Who killed Johnny? A Chicago officer shot a teen in the back, but the boy's accomplice went to prison

On a drizzly fall morning in 2002, 26-year-old Edgar Naranjo parked his car on a street in Chicago. In the passenger seat sat his friend, a 14-year-old boy named Johnny Salazar. The pair put on hooded rain ponchos and nylon masks to hide their faces, walked around the corner to a small brick home and knocked on the door.

When a middle-aged woman answered, they pushed their way inside, with Naranjo holding his finger to his lips, signaling her to stay quiet. Johnny, according to Naranjo, carried a pellet gun.

The woman immediately screamed, and unbeknownst to the intruders, she had a son living in the basement who was a Chicago police officer.

Hearing her shouts, the 30-year-old officer grabbed his gun, ran up the stairs and, according to his statement to investigators, yelled, “Chicago Police!” As he chased the intruders out the front door, the officer said, he heard his mother say in Spanish, “They have guns!”

Outside the house, the officer said, one of the intruders, later determined to be Johnny, stopped and “began to turn in his direction.” The officer, who had been on the force just 10 months and was still on probation, fired eight shots, injuring Naranjo and killing the teen.

Within hours, police cleared the officer, Rafael Balbontin, of wrongdoing, telling the media that the intruders had guns and that the officer fired in self-defense.

“His actions were heroic,” a police spokesman said.

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According to media reports at the time, a Cook County prosecutor also defended the officer, saying that as the suspects were running away, one turned and pulled the trigger of a gun several times. Luckily, the prosecutor said, the gun did not fire.

Although it was Balbontin who shot Johnny, prosecutors charged Naranjo – the teen's accomplice – with first-degree murder in the boy's death. They argued that Naranjo was responsible because his actions led to the shooting: Had he not brought Johnny to Balbontin's house and forced their way inside, the officer would not have felt threatened and shot the teen.

Naranjo was convicted and is now serving 40 years in prison.

But police records, autopsy reports, depositions and recently obtained trial transcripts casts doubts on the police’s version of events, reveals an examination by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, part of the Paste BN Network. 

For instance, police told the media at the time of the incident that Johnny was shot in the chest. But autopsy records later showed the teen was shot once in the back and once in the back of the arm.

And though the prosecutor said that one of the intruders turned in Balbontin’s direction and tried to fire a gun several times, the officer himself later testified that he never saw a weapon.

Hailed as a hero, Officer Balbontin remained on the force. But just two years after the shooting, the officer murdered his wife, stabbing her in the head, chest and back in front of their young son.

The officer was sent to prison for 25 years – 15 years fewer than Naranjo got for bringing the teen to the home invasion.

“I thought it was unfair, definitely,” Naranjo said in a series of prison interviews. “Here you have a guy killing his wife. I didn’t even pull the trigger.”

The case has gained fresh attention in the post-George Floyd era: Not only is it a stark example of a questionable police shooting, but it highlights the increasingly controversial practice of law enforcement officials charging offenders with murder when another party, such as a police officer, kills someone.

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In 41 states, felony murder charges can be applied to someone who didn't pull the trigger

Last year, Naranjo contacted representatives of the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University’s School of Law and informed them of the Journal Sentinel’s investigation into his case. The center then in April filed a clemency petition to ask Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker to free Naranjo.

“Tragedy is everywhere in this case,” said Steven Drizin, the center’s co-director and a Northwestern law professor. “There’s no need to compound this tragedy by requiring that Edgar serve two more decades in prison for his role in this crime.”

Naranjo was convicted of felony murder, a charge available to prosecutors in 41 states. Under felony murder laws, prosecutors can charge all participants in certain felonies with murder if any one of them causes someone's death, even if the death is unexpected, said Guyora Binder, a law professor at the University at Buffalo and author of the book “Felony Murder.” In 13 of these states, he said, the laws go further, allowing murder charges even when a person is killed by someone resisting the felony, such as a police officer or robbery victim.

Felony murder rules date in the U.S. to the 19th century, but there has been a nationwide push in recent years to scale back such laws, partly because critics believe the definition of felony murder has become too broad, Binder said.

In California, for example, the legislature in 2018 barred felony murder charges against participants in a felony who did not personally kill anyone. State Sen. Nancy Skinner, a Democrat, said she introduced the bill because Blacks and Latinos are disproportionately convicted of felony murder.

In February, as part of a broad criminal justice reform package, Pritzker signed legislation restricting prosecutors from charging a person with murder if a third party, such as a police officer, directly committed the killing.

The changes do not affect Naranjo’s prison sentence or those of others convicted under the old law. But Drizin said he would like to see Naranjo’s case draw attention to felony murder laws and aid others serving time for murders they didn’t directly commit.

Said Naranjo: “That murder is not mine.”

The burglary scheme

At the time of the shooting, Naranjo lived at Johnny’s house. Even though Naranjo was 12 years older than Johnny, the two often played basketball together and went out to eat, recalled Laura Salazar, Johnny’s mother. She said all of Johnny’s five siblings were girls, and so she was pleased that her son had found a male friend whom he seemed to enjoy.

Johnny had just started his freshman year of high school, his mother said, but he didn’t like school.

“He was a handful,” she said. “But he was perfect to me. He was my baby. My macho man.”

According to his videotaped confession and police records, Naranjo said he asked Johnny to go with him to a flea-market vendor’s home to steal colognes and resell them. On the morning of Oct. 4, 2002, they had pushed their way only a few feet into the home when Juana Balbontin, the vendor’s wife, started screaming. Naranjo and Johnny ran out of the house, with the officer and his father, Juan Balbontin, in pursuit.

The officer, who had never shot his gun before on duty, said he was in his front yard when he opened fire. The two intruders were about 60 feet away, in front of a neighbor’s house.

Juan Balbontin ran in the line of fire, and a bullet struck him in the shoulder. The officer went to his father’s aid and stopped chasing the intruders.

Naranjo and Johnny ran about 60 feet down the block and turned the corner. The teen collapsed a few yards away in the parkway. Naranjo dragged Johnny into their car.

The teen wasn’t moving and appeared dead, Naranjo recalled. According to his statement to police, he threw the pellet gun out the window near an on-ramp to an expressway. It was never recovered by police.

Naranjo dumped Johnny’s body face-down on the curb of a dead-end street in an industrial area, where a truck driver spotted the body four hours later. Naranjo then drove to the Cook County Hospital to get treatment for his hand, which was shot in the incident.

What he said he didn’t know is that when someone arrives at the hospital with a gunshot wound, hospital staff typically call police. Within several hours, detectives arrived, followed by a prosecutor. Naranjo eventually confessed, thinking he would be charged only with burglary.

But authorities told him he would be charged with Johnny’s murder.

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Sentenced to 40 years

At trial, prosecutors called seven witnesses, including Rafael Balbontin, who said he never saw the intruders carrying a weapon but had reasonable belief that they were armed because he heard his mother yell out that they had guns.

Under department rules, Chicago police officers may use deadly force as a last resort when they think their lives or those of others are in danger.

Naranjo’s lawyer called just one witness: Dr. Nancy Jones, the Cook County medical examiner who conducted the autopsy on Johnny. She said the location of the wounds suggested the shooter was behind the teen but left open the possibility that, at some point, “the side of his body may have been toward the shooter.” That was consistent with the officer’s account of the teen turning toward the officer.

Five days after the trial, Judge Michael Toomin announced a verdict: Naranjo was guilty. “This is a classic case of felony murder,” he said. The judge eventually sentenced him to 40 years.

But over the next several years, two developments cast the shooting in a different light.

On Jan. 18, 2005, almost a year to the day that Naranjo was found guilty, Balbontin murdered his wife.

Meanwhile, Chicago personal injury lawyer Donald Shapiro was amassing damning evidence against Balbontin and Chicago Police in a wrongful-death suit filed in 2003 on behalf of Johnny’s mother.

Shapiro obtained records that showed law enforcement authorities cleared Balbontin just hours after the shooting, even before the autopsy was conducted. Had they waited just one day, they would have learned that Johnny was shot once in the back and once in the back of the arm.

In a deposition, Shapiro pressed Balbontin on whether the intruders posed a deadly risk. The officer acknowledged he not only didn’t see a gun, he also didn’t see the intruders’ arms or hands.

That testimony ran counter to what Nicole Morley, then a Cook County prosecutor, was reported to have said shortly after the shooting. According to a Chicago Tribune article, Morley said that as the intruders were running away, one turned and pulled the trigger of a gun several times, but it didn’t fire. A review of police and court records also show no evidence supporting the prosecutor’s claims.

When the Journal Sentinel asked Morley, now an assistant district attorney in Chester County, Pennsylvania, where she got the information that an intruder attempted to fire a weapon, she said she could not remember details from the 19-year-old shooting or say whether she was quoted accurately by the media at the time of the incident.

Shapiro also obtained the expert testimony of one of the nation’s best-known forensic pathologists, Dr. Michael Baden, a former chief medical examiner for New York City. (Recently, Baden, 87, was hired by George Floyd’s family to conduct a private autopsy. Baden and a colleague concluded Floyd’s death was a homicide due to the way he was subdued.)

Baden said the evidence did not support Balbontin’s testimony that Johnny was turned 90 degrees toward him when he shot. The pathologist said the bullet wounds suggest Johnny was “bent forward slightly, as if in a running position.”

But Baden acknowledged Johnny could have stopped in a running position or that he turned toward the officer and then turned away just before being shot.

In the end, the Chicago City Council agreed to settle the suit and pay Johnny’s family $2.25 million.

The clemency petition filed by Northwestern’s Center on Wrongful Convictions says if Naranjo is released, he will move to Mexico and live with a cousin. Clemency petitions are reviewed by the state Prisoner Review Board, which makes a recommendation to the governor, who has the final say. A decision is expected by the end of the year.

Laura Salazar, Johnny’s mother, said Naranjo should not be released early.

“We all make mistakes,” she said, but she cannot forgive him for treating her son “like an animal” and dumping his body “instead of taking him to a hospital or, hell, bringing him home to me.”

Naranjo questions how he could be imprisoned for so long when another person – a police officer who acted in a questionable manner – was the one who shot Johnny.

“I already gave 20 years of my life,” he said.

Follow reporters Alexandra Kukulka and Sam Roe on Twitter: @Akukulka11, @SamRoe

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