Weather | Sports | Forums | Comics | Classifieds | Calendar | Movies
Four deputies looked at Steven Sullivan's photo and agreed he sold crack cocaine to an undercover detective. Only, he didn't.
By WILLIAM R. LEVESQUE
© St. Petersburg Times, published February 13, 2000
SAFETY HARBOR -- One after the other, without a quiver of uncertainty, four Pinellas sheriff's deputies looked at the photo of Steven Blair Sullivan and agreed there was no doubt:
Sullivan was the man who sold an undercover detective crack cocaine Nov. 7, 1997.
"I recall him just as good now as I did then," sheriff's Detective Tim Connolly said more than a year after Sullivan supposedly sold him $20 of crack.
A lawyer asked: How positive was he?
"A hundred percent," Connolly answered.
So it went for a year as Sullivan, 40, awaited trial on felony charges that could send him to prison for years. He told his lawyer that police had the wrong man. But even his attorney thought Sullivan would be convicted.
Who would jurors believe? It was Sullivan's word against the unequivocal testimony of four trained, street-smart cops used to hearing the protests of "innocent" defendants.
But this time, the cops got it wrong. Sullivan was no drug dealer. His case was a rare commodity in a courthouse overflowing with guilt.
His was a case of mistaken identity.
The story of Sullivan's wrongful arrest underscores the tenuous nature of eyewitness identification, even among professionals trained to observe. It's a lesson about how a drug dealer assumed a stranger's identity and slipped away as police moved to arrest the wrong man.
Police looked at a picture of Sullivan but saw the face of another man.
Now Pinellas Sheriff Everett Rice wants the case to disappear. He has asked a judge to expunge the file of Sullivan's case, forever erasing any record of a wrongful arrest. But somebody wants to keep it open:
An innocent man.
"I want everyone to see what they did," Sullivan said. "I want them to see so it won't happen again."
In less than a minute, a drug buy was completed
Connolly and his partner, Craig Chaisson, radioed to two uniformed deputies and described Pickles. They wanted the deputies to get his real name.
Pickles told the uniformed deputies his name was Steven Sullivan. He provided a birthday and a Largo address. He gave the officers a repairman's portable telephone, which he said he had found and wanted to return for a reward.
He also gave them a pager number.
But deputies didn't arrest him. They didn't want to blow the undercover detectives' cover, so they led Pickles to believe their stop was a coincidence. Pickles would be arrested later.
When the undercover detectives returned to the Sheriff's Office, they searched for mug shots of Sullivan. They found one. In 1992, Sullivan had been convicted of misdemeanor battery for pushing his girlfriend against a wall.
Police looked at the mug shot and decided Sullivan was the drug dealer. Later, they obtained a copy of his driver's license photo. They were unswayed in their identification.
Days later, police returned to the Baskins area to find and arrest Pickles. But he had disappeared.
Now Steven Sullivan was the man in a pickle.
More than a year passed. On Jan. 3, 1999, Sullivan was pulled over by a sheriff's cruiser as he returned from a friend's house in Clearwater.
The Safety Harbor resident thought: Taillight out? Speeding? Bad turn?
A deputy told him the most astounding news of his life. He was wanted for selling and possession cocaine.
"I had never even touched a marijuana cigarette my entire life," Sullivan said.
He was arrested and booked at the Pinellas County Jail. Sullivan, a Clearwater loan officer and then an alternate member of Safety Harbor's zoning commission, was released after a few hours, posting $5,000 bail.
His mother, Shirley Sullivan, remembers nearly swooning at the news.
"My son is no drug dealer," she said. "That wasn't Steve. If the police always get their man, then they were one man short that night."
Sullivan, who is single, pooled all his resources with his family and hired Clearwater lawyer George Tragos, a veteran defense attorney who has probably heard it all from his clients.
One overworn line he's heard from a thousand guilty men: I'm innocent.
He heard it from Sullivan. But something struck him about the college-educated man who swore he was innocent.
"Steve didn't strike me as someone who stands on street corners yelling, "Yo! Yo! Yo!' to passing cars," Tragos said.
The phone Pickles gave police was never dusted for prints. The pager number was never traced. The address Pickles gave police did not exist
Tragos asked the Sheriff's Office if it videotaped the drug buy. Both Connolly and Chaisson testified before trial they had not.
That left the testimony of four officers, three white and one black, certain in their identification of Sullivan. And their testimony appeared unshakeable.
Tragos, months before a trial was set, asked Chaisson to look at Sullivan's mug shot yet again.
Pointing to the photo, he asked, "Are you sure that was" the drug dealer?
"Yes," the officer answered.
"No doubt in your mind?"
"Not in my mind."
Big trouble, Tragos thought. Sullivan was eager to go to trial to prove his innocence.
Sullivan became angry at his attorney over delays in the case. But Tragos, a former prosecutor, said, "I had to prove his innocence. If we went to trial, he would have been convicted."
Then in April, something that wasn't supposed to exist was discovered.
Pickles reappeared -- on a videotape.
It was the videotape of the drug buy that Connolly and Chaisson swore in depositions did not exist. Connolly said he found it forgotten in his desk.
Tragos put it in his VCR as he and his client watched excitedly. The tape showed a man approach Connolly and sell the crack.
It was clear to both that the man on the tape was not Sullivan. It was the elusive Pickles.
But the tape is of poor quality. And the sun's position backlights the suspect, making an absolute identification difficult.
The tape didn't sway the sheriff's deputies who were as sure as ever that they had their man.
They didn't know it then. But they were looking at Pickles and seeing Sullivan.
"They saw what they wanted to see," Sullivan said.
Meanwhile, Sullivan said, his life was falling apart. He was in constant fear of losing his job at Norwest Mortgage, which nonetheless stood behind him. His income, based on commission, dropped as did his ability to focus on his job.
He said he suffered from anxiety attacks and began to become obsessed about going to prison.
"You don't have a life," Sullivan said, "with something like this hanging over you."
Tragos, meanwhile, was working frantically to develop evidence of Sullivan's innocence.
Then in December, a thought hit Tragos. He requested any reports the sheriff had on other incidents involving Sullivan.
He hit pay dirt.
Pickles had used Sullivan's name before. In 1997, before the drug buy, someone hit Pickles in the head with a brick. Pickles told police who investigated that he was Steven Blair Sullivan.
What police did in their investigation of the brick attack might have saved Sullivan from an unjust drug conviction.
They took a picture of Pickles and his injury.
The drug charges had been dropped
Officers, Tragos said, finally saw a picture of Pickles masquerading as Sullivan and realized they had charged an innocent man.
For the year Sullivan had been charged, evidence of his innocence had been in the Sheriff's Office all along.
"They could have found it themselves," said Tragos. Deputies "made a drug buy on the street and that was the last work they did on the case. They were too lazy to do a complete investigation."
Tragos also said deputies should have noted obvious differences in the physical appearance of the two black men: Pickles has fairer skin and is 10 years younger with ears that are more pronounced than Sullivan's. Sullivan is 80 pounds heavier.
But Rice said the men actually look alike. Anyone, he said, could confuse Pickles and Sullivan. "If you look at their pictures," he said, "they look very similar."
Sullivan said the sheriff is making excuses. "My faith in the justice system is shot," he said. "This could happen to anybody."
A week after charges were dropped, the Sheriff's Office filed a rare motion to expunge the criminal file.
Tragos said he believes the expungement is an effort to limit publicity in an embarrassing case. Rice disagreed.
"It's just part of trying to undo a wrong," said Rice, who acknowledges he can't recall his office ever moving to do so before. "It's the least we can do. We arrested the wrong man."
The expungement won't happen just yet -- Sullivan objects to it, blocking the attempt.
Rice, meanwhile, said the case is unfortunate. But he doesn't blame his officers.
"I'm upset this happened the way it has and that the wrong person got arrested," Rice said. "But it's hard to fault any person in this except, of course, Pickles. He's the one who started all this by using Mr. Sullivan's name" and date of birth.
Rice acknowledges his deputies could have used "a little more caution."
He said deputies had Sullivan's Safety Harbor address and should have visited him before making an arrest. The officers, none of whom returned calls for comment, also should have been alerted by Sullivan's lack of a prior drug record.
But Rice said, "I don't think they were negligent."
Rice blames someone other than Pickles for the delay in dropping charges: Sullivan's attorney.
"I've known George Tragos for 25 years, and he knows he could have picked up the phone and called me in the beginning to say we had the wrong person, and we would have done everything to try to clear the guy," the sheriff said.
Tragos said, "Who'd think to call the sheriff when four of his own officers say they've got the right man?"
And Rice said Sullivan would have been cleared faster had he been jailed rather than free on bail. "Once he's out of jail," Rice said, "it's not so urgent to straighten out an ID issue right then."
Rice said cases of mistaken identity are exceptionally rare. But he acknowledged they do, unfortunately, occur in all police agencies.
One case reported by the Times last year involved his own office when a Dunedin man was mistakenly arrested by deputies. The problem in that case: The man's name was nearly identical to a drug dealer's.
Charges were dropped after about three months.
As for Pickles: his real name is Ephrine Pride.
Pride, 30, who is now in prison on drug charges, told sheriff's investigators he found Sullivan's wallet, leading him to use his identity.
Rice said Pride, who has a long record of drug and theft offenses, will never be charged for the crime that Sullivan spent a year defeating.
"He's going to have a good defense," said Rice, "since we've already claimed it was somebody else."