On the night Los Angeles police claim he carried out an act of gangland vengeance, Oscar Eagle could barely walk.

In March 1998, Eagle was only 17 and using crutches to get around after he was wounded in a drive-by shooting. The bullet is still in his leg to this day, marked by a coin-shaped indentation on his calf.

At the same time that police allege Eagle opened fire on an 18th Street gang member in an act of retribution, he says he was at an East L.A. hospital because a friend’s cousin was giving birth, according to court records.

Oscar Eagle in his childhood neighborhood of Pico-Union in 1996.

(Courtesy of Megan Baca)

Eagle knew he was innocent. Witnesses placed him at the hospital and he said medical records could prove he wasn’t mobile enough to carry out the crime.

But a combination of dubious legal representation and an arrest made by members of a notoriously corrupt unit in the Los Angeles Police Department saw Eagle sentenced to 25-years-to-life in prison.

In July, a judge granted a joint motion from the California Innocence Project and the L.A. County district attorney’s office to vacate Eagle’s conviction, citing ineffective assistance of counsel and questions about the behavior of LAPD detectives on the case.

For reform advocates, Eagle’s case epitomizes the problem with prosecuting teens as adults, but it also marks a positive sign for the L.A. County district attorney’s office’s conviction review unit under Nathan Hochman, who personally appeared at the hearing where Eagle was set free.

“This is what I’ve been dreaming of every day,” a tearful Eagle, 45, said during an interview in late July.

Pelican Bay State Prison in Crescent City, California is surrounded by razor wire, tall fences and towers manned by guards with rifles.

(Mark Boster / Los Angeles Times)

Formed in 2015 and expanded under former Dist. Atty. George Gascón, Hochman has shown a continued commitment to the conviction review unit. After facing criticism for recording just four exonerations from 2015 to 2020, the unit has been involved in 12 in just the last four years, according to a district attorney’s office spokesperson.

“I think that a D.A. sends a strong message when you appear in court, that it’s both a case of serious concern to the D.A.’s office, and it’s one where you want to see justice done,” Hochman said.

Seeing L.A. County’s top prosecutor personally endorse his release is a stark turnaround for Eagle, who spent most of his life believing police would do anything to keep him behind bars.

After entering California’s adult prison system as a teenager, Eagle said he watched a friend die in a riot at Pelican Bay. He spent years in isolation after he says he was erroneously connected to the Mexican Mafia. Both of his parents died while Eagle was locked up, and he can’t even mention their names without tearing up to this day.

Eagle said he grew up in a section of Pico-Union where all his neighbors were affiliated with a local gang set, the Burlington Locos. A young tagger who went by “Clown,” he too wound up part of the crew.

In the late 1990s, Eagle became a target of detectives with an infamous LAPD unit known as C.R.A.S.H., short for Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums.

At the time, the LAPD’s Rampart division was home to C.R.A.S.H. officers who falsified reports and framed civilians, later triggering a scandal that ended with the U.S. Department of Justice placing the LAPD under a consent decree.

Officers watch from inside the front entrance of the LAPD’s Rampart Station in the Westlake district in 2010 as protesters demonstrate outside against police brutality.

(Reed Saxon / Associated Press)

Eagle says that in 1996 he was wrongfully arrested for gun possession as a juvenile by Rafael Perez, the central figure of the Rampart scandal. Perez later admitted the report that led to Eagle’s first arrest was falsified, according to court records.

But it was Eagle’s next run-in with police that proved far more consequential.

In March 1998, 18th Street Gang member Benjamin Urias was shot twice on Burlington Avenue in what police believed to be retribution for a prior attack on a Burlington Locos member, court records show. Urias, who was hospitalized for two days and released, told police the shooter walked with a limp.

Investigators from a C.R.A.S.H. unit based in Rampart locked onto Eagle, due to his gang connections and the fact that he was said to be walking with a limp after he was injured in a shooting, according to his attorney, Megan Baca, of the California Innocence Project.

Charges against Eagle were initially dismissed after Urias failed to show up for a preliminary hearing. But a month later, LAPD homicide detectives Thomas Murrell and Kenneth Wiseman prodded the shooting victim to pick Eagle out of a photo lineup, according to the motion to vacate his conviction.

Urias initially told police he did not recognize anyone in the lineup, records show.

“OK, circle that guy … Number 4 is the one you were pointing to,” Murrell said to Urias, according to a recording of the interview described in court records.

An LAPD spokesperson declined to comment. The audio recording that called the validity of the identification into question was never raised at Eagle’s trial, according to Baca.

Despite concerns about the behavior of the detectives, Hochman said he was not immediately ordering a review of other cases involving Murrell and Wiseman. Neither Rampart detective was part of a C.R.A.S.H. unit.

Murrell denied any wrongdoing and told The Times he remembered Eagle’s name because the then-teenager was a suspect in multiple gang homicides at the time.

He did not offer specifics, but dismissed Eagle’s medical alibi, contending the teen “wasn’t on crutches” when police arrested him.

“If he made an ID, we didn’t cheat, I can tell you that … I’ve never done that,” said Murrell. “We did everything by the book.”

Attempts to contact Wiseman were unsuccessful.

Eagle said things were only made worse by his former attorney, Patrick Lake, who didn’t make an opening statement at trial or raise any of Eagle’s alibi evidence. When Eagle questioned his lawyer, Lake joked that he was “saving the best for last.”

Oscar Eagle with his defense attorney, Megan Baca of the Innocence Project.

(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

As Eagle’s family grew frustrated in the gallery, he said his mother passed him a note that simply read “fire him.” Eagle tried to get rid of Lake, but a judge denied his request. Eagle was convicted of murder. And since he was tried as an adult, he faced 25-years-to-life.

Lake did not respond to a request for comment. Baca said she had one conversation with Lake, in which he claimed he didn’t remember Eagle or his case.

At the time, prosecutors in California could directly file charges against teens in adult court, sending hundreds of children every year to adult prisons such as Pelican Bay, where Eagle wound up. That practice has been abolished by a change in state law, but Baca said she’s encountered too many cases where teens had their lives stolen because they were wrongfully convicted and tried as adults.

“It’s egregious, but I think that it happens all the time,” Baca said. “So many of my clients were juveniles and they got adult life.”

Eagle said his stay in prison was long and painful. He spent six years in segregated housing, essentially isolation, after Baca said her client was wrongly labeled as a Mexican Mafia associate. He denied any affiliation with the powerful prison-based syndicate. Eagle said prison officials took a leap in logic to link him to the gang based on a “kite,” or prison note, sent by another inmate.

As he grew older behind bars, Eagle started to read voraciously. His father sent recommended books. Eagle says he gravitated toward the Bible.

Oscar Eagle at an L.A. County juvenile detention camp in 1997.

(Courtesy of Megan Baca)

Even though he knew he hadn’t committed the crime that put him in prison, Eagle said he still realized there were things about his life that needed to change.

“I was 30 years old. My perspective started to change. And I started to see this past life that I was living was nonsense,” he said. “I started to have a conscience.”

In 2023, after repeated failures to get his case overturned on appeal, some of Eagle’s friends got the attention of Baca and the California Innocence Project, which worked to bring the case before the conviction review unit. At the same time, Eagle said, he started exchanging letters with an ex-girlfriend from high school, a woman named Monica.

In July, the two squeezed next to each other on Baca’s couch at the lawyer’s Long Beach home, hands interlocked. They’ve since gotten married and are looking to move to Arizona, away from the city and county that nearly took everything away from Eagle.

There’s still a lot for Eagle to get used too — he’s never driven a car, the concept of Uber is still bizarre to him — but Monica says there’s one silver lining to the prison term Eagle never should have served. She wouldn’t have married the guy who was sent away all those years ago.

“He’s a whole new person from when he went in,” she said.