The Mesa County District Attorney’s Office will ask a judge to dismiss murder charges against a Grand Junction man, James Genrich, who was granted a retrial after the court ruled faulty evidence was used to convict him in a series of pipe bombings in 1991.
filed the motion to dismiss on Friday, stating in the court filing that with this specific evidence now excluded from the case and no other forensic evidence, “we can no longer meet the high ethical and legal burden of proof beyond a reasonable doubt.”
Genrich was accused of planting three bombs between February and June 1991 that killed 12-year-old Maria Delores Gonzales and 43-year-old Henry Ruble. He has maintained his innocence since he was arrested in 1992.
The case relied largely on circumstantial evidence as well as a key piece of expert testimony that markings on the bombs were made by Genrich’s tools and could not have come from other tools.
Genrich successfully appealed part of the case through the Innocence Project in 2023, when a district court judge found that the expertap testimony was flawed because he could not have definitively ruled out other tools from making those marks.
Rubinstein appealed that ruling, but the Colorado Court of Appeals upheld the lower court’s decision in May, and the Colorado Supreme Court declined to hear the case in December.
The DA’s office and Grand Junction Police Department investigators have also sought additional evidence but came up empty. There were no fingerprints or DNA found on evidence tested by the Colorado Bureau of Investigation, and another round of independent testing of the bomb fragments, wires and Genrich’s tools came back inconclusive, Rubinstein wrote.
Itap also been 35 years since the bombings, and at least 28 witnesses who testified in the 1993 trial are dead. The expert witness who testified about the tool markings, John O’Neil, is now 84 years old, has a cognitive impairment and is not available to testify, the DA wrote.
“The District Attorney’s Office remains committed to the victims of these horrific crimes and their families,” Rubinstein wrote. “However, prosecuting a case we know cannot be proven beyond a reasonable doubt violates our ethical obligations. It risks further traumatizing the victims with a futile trial and wastes public resources.”
Genrich is still serving a 72-year sentence for his convictions for use of an explosive device and third-degree assault in the case, but will be able to apply for parole if a judge grants the DA’s motion.
A court hearing is set for 9 a.m. Monday.
