Daniel Villegas: Accused El Paso Drive-By Shooting Killer Welcomed Home By Surviving Victim

Daniel Villegas, the El Paso man who, as a teenager, survived a drive-by shooting that killed two of his friends 21 years ago hugged the man accused of pulling the trigger Tuesday. Villegas was freed after 19 years in prison as he awaits a new trial.

Jesse Hernandez, now 38, has long been certain that El Paso, Texas, police got the wrong guy when they picked up Villegas for the drive-by shootings in 1993, El Paso’s KFOC 14 News reports.

Last month, a Texas appeals court ruled that Villegas should receive a new trial because his previous lawyers presented an ineffective defense. The court stopped short of saying that Villegas was innocent of the murders. But Tuesday, an El Paso judge freed Villegas on $50,000 bond until he can be tried again.

No new trial date has been set, however, and prosecutors — though they still insist that Villegas committed the crimes — have not decided if they have enough evidence to make a new trial worthwhile, The El Paso Times reported.

Villegas, just 16 at the time of the murders, was convicted in 1995 based largely on his own confession. But Villegas retracted that confession shortly after granting it to El Paso investigators, maintaining that his interrogators threatened and intimidated him, warning he would be raped in county jail if he didn’t serve up the confession, and that he would be convicted of the crime and executed, NBC News recounts.

“I know in my heart Daniel didn’t do it,” said Hernandez, who had never met Villegas before the two greeted each other on Tuesday following Villegas’ release. “I was just mind-blown, how did they convict Daniel? Nothing from what I said, the car, the weapon. Where are they getting this story from? Are they saying I’m lying? Or what I saw was incorrect? How can they say I’m incorrect when I’m the one who witnessed everything?”

In fact, Villegas’ allegedly coerced confession bore significant discrepancies from Hernandez’s eyewitness account.

Hernandez, then 17, was walking home from a friend’s house with three other friends, taking care to avoid gang-ridden territory at a time when El Paso suffered from a plague of gang violence. But they didn’t go far enough out of the way. As they walked down a thoroughfare then known as Electric Street, a car appeared and someone inside opened fire, killing two of the boys, Robert England, 18, and Armando “Mando” Lazo, 17.

In his confession, Villegas said he was riding in a white vehicle, but Hernandez and another eyewitness both described the killer’s car as red, among other differences. In 2009, both now-grown survivors of the drive-by signed sworn affidavits saying that Villegas’ confession was at odds with what they saw that night, The El Paso Times reported.

“I’m sticking to my story. Nothing has changed from the get-go,” Hernandez said this week.

Villegas’ defense team has named two brothers as the actual killers of England and Lazo. But one, Javier Flores, has since died. His brother, Rudy Flores, is currently incarcerated on a federal drug conviction and has refused to speak about that deadly night in El Paso 21 years ago.