The Wrong Man

Fishburne, 38, recalls the black booking officer saying he wasn't sure this was the right guy, and the white arresting officer dismissing the doubt, leaving it for someone else along the way to decide. A process had been set in motion, and with it, a chain reaction that would leave Elias Fishburne stunned and stranded on the side of a road he had spent a lifetime dreading.

* * *

Cutting His Dreadlocks

Only white clothes were allowed in jail, Fishburne learned. They took his sneakers, his shirt, even his black underwear. He was given flip-flops and a jail shirt at least three sizes too large. Any street clothes that weren't white could signal possible gang affiliation. Fingerprinted and photographed for his mug shot, Fishburne tried to stay calm. This would be straightened out any minute, when they saw that the fingerprints didn't match. They told him to sign paperwork acknowledging that he was being booked on charges of cocaine trafficking, receiving stolen property, and illegal possession of a firearm. The name printed on the sheet was Jarvis Tucker. He crossed it out and signed it Elias Fishburne.

"Then this officer sitting in the glass booth asks me if I want to waive extradition," Fishburne says. That would mean not fighting the warrant from Atlanta demanding that he face charges there. "I'm asking this woman, this guard next to me, what I should do, because I don't know. She tells me that if Atlanta has the charges, Atlanta needs to see you to know you're not the right guy."

Fishburne remembers asking what the difference was between staying in Prince George's or agreeing to go to Atlanta. "She said if I was going to be extradited, they only had two weeks to pick me up, but if I stayed here, I could be locked up for three months waiting for trial."

What no one told him, Fishburne now realizes, was that waiving extradition would effectively freeze him in this bureaucratic error. No one said what Department of Corrections official Jeff Logan declares so clearly now: "Understand this: If it is not you, you do not acquiesce to anything. You're caught in the wheels of justice and they're spinning against you."

Fishburne sees now how naive he was to believe that the system was somehow self-correcting, that the truth would quickly become obvious, that he wouldn't even need an attorney. I'm a hairdresser, he remembers trying to explain to everyone he encountered. I'm a veteran, I have a mortgage, a business, a Web site, a clean record, a sound reputation. "They're looking at me like, whatever."

As he was being processed, he felt a guard tug at his long dreadlocks, and cried out in protest when he felt hanks of his hair being snipped off to remove the tiny silver charms woven into the twisted strands. A doll-size pair of scissors entwined in his hair were considered a potential weapon? This particular humiliation touched a nerve. It had taken him years of meticulous care to grow locks like his, and now a stranger was blithely chopping away. Fishburne landed in the day room of the county jail in a sea of men, most of them young, most of them black. He sat with his back against the wall, trying to draw the calming breaths he had learned in yoga class, assuring himself this would be over any minute now.

Elias Fishburne grew up with two fears that held their grip on him even in adulthood. One was being homeless. The other was going to prison. "Growing up in the projects, I knew this could happen to me. I could go to jail, I could lose everything to drugs and be homeless," he says. "If you see those things on an everyday basis, you know it could happen to you."

Fishburne hoped that the friend who had witnessed his arrest was trying to get him released. With his cellphone confiscated, Fishburne didn't have phone numbers at hand for loved ones he might call for help. Most everybody he knew used cellphones, anyway, and receiving a collect call from jail required a land line. It was three days before he got a turn at the jail's pay phone. The only number he could summon from memory belonged to his friend Jerome Wilcox. Fishburne asked Wilcox to contact his mother and the prepaid legal service Fishburne subscribed to. He had used the Baltimore law firm to plead down a couple of traffic tickets and to write warning letters to clients who bounced checks. Help was close at hand, he reminded himself now.

In Charleston, S.C., GeorgeAnna Milligan had been waiting all day that Sunday for her oldest son to call. Elias never missed Mother's Day. "Finally, his friend Jerome calls and tells me Elias has been arrested," she recounts. All Wilcox knew was that there had been an accident, Elias was okay, but he was in jail. Jail? Was someone killed? Milligan's mind raced. She quickly put together the pieces Elias hadn't.

She called the Prince George's Sheriff's Office, trying to track down her son. "He doesn't have any aliases. His ID was stolen," she explained again and again. "Why can't you just check his fingerprints and run his background in NCIC?" Milligan knew the FBI's National Crime Information Center was the data bank that would prove her son was not wanted, that his fingerprints, birth date and Social Security number didn't match those of this Jarvis Tucker. She had confidence in this system of checks and balances, because she herself had relied on it years before while working for the Charleston police. "I took mug shots and did fingerprints," she recounts. "I knew what I was talking about."