to consecutive sentences on each of the three counts totaling 103 years in prison. He imposed 88 years on the murder and attempted murder convictions and 15 years on the carjacking conviction.
In 2002, the First District Illinois Appellate Court upheld the convictions and sentences. That same year, McDowell filed his first post-conviction petition, arguing that he had been arrested without probable cause because the identifications were tainted by suggestive procedures. The petition was denied and the Illinois Appellate Court affirmed.
In 2004, McDowell, acting as his own lawyer, filed a federal petition for a writ of habeas corpus claiming that Guevara had framed him because he refused to identify a specific person as the man who shot McDowell. That petition was denied and the Seventh Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals upheld the ruling in 2013.
In 2014, McDowell filed another post-conviction petition, which cited media articles describing misconduct by Guevara in other cases. The petition was denied as well. McDowell obtained a lawyer and a motion for reconsideration was filed.
The court denied the motion, though it acknowledged that the motion for reconsideration had added information about “numerous post-conviction cases pending in the Circuit Court of Cook County involving allegations of misconduct against Detective Guevara.”
On April 9, 2020, McDowell’s lawyers at the Exoneration Project at the University of Chicago law school filed a request for clemency with Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker.
“We believe strongly in the innocence of our client, Antonio McDowell, a man who has been incarcerated for 23 years for crimes investigated and ‘solved’ by disgraced former Chicago Police Detective Reynaldo Guevara–an officer a Cook County Judge has called a ‘bald-faced’ liar ‘without an ounce of credibility.’”
By that time, nearly two dozen convictions had been vacated and the cases had been dismissed based on misconduct by Guevara.
The request for clemency said, “Those men served hundreds of years in prison for crimes they did not commit. What is particularly notable is that in many of those cases, Guevara engaged in precisely the kind of investigative misconduct that occurred in [McDowell’s] case, including obtaining false eyewitness identifications through manipulated identification procedures, manipulating witnesses in other ways, fabricating evidence, perjury, and concealing evidence in the course of maliciously prosecuting innocent persons.”
On June 22, 2020, Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker commuted McDowell’s sentence to time served and he was released.
In 2023, McDowell’s attorneys, Lyla Wasz-Piper and Joshua Tepfer, filed another post-conviction petition that included a report by Caren Rotello, an eyewitness identification expert.
Rotello concluded, “In light of the factors undermining the eyewitness’ opportunity to observe the perpetrator, the inconsistency of the witnesses’ initial perpetrator descriptions and the suspect they identified, the repeated identification procedures with the same suspect and poor quality fillers, as well as cross-race identifications made after a long delay, it is my opinion that the identifications made by each of these witnesses is likely erroneous.”
In May 2024, another supplement to the petition was filed, which reported that the prosecution had sought DNA testing of swabs from the pockets of Castro’s pants, based on witness testimony that the gunman had searched Castro’s pockets. In addition to the DNA testing, the prosecution sought probabilistic genotyping of any DNA mixtures found.
The supplement said that the Illinois State Police Crime Laboratory had compared samples of DNA found in the pants pockets to the DNA of Castro and McDowell. Three DNA profiles were identified, but because of the complex nature of the mixtures, the testing “could not identify with certainty who contributed the samples,” the lab reported.
At the prosecution’s request, the court ordered a private company, STRMix, to conduct the probabilistic genotyping to determine the likelihood that McDowell was a contributor to the DNA found in the pockets. “In all instances, it was determined that there was support for the proposition that ‘Antonio McDowell is not a contributor to the DNA profile,’” the supplement said. “No analysis ever concluded that there was actual support that [McDowell] could be a contributor.”
On May 29, 2024, McDowell’s murder conviction was subsequently vacated and that charge was dismissed. A year later, on May 6, 2025, Cook County Circuit Court Judge Maria Kuriakos-Ciesil vacated the carjacking conviction, citing the evidence that McDowell went from victim to suspect and Guevara’s long history of misconduct.
On June 2, 2025, the prosecution dismissed the carjacking case.
In December 2025, McDowell filed a federal civil-rights lawsuit against Guevara, other police officers and the city of Chicago.
– Maurice PossleyPosting Date: 06-16-2025
Last Update Date: 04-23-2026
