‘I JUST WANTED TO GO HOME’
Man spends two nights at City Jail after police arrest the wrong ‘Maurice Williams’
NEWPORT NEWS — Maurice Antonio Williams was working his cooking job at a Newport News retirement home a few weeks back — about to take his lunch break.
Then his supervisor came over and asked him to walk out a back kitchen door, where two police officers were waiting.
“They put me in handcuffs, and searched me,” Williams said. “They didn’t read me my rights, none of that. They asked me a bunch of questions, and said, ‘You have an outstanding warrant.’ And I’m like, ‘For what?’”
The officers wouldn’t tell him, he said, but walked him — in cuffs — in front of a grassy area in front of the nursing home to get to a police car. “I was embarrassed,” he said.
Williams learned several hours later that he was being charged with robbery, and would spend the next two nights locked up at the Newport News City Jail.
But there was a problem: They had the wrong Maurice Williams.
Police looked deeper into the case at the behest of Williams’ girlfriend, and realized their mistake two days later.
“I cannot apologize enough to Mr. Williams and his family and to this commu
nity,” Police Chief Steve Drew said last week. “I apologize that we did not do the best job we could have.”
Robbery on 24th Street
The robbery in question took place just before 11 p.m. Jan. 2.
Police said a Newport News resident, Roland White, and his wife were talking to a friend on a porch on 24th Street when another man — whom the victim identified as “Maurice Williams” — approached “aggressively” and said White’s wife owed him $60.
“Mr. White said he didn’t owe Mr. Williams anything,” a criminal complaint said. “Mr. Williams then picked Mr. White up and slammed him on the ground on his neck, then proceeded to go through Mr. White’s pockets.”
The robber took White’s cell phone “and said he was going to keep it,” the complaint said.
It was seventeen days later, on Jan. 19, that Maurice Antonio Williams was working at the Warwick Forest Retirement Community on Old Denbigh Boulevard when police came to arrest him at about 1:30 p.m.
As they were cuffing him, he said, “I kept asking them, ‘Yo, what’s going on?’”
Officers instead asked him twice if he had tattoos, and he said no. As he was being driven downtown in a police car, Williams said he told officers he never lived at the 24th Street address that he spotted on an arrest warrant attached to an officer’s clipboard.
Williams only learned he was being charged with robbery, he said, when he appeared before a magistrate and was booked at the City Jail several hours later.
‘I knew something was off ’
Maurice Antonio Williams, 42, and the man police now say actually committed the robbery, Maurice Lavonta Williams, 37, are both balding Black men with beards.
But Maurice Lavonta Williams, a local fitness trainer, stands about five inches taller.
He’s listed at 6-5 and 215 pounds and has a dark beard. Maurice Antonio Williams is 6-feet and weighs about 230 pounds, with a graying beard.
Both men were in the police computer system from prior arrests: Court records show that Maurice Antonio Williams had three prior misdemeanor marijuana possession convictions, while Maurice Lavonta Williams had prior convictions for misdemeanor assault and battery, cocaine conspiracy, DUI and misdemeanor pot possession.
Once Maurice Antonio Williams was booked into the City Jail — his pleas to being the wrong man notwithstanding — he called his girlfriend, Christina Brown, several times. She didn’t recognize the number and didn’t pick up.
“I thought it was spam or something, and I was ignoring the call,” she said.
Then one of Maurice’s friends sent her a Facebook message, asking “if Maurice was OK.” The workplace arrest, she said, “was making the rounds.”
Brown picked up the next phone call, and it was Maurice. “He said, Yeah, they picked me up for a robbery,” she said.
“And I was like, ‘Wow.’ ... I knew something was off, that something was wrong.”
Both she and her boyfriend have steady jobs, she said, “and we don’t have a reason to rob anybody.”
“He was calm, I guess I would say resilient,” Brown said. “He wasn’t panicking. He just knew that something was wrong.” She said he thought he’d be out “later that night” when police realized their mistake.
Maurice Antonio Williams told the Daily Press last week that he’s never previously spent any time in the City Jail.
He said he kept to himself during his two nights in custody. He passed the time, he said, “mostly by trying to just think about my family,” referring to his girlfriend, his 8-year-old son and 3-year old daughter.
“I just wanted to go home,” he said.
Girlfriend digs for answers
The first thing the next morning, Brown, 36, went to the courthouse and magistrate’s office. She called police, bail bondsman and local lawyers. But she didn’t think people were “really listening” at first.
“I’ve never been through this stuff before,” she said. “So I’m just trying to figure out what I’m supposed to do ... They hear all the time that they have the wrong person, and I’m trying to explain to them, “No, like, I really think you have the wrong person.’”
She added that Maurice Antonio Williams was with her at home watching a college football bowl game on the night of the robbery.
On Jan. 20, the day after the arrest, a judge ordered Williams held without bond until his March 24 court date.
“That’s kind of when panic started setting in,” Brown said. “Because he’s like, ‘I’m not sitting here till March 24,’ so when he was telling me all that, I’m like, ‘Okay, I need to get on the ball here.’”
She also began doing her own digging. Her boyfriend’s address was listed — incorrectly — on the arrest warrant as being in the 1300 block of 24th Street, the site of the Jan. 2 robbery. But the couple lives on Turlington Road in Midtown Newport News.
Brown typed the 24th Street address and the name into Google. “Lo and behold, there was another Maurice Williams living at that address,” she said.
She told police of her findings, and a lieutenant called her that Thursday morning, Jan. 21, followed by a call from the police chief. “Hey, it’s the first I’m hearing about this, and we’re trying to figure out what’s going on,” Drew told her.
Court records indicate that police didn’t show the robbery victim a photo lineup of possible suspects before making the initial arrest.
But on Jan. 21, officers showed the victim a photo array that included Maurice Lavonta Williams, 37, of 24th Street, with court documents saying that he “positively identified” him as the man who robbed him. (Officers also showed him a picture of Maurice Antonio Williams, and he said he wasn’t the right man).
“I would have thought that would have been the first thing they would have done,” Christina Brown said last week.
Police realize mistake
The police lieutenant called Brown that afternoon. “Hey, Ms. Brown, I think you’re right,” he said. “It looks like we got the wrong person. We’re working now on trying to get him out.”
Prosecutors got in touch with Maurice’s court-appointed attorney, Josh Goff, who visited his client at the jail. “We got to get you out of here,” Goff told him.
That afternoon, Deputy Commonwealth’s Attorney Dennis Guthinger filed a motion with the court to drop the charges, saying Williams had been “misidentified ... as being the perpetrator of the offense.”
General District Judge Matthew W. Hoffman granted the motion, and Williams walked out of the jail that afternoon.
Goff praised police and prosecutors for acting fast once they realized their mistake. “They straight up arrested the wrong guy,” he said. “But the police and the commonwealth acted very quickly, to their credit.”
‘This should not have happened’
Drew, for his part, said “his heart goes out” to Maurice Antonio Williams and his family and co-workers, “because at the end of the day, this should not have happened.”
There are several Maurice Williamses in the police computer system, and officers “were going with the descriptions that were given to them,” he said. But he said they should have done better.
“It was simply that we did not do a thorough enough investigation,” Drew said. “This is a mistaken identity ... No words that I say are acceptable, but I know that we got it wrong. We made a mistake.”
The two officers who investigated the robbery — one with almost four years on the force and another with 13 years’ experience — “are good officers,” he said.
“These ladies are outstanding officers,” Drew said, saying they mentor youth, have worked on suicide prevention, and have had “minimal to nil” complaints filed against them.
He said both officers are “very remorseful,” and “broke down” when told of what happened. “You could see the anguish and shock on their faces,” he said.
Both officers asked him if they could apologize to Maurice Antonio Williams in person. “I think that’s admirable,” Drew said, saying he will set that up if Williams is OK with such a meeting.
As for why the arresting officers — different from the ones who investigated — wouldn’t tell Williams why he was being arrested, Drew said circumstances vary on when someone is informed. But in most cases, he said, people being arrested should be told of the charges “as soon as possible.”
When police realized they got the wrong man, Drew said, “the top priority was to get him out,” and they called the prosecutor’s office to make that happen quickly.
The chief also sent officers to the retirement home where Williams worked to explain. “We wanted to make sure that they understood that he hadn’t done anything wrong,” Drew said. “I didn’t want anybody losing a job.”
Moreover, Drew said he’s ordered mandatory officer training on “thorough investigations, solid documentation, lineups and photos,” as well as “asking the right questions in interviews” and having supervisors review investigations.
“These are things that I want us to just refresh on,” he said. “My goal is to try to decrease the probability of something like this ever happening again.”
On Jan. 21, police issued an arrest warrant for Maurice Lavonta Williams, and he was taken into custody just over a week later. He’s being held without bond at the City Jail, and is scheduled to appear in court Wednesday.