Antonio McDowell walked into a Chicago police station in 1997 the victim of a shooting. He instead ended up charged and convicted of murder.
On Monday, 28 years later, he was finally free again.
“This is a defining moment,” McDowell, 49, told reporters at the Leighton Criminal Courthouse. “It proves that justice is not lost, that justice will return. No matter who tries to keep it in a dark place, justice will shine.”
McDowell is the 51st person exonerated of a homicide conviction tied to Reynaldo Guevara, the disgraced former Chicago police detective.
While working out of the department’s Area 5 station in the 1990s, Guevara allegedly used coercion and physical violence to force dozens of witnesses to make false identifications in cases. He has never been charged with a crime and retired in 2005.
“Hundreds and hundreds of years of life” were taken away by Guevara, said Anand Swaminathan, one of McDowell’s attorneys from the law firm Loevy + Loevy. “We can add the more than two decades that Antonio spent in prison for crimes he did not commit to the growing and long list.”
At the station in July 1997, Guevara tried to get then 21-year-old McDowell to identify someone as the person who shot him. McDowell refused — he didn’t know who shot him or what they looked like, according to lawyers for the Exoneration Project, which worked to overturn the conviction. Guevara allegedly retaliated and made McDowell the main suspect in a 7-month old cold case, which Guevara began reinvestigating that same month.
In December 1996, Mario Castro was shot and killed in his backyard, and 30 minutes later in a nearby alley a woman had her car stolen at gunpoint. Police believed the two crimes were connected, but they had no leads and made little progress, according to the project.
After McDowell refused to implicate Guevara’s chosen suspect, he became the main suspect in the Castro murder and carjacking, despite no evidence or witnesses tying him to the crimes, the Exoneration Project alleged. He was eventually convicted and sentenced to 103 years.
“I will not be the guy to send you to prison for something that you did not do. That’s not my game,” McDowell said Monday. “If I did, right now I would be on the other side looking at you speaking about how painful it is. Then I would be the person that victimized.”
McDowell spent 23 years in prison fighting his conviction. In 2020, he petitioned for clemency because of COVID-19-related health risks, which Gov. JB Pritzker granted.
In 2023, former Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx dropped the murder charge after requesting a sample of McDowell’s DNA to test against the murder victim’s clothes. He supplied a sample, and the test came back negative. But prosecutors did not drop the carjacking conviction.
Last month, Judge Maria Kuriakos-Ciesil vacated the carjacking conviction, and on Monday prosecutors dropped the charge and declined to retry him.
McDowell is also represented by exoneration project attorneys Lyla Wasz-Piper and Josh Tepfer. Several of his family members, including his mom, Florine McDowell, joined him Monday morning.
“These people helped me get through this,” McDowell said. “I won’t get to be terrified. Because without a support team, it’s really devastating. The act itself is devastating, but without someone there to help you, it’s even worse.”