Prosecutors in Cook County, Ill., dropped murder charges against a man convicted as a teenager of fatally shooting his two friends in 1994, spending more than 28 years behind bars before his release.

The Chicago Sun-Times reports that David Wright, now 46, was released from prison last September after an appeals court threw out his faulty confession –  the only evidence against him – and a new trial was ordered. On March 29, county prosecutors told Judge Carol Howard that they were dropping all charges against him.

Wright’s friends, Tyrone Rockett, 16, and 26-year-old Robert Smith were fatally shot on March 25, 1994 on South Parnell Avenue in Chicago, as one of them walked through a gangway and the other behind a building, CBS Chicago reported.

Chicago police detectives interrogated Wright, then 17, for at least 14 hours and coerced a confession from him, according to Wright’s attorney David Owens, with The Exoneration Project. The detectives allegedly told Wright that his older brother was also a suspect and would face the death penalty if Wright didn’t sign a false confession. Detectives in the department have a pattern of obtaining false confessions, Owens stated.

"The only evidence that ever existed against Mr. Wright was the statements that they said that he gave as a juvenile," Owens said, according to CBS Chicago.

"There was no eyewitness. There is no forensic evidence. There's no bullet evidence. There's no nothing like that. It's just, 'Oh yeah, this kid after 15 hours of interrogation said this,' and that's all it was. So once we showed that the cops lacked reliability, that was part of it," the attorney added.

With Wright’s release, an unsolved murder mystery remains for the victims’ families.

“There’s no winners for any of the families involved. There’s no case gonna be opened. There’s no one who’s going to trace it back. So if it wasn’t him, who was it? We don’t have any answers. Where is the justice?” Smith’s sister, Sabrina Morgan, asked at a press conference after prosecutors dropped charges against Wright, according to the Sun-Times.

Looking forward, Wright said he plans to earn his GED and rebuild his life, as well as become a voice for wrongly convicted inmates.