- April 26, 2024
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Anyone with a common name has dealt with the confusion that comes with being mixed up with someone else with the same or a similar name.
Usually, it’s just a nuisance. But for one young Bunnell man, a name mixup led to criminal charges for failure to appear in court over a battery charge.
Dakota Ward, a resident of Orange Street in Bunnell, didn’t believe it when his friend told him weeks ago that he’d seen Ward’s name on a court roster for a bench warrant.
“I told him he was crazy, because I hadn’t gotten in trouble for anything.”
He hadn’t: The State Attorney’s Office has now dropped all charges against him, and the Sheriff's Office has opened an internal investigation about the case. But another man with a similar name — De’coda Ward, who Dakota said he’d gone to school with at FPC and been mixed up with even then, receiving De’coda’s disciplinary reports — had, according to the victim and a witness in the battery case, hit someone Dec.15.
That man allegedly failed to show up in court, according to court records, so Judge Melissa Moore Stens signed a warrant March 23 for failure to appear in court over the battery charge — but the original arrest affidavit mistakenly listed the defendant as “Dakota Ward,” and the warrant was signed for “Dakota Ward.”
Dakota Ward, 19, was offshore fishing with his father March 26 when his mother called him to say that three policemen had arrived at the house.
Worried, Dakota and his father came back.
“Once we got back into Palm Coast, I called the Sheriff’s Office so they could send an officer out to speak to me, and tell me what was going on,” Dakota Ward said.
The officer, Dakota Ward said, "Asked if I was Dakota Ward, and I said ‘Yes sir,’ and he said, ‘We have warrant out for your arrest.’ And I said, ‘For what?’ And he said … 'A failure to appear on a misdemeanor battery charge.'"
There wasn’t much he could do, then and there, with a law enforcement officer who was sure he was their guy, Dakota Ward said.
"I put my hands behind my back, and said, ‘OK,'" he said.
His parents were there when he was arrested, and were able to post his $1,000 bond, so he only spent an hour and a half or so at the county jail before he was released, he said.
The family hired attorney Joshua Davis, who summarized the mixup to a reporter.
“The officer wrote a 707” — an arrest affidavit — “which was forwarded to the State Attorney’s Office,” Davis said. “The State Attorney decided to file charges on that incident. So charges are filed, and they send out summons, so people appear (in court). Well, they got the wrong kid as the defendant, and of course he didn’t show up, because they’re serving him at the real defendant’s address.”
Soon enough, Dakota’s mug shot appeared online. Davis printed out a copy and met with Chad Cox, the 25-year-old victim of the December 15 battery which Dakota Ward had been arrested for failing to appear in court for.
Cox wrote across the printout of the mug shot, “I Chad Cox am 100% sure this is the wrong guy it’s NOT De’coda Ward,” then signed it. Davis sent that signed printout to The Palm Coast Observer.
Cox’s mother, a witness in the case, confirmed to a reporter that the Dakota Ward who’d been arrested wasn’t the one who hit her son, and that the two men look nothing alike. The young man who was arrested, Dakota, had brown hair and brown eyes. The one who hit her son — whose name was spelled De’coda, she said — had blondish hair and blue eyes.
“The Dakota that they arrested is not the same De’coda Ward,” Donna Cox said. “I feel very bad that he’s in there. … It was another one. He’s got blondish, reddish hair. … My son met with the attorney of the wrong Dakota Ward one, and even looked at the picture and said, ‘Yeah, that’s not him.’”
Davis tried to clear things up with the Sheriff's Office, he said.
“It’s frustrating," he said. "After something like this happens, you would hope that somebody would jump on it and say, ‘Oh wow, we really screwed up.’ I keep getting the ‘cog-in-the-wheel’ speech. It’s nobody’s problem, yet I got a kid siting in jail over something he didn’t do. … I’ve been practicing law awhile, and this is pretty upsetting to me.”
Dakota Ward has twice since his arrest had law enforcement officers show up at his home to serve him papers to appear in court, Davis said.
Here’s what happened, according to the initial police report from the crime.
On Dec. 15, Sheriff’s Office deputies were called out to a home on Forrester Lane. A deputy took a statement from Cox, the victim, and summarized it in a form 707 charging affidavit, writing that Cox “stated that Dakota Ward (suspect) and Steven Docking (suspect) attacked him.”
Cox had been in an argument with his girlfriend, who wanted him to leave her house. The girlfriend “then texted her ex-boyfriend, Dakota, and asked him to come over to get Chad out of the home.”
Concerned that things were escalating, Cox called his mother, Donna Cox, who came to the house as well. At first, there were no issues, and Cox’s girlfriend was going to ask the other two men to leave, but then Cox turned to his girlfriend and laughed about something about the dog.
Cox “stated that Dakota thought he was laughing at him in which Dakota then became angry and confronted him,” and then, along with Docking, began pushing him and punching him in the face, according to the report.
He didn’t hit back out of fear of being arrested himself, and the two men only stopped hitting him after Donna Cox intervened, according to the report.
By the time deputies arrived, the two alleged attackers were gone.
Chad Cox and Donna Cox both filled out sworn witness statements.
There are supposed to be protections that would prevent someone from being arrested for a crime committed by another person with the same or a similar name.
The Sheriff’s Office opened an internal affairs investigation on the deputy who filled out the original arrest affidavit that named Dakota Ward as a suspect, Sheriff's Office spokesman James Troiano said.
The agency can not talk about details of what happened — and what, potentially, went wrong — until it’s over, he said.
“I certainly understand that this could be on the minds of many,” Troiano said. “We’ll determine what happened, and then at that point, determine what actions must be taken. … We will be working with the attorney and the man in this case; we will not be subjecting that person to any adverse reactions at all, including court appearances.”
For now, Deputy James Gore has been placed on paid administrative leave, Troiano said. If he's found at fault, consequences can range from a written reprimand to a firing. The Sheriff's Office believes there was "no malicious intent" on the part of the deputy, he said.
"It can happen," he said. "We have procedures in place, we have training, we have supervisory oversight, we have intervention, we have the review process — we take it very seriously. When you think about having the ability to take someone’s liberty from them, that’s very powerful."
The investigation will determine if any policies were breached, and if new policies or further training might be needed, he said.
"Issues can happen, and our job is to prevent that from happening," Troiano said. "We’re certainly sorry that it happened, and we’re going take the steps necessary to evaluate ... and to see if any changes are warranted. ... We don’t believe this is a systemic problem at all. It’s isolated to one incident, and from there we need to get to the bottom of it as efficiently as possible."
The State Attorney’s Office realized the error and has now dropped all charges against Dakota Ward, State Attorney’s Office spokesman Spencer Hathaway said.
“It looks like it’s an unfortunate mistake that happened,” Hathaway said. “We dropped all charges when we became aware of it. All of the information on the 707 form was wrong — all consistent with the person who was arrested, but not the right Dakota."
As bad as things have been for his client, Davis said, mixups like this one could be even worse and have life-long consequences.
“Luckily, it was a battery charge,” Davis said. “But what if the charge was, say, lewd and lascivious molestation on a child under 5? … Try explaining that to your employer at 18 years old. ‘Oh yeah, that’s not me.’”
And, he said after a reporter told him of the internal affairs investigation, this wasn't just one deputy's error: There would have been missteps throughout the process that led to his client's arrest, plus the multiple incidents of deputies coming to Dakota Ward's house since. "They'll fire the first guy, and then go on doing the same thing," he said.
Dakota Ward is worried about the ramifications of the arrest, like records that may remain online.
Troiano said that if the Sheriff’s Office “is able to determine that there was a mistaken arrest or a false arrest … we need to make sure of that ... then we look at removing that documentation, assuring it’s done through proper channels through our law enforcement partners at the state and federal level.”
But mug shots posted online by the Sheriff’s Office, along with the arrested person’s name, are often aggregated by a number of private websites.
That means that even if the Sheriff’s Office were to delete Dakota Ward’s record from its own site, any future employer who Googled the young man’s name might see that he’d been arrested because the mug shot could appear on other websites.
As to the arrest itself, Dakota Ward said, “It’s just humiliating, being arrested. And having your neighbors — what if they walk outside — and I have a 10-year-old sister, and I can only imagine what she would think if she saw it. And all of my friends, seeing my mug shot pop up — it’s kind of humiliating.”
