Little Rock man wrongly accused

Greg Holmes’ cousin called and warned him that his phone was about to “blow up.”

It was about 9 p.m. on Dec. 22 and news had broke authorities had arrested a man in the fatal shooting of 3-year-old Acen King in Little Rock. The U.S. Marshals Service, which had helped Little Rock police make the arrest, identified the suspect only as “Greg Holmes.”

The agency did not provide a photo of the man, or his age, race or home address. Little Rock police did not immediately comment on the arrest.

As his cousin predicted, Greg Holmes’ phone started ringing off the hook. Friends, family members and co-workers wanted to know how Holmes, a 42-year-old car salesman known for surprising people with homemade pies, could be accused of killing a toddler.

They weren’t the only ones who wanted to know more.

That night, in the absence of other identifying information, numerous Facebook users searched “Greg Holmes” on the social networking website. Several found the Little Rock man’s car salesman’s profile and shared it alongside news reports. One person posted his phone number.

“Is this the same Greg Holmes that sells cars???” one Facebook user wrote.

Holmes said he soon received countless messages and phone calls, some of them threatening, from strangers who thought he had been arrested in Acen’s killing.

Authorities had actually arrested Gary Eugene Holmes, a 33-year-old felon, in the toddler’s death. The U.S. Marshals Service had reported the wrong first name.

The agency named the real suspect about an hour later, and news outlets quickly updated stories on the arrest.

But for Greg Holmes, the mistake had already taken a toll.

“It was horrible,” he said.

A HIGH-INTEREST CASE

Acen King was killed the night of Dec. 17 in what Little Rock police described as an act of road rage.

The toddler was sleeping in the backseat of his grandmother’s car when a man reportedly got out of another vehicle and opened fire.

The case made headlines across the world.

Authorities offered a $40,000 reward for information on the shooting. Elected officials and community leaders publicly demanded that the killer surrender.

Word spread rapidly across Twitter and Facebook after authorities arrested “Greg Holmes” in the case.

“Suspect: Greg Holmes of Little Rock,” one Facebook user wrote.

“Betting Greg Holmes is over his rage… for good,” another person commented.

After the arrest was reported, worldwide searches for “Acen King” increased 63 percent from a previous high recorded in the days after his killing, according to Google Trends.

Google searches for “Greg Holmes,” the name provided by the U.S. Marshals Service, also reached an all-time high.

Several of the car salesman’s friends and colleagues, including Delnorte Chunn, 46, said they began receiving calls and messages from people who’d heard the news. Chunn said acquaintances in Atlanta and Dallas, some of whom he hadn’t spoken to in a “pretty good while,” called because they’d heard his friend of 16 years, the car salesman, was a suspect.

James Holloway, 44, who works with Greg Holmes, said several of his friends searched for the name on Facebook. Holloway said one of them found his colleague’s profile, as numerous others had.

That friend wrote to Holloway: “Don’t you know this guy? He’s the one that got arrested in the road rage killing.”

SEEKING CLARIFICATION

Gary Eugene Holmes, the man accused of killing Acen King, was booked in the Pulaski County jail on charges of capital murder and terroristic threatening at 10:57 p.m. on Dec. 22, according to the jail website.

Greg Holmes said his name was still circulating online at the time, so he went on Facebook Live, the website’s video broadcast service, to set the record straight about who had been arrested.

His friends did the same. They spoke in his defense in several comment threads, responding to users who had called for “Greg Holmes” to be imprisoned for life, sexually assaulted or, as more than one Facebook user suggested, executed in the street and hung on public display.

“This is NOT our Greg Holmes !!!! He is not this guy y’all know it,” Tami Dick wrote. “He bakes pies for crying out loud !!!! ”

Some people, seeking to correct other Facebook users, shared links to the real suspect’s Facebook profile.

Even after news outlets fixed the mistake and online communities shared the real suspect’s name, there was still confusion.

One Facebook user wrote: “Gary Holmes or Greg Holmes? Contradiction…”

Another person, in response to a post identifying Gary Eugene Holmes as the suspect, wrote: “I think they said his real name was Greg.”

As the real suspect’s name spread, several Facebook posts mentioning “Greg Holmes” were deleted.

But Greg Holmes said he still received strange phone calls and messages. Sometimes the person on the line quickly hung up.

Other times they had something to say. Greg Holmes last got one of those calls in March.

He said he picked up the phone and a man said, “I’m out of prison now, you baby killer.”

INTERNET SLEUTHS

The U.S. Marshals Service named “Greg Holmes” as the man arrested in Acen’s killing, but it was Internet users who incorrectly linked Greg Holmes, the Little Rock car salesman, to the case.

It’s not the first instance of Internet sleuthing gone wrong.

In the days after the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013, users of Reddit infamously sought to find the men who committed the attack. Thousands of users examined photographs, shared news clips and combed social media accounts in search of the bombers.

The crowd-sourced investigation, as some called it, led Reddit users to wrongfully accuse several people in the attack before authorities named brothers Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev as the bombers.

Stephanie Schulte, a University of Arkansas professor who studies the connection between technology and culture, said the relative anonymity of the Internet empowers people to spread such misinformation.

“The norms in online spaces are different, in part because you’re hidden behind a screen,” she said.

That’s a luxury that most lawmen don’t have.

Deputy U.S. Marshal Kevin Sanders, who supervises the fugitive apprehension team that helped Little Rock police arrest Gary Eugene Holmes, said he didn’t know how the names “Gary” and “Greg” got mixed up.

The suspect’s first and last name are listed correctly in a court affidavit filed before the arrest.

“Somewhere along the way,” Sanders said, “it just got relayed to us that his name was Greg.”