DALLAS, Texas — Almost three decades after a young man was gunned down outside a nightclub in the Deep Ellum district of Dallas, Texas, the person who actually pulled the trigger is headed to prison, and the man wrongly convicted of the crime is long since free.
Michael Nevarez, now 45, entered a guilty plea to murder this week in the July 14, 1997, death of Damond Wittman, and a jury set his punishment at 21 years in prison, the Dallas County District Attorney’s Office said. Nevarez was 16 at the time.
Wittman, 21, was with friends outside the club when a stranger asked for a cigarette, then pulled out a gun and told the group to hand over cash. When the young man resisted, the gunman fired at him repeatedly.
In 1998 a jury convicted Martin Santillan, then 24, of capital murder and gave him life in prison. He insisted he was innocent the whole time, and the case against him rested on a single eyewitness.
The breakthrough came when the Conviction Integrity Unit of the Dallas County District Attorney’s Office took a fresh look in 2021 and ordered new DNA tests. Genetic material on a Dallas Stars jersey found near the scene did not match Santillan and pointed investigators toward Nevarez, who was tracked down and arrested in Colorado.
Santillan walked out of prison in December 2022, and a Dallas County judge threw out the murder charge against him in March 2023, after he had spent more than 25 years locked up for a killing he did not commit.
District Attorney John Creuzot said the sentence brings a measure of accountability for the Wittman family and is also a hard lesson in what a wrongful conviction costs.
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