A single typo by cops led to an innocent Canadian man spending 18 months in jail.
The man, Brandon Klayme of Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, was eventually acquitted of all charges on July 23 by the Nova Scotia Court of Appeals. But it was a small recompense for a catastrophic chain of incompetence that led him to being wrongly smeared as a child sex offender, completely upending his life.
In 2018, police in Wisconsin launched an investigation into a man on the Kik messaging app who had sent 125 sexually explicit messages to a 12-year-old girl. His username was fus__ro_dah, a reference to the 2011 video game The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.
But when the police sent a subpoena to Kik to unearth the user’s identity, they made a critical error: they asked for fus_ro_dah, missing a single underscore.
That so happened to be Klayme’s username. Kik, working off the erroneous username the cops provided, released an email address that investigators tied to an IP address in Canada, according to Ars Technica. They then reached out to the internet service provider associated with the IP, which provided where Klayme lived.
There were plenty of warning signs that the cops had the wrong man, but they went unheeded. Perhaps when the Wisconsin police handed over the investigation to Canadian authorities, the cops inheriting the case simply assumed that their counterparts across the border had done their due diligence.
That doesn’t excuse the baffling incompetence on display. After obtaining a search warrant, the Halifax Regional Police found zero evidence tying Klayme to the case or the underaged girl that the Kik user had messaged. They couldn’t even prove that Klayme had used his Kik account during the same period those explicit messages were sent, with Klayme maintaining he hadn’t accessed the account since 2012.
Despite all that, he was arrested and charged with child luring, possession of CSAM, and sending sexually explicit material to a child. When the case went to trial, neither side seemed to have noticed that the Kik username so central to the investigation wasn’t Klayme’s.
This proved to be costly. Somehow, despite the prosecution lacking any compelling evidence, Klayme was found guilty in January 2024 and sentenced to 18 months in prison. Klayme continued to protest his innocence, and eventually his lawyer, Zeb Brown, spotted the typo.
“We couldn’t figure out how Mr. Klayme’s account came into it,” Brown told the New York Times. “So we were taking a closer look at the trial evidence and the discrepancy was readily apparent in the printouts of the social media messages.”
The appeal judges, stating the obvious, said that the investigators gave Kik the wrong username. The actual person of interest lived in California.
“He should never have been charged, let alone convicted,” the judges said, per the NYT.
Klayme’s name was cleared, but by the time the judges overturned the conviction, he had already served his full sentence.
Halifax Regional Police, seemingly washing their hands of the error, merely stressed that it wasn’t the department that launched the investigation.
“This was a complex investigation as it began with a police agency in Wisconsin before the support of the Halifax Regional Police was requested,” it said in a statement, per the NYT.
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