Denise Bolanos Heredia is reaching out to journalists, starting Instagram advocacy, collecting court paperwork and trying to get 2,500 signatures on a change.org petition she started to get her husband Arturo Bolanos freed from the Lovelock Correctional Center Facility.
In photo above, Bolanos is seen participating in its 3P “Puppies, Prisoner and Patriots” program pairing abused dogs with inmates who work to rehabilitate them. Bolanos also enjoys making art and visits from family while trying to get released, but struggling the longer he stays locked up.
In 2014, Bolanos was sentenced to a minimum of 54 years in prison after being found guilty of first degree murder with a deadly weapon, as well as three counts of attempted murder with a deadly weapon and two counts of battery with a deadly weapon. His sentencing and conviction resulted from an October 2011 shooting directed at an SUV in the parking garage south of Greater Nevada Field, which wounded two men and killed Macario Ortiz.
Bolanos, whose bail was denied, has been incarcerated since his arrest in Shasta County ten days after the shooting. The prosecutor for the case was then Chief Deputy District Attorney Chris Hicks, now the Washoe County District Attorney.
Hicks said at the time the arrest was based on eyewitness accounts. “The level of firepower discharged by the defendant in that parking garage was frightening,” Hicks said, adding in a statement that Bolanos and the targeted men “had just been in a gang-motivated fight with his younger brother and cousin outside the Freight House District.”
“There was a time where I would go every two weeks to visit him. Life has gotten more expensive, especially lately, I find myself having to hold two jobs. I had three jobs for two months. So it makes it so that I can't visit often. So I try to go as often as every two weeks. But really, it's maybe once a month, once every two months, however, you know, the best I can do basically,” Bolanos Heredia says.
Our Town Reno is trying to sift through court records while reaching out to those who took part in his trial to find out more and whether there was a miscarriage of justice as the Bolanos couple insists.
One of the defense documents shared with us by Bolanos Heredia indicates a forensic investigator with the Washoe County Sheriff’s Office testified she collected gunshot residue swab from Bolanos, but that the testing results were never produced, “signaling the GSR swabs were not preserved.”
There are also defense documents indicating contradictory statements by one of the eyewitnesses, one of the men who was shot at and who cooperated during the Bolanos trial. According to a section of court documents Bolanos Heredia has highlighted, this eyewitness changed his account about one week before being sentenced for hitting a man in the head with a liquor bottle.
The yellow highlighted part reads “a reasonable juror could infer that the promise of a letter from the Washoe County District Attorney’s Office relative to substantial assistance may have influenced [the witness] in dramatically changing his recitation of the facts the evening of the shooting where he went from exculpating Bolanos as the person with the gun to testifying Bolanos was carrying a gun.”
In the change.org petition, which is signed by Arturo Bolanos, he writes he was “given a 54 to life sentence for a murder I did not commit and have been incarcerated in the Nevada Department of Corrections for over a decade. I know that everyone that’s incarcerated makes that same allegation. I am aware of all the skepticism and stigma that a person who finds themselves in these unfortunate circumstances faces when making such a statement. However, I stand by my innocence as fervently today as I did all that time ago.”
It concludes: “The person responsible is still out there while I remain here. The ultimate tradeoff for not being labeled a snitch is not respect like most of us believed but the loss of everything and everyone you ever loved. Still, I have not lost faith. I know sooner or later justice will be on my side. Help me obtain justice!”
Bolanos Heredia, a digital organizer with Make the Road Nevada, married Arturo Bolanos four years ago when he was already incarcerated.
“We met when we were teenagers,” she says. “Nobody could believe it when he was arrested. Anybody who knew him couldn't believe it.”
They reconnected after she got a divorce. Bolanos Heredia is also on the board of the Return Strong Nevada non-profit which is “committed to deconstructing the prison industrial complex by unapologetically fighting to center folx of color and people experiencing poverty in all phases of the criminal legal and correctional systems,” according to its mission statement.
She’s tried getting in contact with the Innocence Project but says she hasn’t received a response yet. “They do have certain parameters that they stick to when taking cases,” she said. “Sometimes, it has to be that they've exhausted all their appeals, things like that. And my husband is on his last appeal now, which is taking place in Reno. It is in the federal system. If this doesn't go through, if his appeal is denied once again, then that would be the exhaustion of all his appeals.”
This Instagram page was launched in early October on Wrongful Conviction Day.
Media covered the initial arrest and sentencing, she says, but have lost interest since.
Both Arturo Bolanos and the man who was killed were “branded as gang members,” even though, she says, both were dads with jobs. She says both families were upset they were portrayed as gang-affiliated during the trial.
Bolanos Heredia sees racism at play. “It has impacted not just Arturo, but so many others from communities of color and low income communities,” she said during a recent phone call with Our Town Reno.
After his arrest, his family hired the late legendary David Houston to try to clear him. “David Houston was super expensive for them to hire, that came with a cost, I mean families refinanced homes to be able to afford his defense because of their belief in his innocence. And, you know, even that came out. He was portrayed as this scary gang member that was out shooting at people and killed someone,” she says.
Bolanos Heredia says Houston was stunned with the guilty verdict. "This was not a gang case, was never a gang case and in fact the prosecution had dismissed any relationship to gang allegations in this matter, but rather simply used it to try to explain motive," Houston said after his client was found guilty.
Houston died in 2021 after a career which included representing Hulk Hogan in a successful jury settlement of over $100 million against Gawker Media.
Previous appeals for Bolanos have failed.
Bolanos Heredia says she is also doing this for Arturo’s three daughters, all teenagers now. His late dad who was undocumented was unable to visit him in prison.
“When he passed away last year, that was a really hard blow knowing that you'll never see your father again,” she recounted. The last time he saw him was at trial.
“If this appeal fails, we definitely plan to do more, more aggressive outreach to organizations,” she concluded, not knowing when exactly there would be a decision on the current appeal process, but still hoping somehow her husband will have his name cleared soon and be released.