‘I Was Just Stunned’: Cops Allegedly Fingerprinted the Actual Suspect, Then Charged a Completely Different Man Anyway, and Nearly Cost a North Carolina Teacher Everything
Kendrick Gonzalez, a Black man from North Carolina with a clean criminal record, was working his dream job as a schoolteacher and coach in 2023 when he received a call from human resources informing him he was being fired for having been arrested on several felonies, including breaking and entering and possession of heroin.
It was a shocking call that turned out to be a lie. And it nearly destroyed his life.
The 38-year-old U.S. Army veteran remained unemployed for a year after being terminated from the middle school where he had been working for only a short period, was rejected from more than 100 jobs, and came close to losing the home he shared with his wife.
Turns out, it was a childhood friend with a long criminal record who used his name after being arrested for breaking into a hotel — a man named Kemardrick Sherrod who did not even look like Gonzalez, other than his skin color — a detail noted in the police report.
But for unexplained reasons, Charlotte-Mecklenburg police failed to remove his name as the suspect, which is why he ended up being fired. It took nine months before the false record against him was expunged.
Now Gonzalez is suing the three officers who arrested Sherrod — Aubrey Guldager, Eric Wagner, and Lou Vang — as well as the city of Charlotte, accusing the defendants of malicious prosecution and gross negligence. Guldager was arrested for DWI in 2014 while employed for the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department.
Gonzalez eventually found a job at a daycare as an after-school teacher and van driver, but the man who graduated with a degree in education longs to return to the school system.
“I went to school to teach K-12, not to work in a daycare center,” Gonzalez told WCNC. “I want things to be made right.”
‘I Was Just Stunned’
Unbeknownst to Gonzalez at the time, his childhood friend Sherrod had been arrested after breaking into a vacant hotel room, where police found him using heroin.
Sherrod, whose life took a completely different path into adulthood compared to Gonzalez, has a long history of arrests dating back to 2008, when he was arrested for felony possession of cocaine.
The career criminal did not have identification on him and initially told police his name was Khalil Wiggins, giving a date of birth of Oct. 11, 1984.
But officers apparently did not believe him, so he then told them his name was Kendrick Gonzalez.
Police remained skeptical because when they compared driver’s license photos of the two men, they looked nothing alike.
“Officers were able to locate this name and date of birth, but did not believe the photo provided by the DMV matched the male,” one of the officers wrote on the arrest sheet, according to WRAL News.
They also fingerprinted him at the jail, which apparently revealed his true identity, but police did not make the correction in the system.
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When Sherrod pleaded guilty two weeks later, his real name was listed in court documents along with his previous criminal history, but somehow the guilty plea was recorded under Gonzalez’s name. Even the judge had her doubts.
“Magistrate Penny Lytle noted that there was uncertainty of the identity of Mr. Sherrod on the Magistrate’s Finding of Fact form,” the claim states.
It was not long after that when Gonzalez received the call from human resources while he was coaching football at middle school practice.
“I received a phone call from HR,” he told local media.
“I was literally in the middle of practice. All of the kids could hear the conversation, and the coaching staff as well, so it was extremely embarrassing. I was just stunned.”
He didn’t learn that his childhood friend had used his identity until he came across a mugshot of Sherrod labeled with Gonzalez’s name.
“I was immediately heartbroken,” Gonzalez said. “We grew up literally two doors down from each other. We played with action figures together in the sandbox.”
“(He) came to every birthday. We played travel baseball together. His dad was like a father figure to me. It really hurt me to my core. Why would you say my name out of all people?” Gonzalez continued.
And why would police or prosecutors — who are accustomed to defendants providing false names — not correct the mistake?
‘The Ball’s Been Dropped in Multiple Places’
Neither police nor prosecutors were able to explain to local media how the blunder occurred, instead blaming each other for the mistake that nearly destroyed Gonzalez’s life.
They also blamed Sherrod, but his lie should have been resolved after fingerprinting.
“I feel like the ball’s been dropped in multiple places, but it starts with law enforcement not identifying the person on the scene,” Gonzalez’s attorney, Dominique Camm, told local media.
“The issue is why not put in the extra effort to ensure a proper prosecution? Sometimes these things happen where people use other people’s names, but I’ve never seen it get this far.”
Despite Sherrod’s lengthy criminal history, there is no record in Mecklenburg County court files that he pleaded guilty to the felony charges stemming from the February 2023 arrest.
On May 15, the defendants filed a motion to dismiss the civil case after submitting their answers to the allegations listed in the lawsuit, denying any malicious behavior and insisting that DMV photos did not conclusively show Sherrod and Gonzalez were different people — despite what was written in the initial police report.
But Gonzalez still hasn’t fully recovered from the fallout of the false record.
“It was just devastating for me,” Gonzalez said. “How does this happen?”