A Black professional football player who was wrongfully jailed for 67 days after being mistaken for a murder suspect with a similar name is now suing five of the officers involved in a South Carolina federal court.
The lawsuit by Ty’Ran Tyrell Dixon, 28, filed on Aug. 6 and obtained by Atlanta Black Star, argues that he looks nothing like Tyren Romell Dickson, the man eventually arrested for the murder of Jasmine Roach, who was four months pregnant when she was shot and killed in October 2023 at a party in Barnwell, South Carolina.
But police investigating the murder never bothered to show witnesses to the crime a photo lineup that included Dixon, which would have immediately cleared him, his attorneys say.
Dixon’s hellish experience, which involved being confined in five jails and detention centers in four states, began on Sept. 30, 2024, when he was on his way home from Finland, where he plays for a pro football team, to visit his mother and other family in Columbia, South Carolina, passing through Boston’s Logan Airport.
Just after stepping off the plane inside the airport, he was swarmed by a group of Massachusetts State Police officers who cuffed him and shuffled him off to a holding facility, where his bags were confiscated and searched. They didn’t tell him the reason for his arrest, which he only learned the next morning at a court hearing: he was charged with first-degree murder of a woman in Barnwell, a place he’d never been.
His protestations of innocence fell on deaf ears, and he voluntarily signed extradition papers, expecting to be returned to South Carolina by the Barnwell County Sheriff’s Office, which had issued the warrants.
Barnwell County sheriffs did come to Boston, but only to take his cellphone as evidence.
Dixon, now in federal custody, was then sent to Suffolk County Detention Facility in Boston, where for the next 17 days he was housed with dangerous inmates, including murderers, rapists, gang members, and professed Nazis and white supremacists, the complaint says. He witnessed multiple fights and beatings, and feared for his life.
His cell was cold, with no heat, and he slept on a hard steel slab of metal, while rats and mice crawled over him at night, the lawsuit says.
Meanwhile, the bumbling Barnwell County sheriffs investigating his case already had in their possession evidence and information that proved Dixon was not their man, his attorneys claim.
Within 12 hours of Roach’s killing on Oct. 15, 2023, Sheriff Steven Griffith, a defendant in the case, was told by a highly credible source that the alleged shooter had been identified by multiple witnesses as “Tyren Dickson,” the lawsuit says. Griffith was given a photo of Dickson and images of his social media profiles.
Dixon’s build and physical description did not match the alleged suspect. Dixon was 6 feet 3 and weighed 295 pounds. Dickson was 6 feet 1 and weighed 180 pounds.
Barnwell County Deputy Sheriffs Lt. Matthew Davis and Investigator Noah Klienholz allegedly failed to show any witness with knowledge of the incident or who knew the actual suspect, Tyren Dickson, a picture or photo array of Dixon as a suspect for identification purposes.
Shawn Murray, who investigated the case for the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division (SLED), also allegedly identified “Tyren Dickson” or “Tyren Dixon” as the potential suspect, based on a phonetic spelling from witness statements.
But while interviewing witnesses, Murray, nor any other law enforcement officer investigating the murder, tried to obtain a description of the suspect, to request a name spelling of the suspect, to gather other identifying physical evidence, or to use a police sketch, the complaint contends.
Murray at some point pulled the driving record of Ty’Ran Dixon and inserted his photo into a suspect chart, but did not include a photo of Tyren Dickson, the actual person they were seeking to investigate, the lawsuit says.
Murray never provided any witness with a photo of Dixon for identification purposes, the complaint alleges, despite the fact that there were multiple witnesses to the shooting at the party, including some who knew Dickson by name.
Acting on the failed investigation, Klienholz, lacking probable cause, swore out affidavits and obtained arrest warrants for murder and attempted murder against Dixon, which were entered into the National Crime Information Center database.
In obtaining the arrest warrants, the officers “made no effort to confirm the identity of the perpetrator by utilizing photograph identification with witnesses of the shooting, obtaining ballistic evidence, forensic evidence, fingerprint evidence, surveillance evidence, photographic evidence, confessional evidence, or any other credible evidence that would link Dixon to the murder of Jasmine Roach,” the complaint says.
The arrest warrants “were the product of fundamental police investigative failures, and shoddy, incompetent, and utterly inexcusable actions of the Defendants, demonstrating a heartless disregard for the impact of their actions against an innocent Plaintiff Dixon,” the lawsuit says.
In the weeks after Dixon was detained, his family and their attorney tried on multiple occasions to provide law enforcement with readily available facts and witnesses to prove his whereabouts at the time of the murder, but say law enforcement chose to ignore them.
On each occasion, the family was allegedly told by officers, “They all say that,” or “Tell it to the judge.”
The officers also never interviewed Dixon to investigate his involvement in the murder of Roach, the lawsuit claims.
If they had, they would have learned that on Oct. 15, 2023, he was 80 miles away from Barnwell, attending homecoming festivities at Newberry College, where he had been a star student-athlete, a fact known to dozens of available witnesses.
A simple Google search of his name would have led them to discover he was a pro athlete, the lawsuit says, with stints in the XFL for the Las Vegas Vipers and, at the time, in a European league for the Lohja Crusaders in Finland.
The investigating officers also had another opportunity to rectify their misidentification on Aug. 23, 2024, nine days after the arrest warrant against Dixon was issued, the complaint says.
Officer Carlos Colindres of the Aiken, South Carolina Public Safety Department sent an email to Barnwell Sheriff Davis with the subject line “Tyren Dickson,” and stating, “I just want to make sure we have the right guy.”
He enclosed the driving record of Tyren Dickson, including his photo, and asked Davis to show it to Richard Garvin, one of the witnesses to Roach’s murder, who was in custody at the local jail. “We just need visual confirmation that this is him,” he wrote.
Davis never went to jail to show Richard Garvin the photo of the correct suspect, the lawsuit says.
On October 17, 2024, Dixon was transferred to South Bay Jail, where he was again housed with dangerous inmates in a facility that had only three detention guards assigned to nearly 150 inmates. The guards made sport of humiliating him, the complaint says, once requiring him to strip naked to be searched.
On October 31, 2024, Dixon was transferred to a prison in Maine, where he spent 21 days in solitary confinement, and became disoriented, anxious, hallucinated, and suffered a nervous breakdown.
Confined to a small, dark cell that had graffiti on the walls with messages including, “If you’re reading this, the ghost of the guy that died in here will haunt you at night” and “rot in hell,” the lawsuit says Dixon contemplated suicide.
In the brief periods when he was allowed to leave his cell to take a shower, he was shackled to a cage, and when he was given recreation time, he was confined to sitting shackled in another cage.
“There were days where I was like ‘How’d I just go from playing football and now I’m in a freaking jumpsuit? I’m locked up now. Like, how is this possible?” Dixon, who until that point had no criminal record and earned a master’s degree in organizational development and leadership at Newberry College, told WRDW.
At the first jail, he was given a Bible that he kept by his side until the third detention center took it from him, Dixon told The State, because some inmates smoked pages of the Bible.
“Stay strong,” he scribbled on a scrap of paper. “Don’t let this be for nothing. God strength.”
He still has the piece of paper.
“It took every piece of mental fortitude that I had from all of the years that I’ve been playing football and going through life” to make it through his confinement, Dixon said. “That took every ounce that I had left.”
On Nov. 20, 2024, Dixon was flown to a jail in Chickasaw, Oklahoma, where he stayed for four days, and then was flown to Georgia and booked into a detention center in Ocilla, where he remained until Dec. 6, 2024, when he was transported to Columbia, South Carolina, and picked up by Barnwell County sheriffs.
After being booked into the Barnwell County jail, he was put in an interrogation room, where two BCSD officers, including Lt. Davis, explained they were investigating a murder on Oct. 15, 2023, and they had a warrant charging him with felony murder.
Dixon protested his innocence, and reminded the officers that his parents, lawyer and a legal investigator had contacted the sheriff’s office numerous times to provide evidence showing the wrong person had been arrested. After a short discussion, the lawsuit says, the Barnwell Sheriff’s Office officers left the room, returning minutes later to advise Dixon that he had been mistakenly arrested and would be transported home.
Davis, his hands shaking, sheepishly removed his handcuffs and apologized, Dixon told WRDW.
In the weeks following the release of Dixon, BCSD arrested Tyren Rommell Dickson for the murder of Jasmine Roach. His trial is still pending.
The lawsuit accuses all five defendants of false arrest and malicious prosecution, alleging that they violated Dixon’s constitutional rights by arresting him without probable cause, failing to properly investigate, ignoring exculpatory and alibi evidence, unlawfully detaining him and then abdicating their responsibility to return him to South Carolina, defaming him, failing to interview him, and after seizing his cellphone, failing to expeditiously analyze the phone for text messages, calls and photos which would have immediately revealed his whereabouts on the date and time of the murder.
The lawsuit claims supervisory liability against Barnwell County Sheriff Steven Griffith, asserting that he knew within 12 hours of Roach’s murder that Dickson was a suspect, but did not share this information with his investigators.
It further alleges that Griffith failed to properly train and supervise his investigators, whose missteps are an outcome of “the culture at the Barnwell County Sheriff’s Department of quick, fast and incomplete criminal investigations that lead to the arrest, detainment and possible convictions of innocent individuals.”
Dixon, who has resumed his football career in Finland, but says he continues to have nightmares related to the ordeal, seeks a jury trial to determine unspecified actual and punitive damages to compensate him for deprivation of his liberties and freedom that resulted in physical, mental and emotional injuries that will affect his life for the foreseeable future.
“I know this about legal and police work,” Joe McCulloch, one of Dixon’s attorneys, told WRDW. “Measure twice and cut once, because the consequences of making a mistake like this are catastrophic for people like our client.”
In a Facebook post last week, Sheryl Brand, Dixon’s mother, noting the upcoming anniversary of her son’s arrest and suffering “due to the negligence of Barnwell [Sheriff’s] Department,” said, “ALL THE DAMN MONEY IN THE WORLD” will never ever give him back” the time he spent incarcerated.
“They say it was a mistake!!!! Hell no it wasn’t a mistake…they didn’t do their jobs and have been getting away with their incompetence [for] years…wayyyy before Ty’Ran was born (FACTS)! I say to all involved “BLACK LIVES MATTER dead or alive! You can hide behind those badges but, God seen everything you purposely did to my child!”
The defendants have 21 days to file a response to the federal complaint after being served, or until Sept. 3. The Barnwell County Sheriff’s Office did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Atlanta Black Star.
In its answer to a separate state lawsuit filed by Dixon in April, the Barnwell County Sheriff’s Office denied similar allegations and asserted that any misidentification of Dixon was not done with malice.
Great Job Jill Jordan Sieder & the Team @ Atlanta Black Star Source link for sharing this story.
