Judge Says He Needs More Time to Consider 2,000-Page Motion in the Salas Murder Case | Crime and Courts

Yakima County Superior Court Judge David Elofson said Friday that he needed more time to decide whether to question the lead investigator in a 1995 Sunnyside murder case under oath, ruling that the motion was on has grown more than 2,000 pages.

“It will take me a while to go through 2,000 pages,” Elofson told Defense Attorney Laura Shaver. “You have an infinite understanding of this case – I’ve been living with it for two months now.”

The question is whether Evaristo Junior Salas received a fair trial when he was convicted of the shooting of Jose Arreola, also known as Bugs, on November 14, 1995.

Shaver says new information has come to light that was not presented in court.

She applied for the dismissal of retired Sunnyside Police Sgt. Jim Rivard and give Salas a new exam. The first hearing on the matter took place on Nov.

Rivard declined to comment on the matter.

Assistant Prosecutor Bret Roberts argues that the evidence presented by Shaver is not new, and therefore her request to remove Rivard and allow Salas to retry should be denied.

Elofson said the hearing for Friday had been rescheduled by another judge because he was out of town and unaware that he would be making a decision anytime soon.

He asked Shaver to restrict her request to state her reasons for dismissing Rivard directly.

Shaver said she would resubmit her motion just to focus on getting Rivard off and filing a separate motion for a new trial later.

A follow-up hearing is planned for August 20 at 2 p.m.

The investigation

Arreola was sitting in a minitruck outside his girlfriend’s apartment in Sunnyside on a foggy November evening when he was shot twice in the head. His girlfriend had just got out of the truck with her young child when the shooting took place.

The truck was seized with a police room in the night. Four days later, Arreola’s friend Ofelia Gonzalez picked up the truck from the towing company, cleaned it up and sold it, according to police reports.

Former police officer Jose Trevino was upset when he found the truck had been removed before he could use it as evidence, police reports said.

Police officers did not approve the truck’s release, police reports said.

Gonzalez shared various stories about the truck being released and who authorized it, police reports say.

Rivard wrote an incident report demanding that Gonzalez be charged with criminal assistance in a murder.

Six months passed with no real clues as to who the shooter was before Salas emerged as a suspect.

Rivard said he photographed Salas with a Polaroid camera at the Sunnyside Police Department after being questioned by a Yakima County sheriff’s assistant on an unrelated matter.

Rivard said he returned to his office and threw the photo of Salas on his desk. An informant sitting in his office said the boy in the photo was the person he heard bragging about the shooting some time ago.

A few days later, Gonzalez was called to the department and identified Salas as the shooter based on a photographic record, police reports said.

Salas, then 15, was tried as an adult and convicted of first degree murder two days after his 16th birthday. He was sentenced to almost 33 years in prison. He has protested his innocence.

Questions, allegations

Shaver said that attorney George Trejo, who defended Salas more than 24 years ago, had been withheld reports of the truck’s removal from the seizure prior to the taking of evidence.

She also said Rivard’s motion to be charged with Gonzalez for criminal assistance was not presented to Trejo and receipts showing Rivard’s informant was paid.

Shaver said that according to Arreola’s mother, Gonzalez went through hypnosis before identifying Salas. She said she accompanied Gonzalez the day she identified Salas.

Such testimony is inadmissible in court because hypnosis can create false memories, Shaver said.

Trejo said none of this information was provided to him. He put in brief support for Shaver’s motion.

A new investigation into Salas’ conviction was launched by filmmaker Joe Berlinger, best known for his documentaries on wrongful convictions.

Berlinger assembled his own investigation team to uncover information that questioned the integrity of the Salas trial. These results were highlighted in the documentary “Wrong Man”, which was published in the summer of 2018 on the television channel STARZ.

Forward

Reviewing the case is anything but easy given the mountain of documents submitted, Elofson said.

There are many documents submitted in the application that are questionable, he said.

A report of a Gonzalez polygraph test is attached. Polygraph reports are not allowed in court.

“There is no way I would consider it,” said Elofson.

An investigation into Shaver’s finding by the Washington State Patrol is also underway. State Patrol investigators interviewed Rivard and Gonzalez and found that they were telling the truth in the first case.

Elofson said he believed these were unsound testimony.

Shaver said there was an inconsistency in what Rivard told investigators in the documentation and State Patrol investigators.

If Shaver used the state patrol interview to perjure Rivard, Roberts could argue that it is inadmissible because of his insulting testimony, Elofson said.

“Then we have to discuss it,” he said.

Elofson also said he saw the documentary and was frustrated with it. He said that while it was well done as a television production, it did not reflect how the courts work on such matters.

“It’s a one-way street,” he said. “That goes against what we do in the legal system,” he said.