‘Humiliated’: Black Woman Wrongly Jailed for Three Days After Deputies Arrested Her Instead of White Suspect Solved Her Own Case to Get Out
A 49-year-old Black woman was wrongly arrested in front of her grandson, charged with elder abuse and jailed for three days after deputy sheriffs in Georgia looking for a white suspect from Kentucky with a similar name erroneously took her into custody. Nickie Sledge was wrongly arrested in Canton, Georgia on Dec. 21, 2024 by Rockdale County Sheriff's Deputies looking for a white woman from Kentucky named Nikki Sledge suspected of abusing an elderly relative. (Photo: WSB-TV screenshot) Nickie Sledge of Lithonia, Georgia, said she was baffled when deputies from Rockdale County showed up at the movie theater in Conyers where she was watching a movie with her 5-year-old grandson on Dec. 21, 2024, just a few days before Christmas.They had lured her outside with a text saying her car had been struck in the parking lot, civil rights attorney Harry M. Daniels, who is representing her, told Atlanta Black Star. “’Elder abuse? My elderly mother lives with me. I’m being punked,” she recalled telling them, reported WSB. “No ma’am, you’re not being punked,” a female deputy sternly replied. ‘Bad Apples’: Two Rogue Louisiana Cops Fired After Beating Black Men and Throwing a Teen Girl to the Ground in 24 Hours of Pure Lawless RageShe was patted down and put in a patrol car, and whisked away to the county jail, where she was strip searched and processed. Her grandson was taken in another patrol car to the local police station. The warrant the deputies carried was for a 43-year-old white woman named Nikki Sledge from Covington, Kentucky, who was wanted on two counts of abuse, neglect or exploitation of disabled or elderly. The warrant was issued in Cherokee County, so Sledge was transported at 2 a.m. to the county detention center there, and strip searched again. “I knew they had the wrong person,” she said. “But it’s like, how am I going to prove it?” She was in the Cherokee County Jail for three days and at some point got a look at the case report and noticed the accused was a white woman who was six years younger. She pointed this out to her jailers, who then informed a supervisor. But she still had to wait to go before a judge, who viewed the report and said, according to Sledge, “It says on here ‘family violence.’ Well, I can clearly see she ain’t related.” View this post on Instagram A post shared by Attorney Gerald A. Griggs Sr (@attorneygriggs) According to the case report from the Cherokee County Sheriff’s Office provided to reporters by Daniels, the victim in the elder abuse case was the bedridden grandfather of Nikki Sledge’s husband, Joshua Sledge. It said Nikki and Joshua Sledge, who live in Kentucky, had neglected the cancer-stricken man, who lived in Woodstock, Georgia, while his wife was in the hospital. The Sledges were accused of fraudulently using his credit cards to buy $3,500 worth of goods at Walmart. The Cherokee case report indicated that images and a video still of the two suspects showed they had left Georgia and were last seen in a motel along I-75 in Florence, Kentucky. The images also clearly revealed they were white, said Daniels.Nickie Sledge, who lives in Lithonia, Georgia, has never lived in Kentucky, Daniels said. For the past 20 years she has run an HR consulting business, NSure Your Future, in Georgia and has no criminal record. Ironically, he said, the only time she has spent in jail has been during the Bible studies she leads with inmates at the Dekalb County Jail. Sledge had attended a meeting with her religious group prior to going to the movie with her grandson on the day of her arrest, he said."She is just a sweet, nice woman. And she was devastated by this experience," Daniels said, noting that she was strip searched twice during her ordeal behind bars. She is now seeing a mental health counselor for her ongoing anxiety and trauma related to the incident, he said."This is absolutely dereliction of duty by law enforcement, who had a duty to do their job properly and either deliberately chose to swear the warrant to a magistrate with wrong information that could easily been checked, or it was gross recklessness. Either way, it led to the same consequences for Ms. Sledge — being arrested, patted down and put in a police car in front of her grandson, publicly humiliated, and then falsely imprisoned. We can't have these kind of errors that harm innocent people."Daniels noted "there was a full investigation, a signed warrant, one arrest, two strip searches at two different jails, multiple days in custody and a bond hearing, and no one bothered to notice that a 49-year-old Black grandmother from Georgia who’d never been in trouble with the law before wasn’t the same woman as a 43-year-old white suspect from Kentucky." Even though the charges against her were dismissed in February, Sledge is concerned the arrest may cause problems for her down the line. “This is a record that won’t disappear,” Sledge told WSB. “It’s gonna follow me the rest of my life.” Daniels told Atlanta Black Star he is likely to file a civil suit on her behalf against Cherokee County seeking compensation for the “nightmare ordeal” she experienced. He will first make pre-litigation demands on the Cherokee Sheriff's Department and the Cherokee County Board of Commissioners, giving them an opportunity to settle."Someone has to answer for what happened here," he said. "This is a person that has no criminal record. She's a hard-working taxpaying citizen, a law-abiding citizen, and all of a sudden, on a good day, happy day, spending time with your grandchild you get arrested, you get taken away, ripped," said Daniels. "Your freedom of liberty is taken away, all because somebody didn't do their job." The Cherokee County Sheriff’s Office said a statement on Wednesday it had just become aware of the matter and had “not yet received any communications from Ms. Sledge or her attorney, nor have we been served with any civil papers related to this incident. However, we take this matter very seriously and are actively reviewing the situation to understand what occurred.”
