4 arrested on night of mob violence exonerated

A Jefferson County grand jury Tuesday declined to indict the defendants dubbed the "Misidentified Four" who claimed they were the victims of shoddy identification procedures when arrested on the night of the mob violence in Louisville.

The grand jury exonerated Shaquazz Allen, 18; Tyrone Booker Jr., 19; Craig Dean, 20, and Jerron Bush, 21, on a robbery charge that could have carried up to 20 years in prison, and cleared Allen and Booker on additional charges of unlawful imprisonment, criminal mischief and assault.

The four men, who are cousins and had never been convicted of a crime, said they were sitting on the front porch of a house on North 39th Street on March 22 when, two blocks away a woman reported that she'd been robbed of her purse and cell phone at gunpoint by four men.

The woman and her boyfriend could only describe the perpetrators as black, ages 16 to 20, and all wearing black hoodies, and said they headed northbound on 39th.

Louisville Metro Police confronted the first four black men they found and brought the victim and her boyfriend to the house, where they identified the four as the perpetrators.

The defendant's lawyer, Jan Waddell, claimed the process used — called 'show-up' identification — was unduly suggestive and that there was no evidence — such as the cell phone, the purse or the gun — found to tie them to the crime.

Allen and Booker were subsequently charged with another crime earlier in the evening after their mug shots from the robbery were broadcast on TV.

But Waddell said cell phone tower records showed they were eight miles away at the time of that crime, in which a family was imprisoned in their car by a rampaging mob and a passenger punched in the face.

Waddell called the initial identification of the men the most suggested identification procedure he'd seen in 39 years of practice, but police Chief Steve Conrad said it was justified because the men were found only two blocks from the crime and fit the general description offered by the victim and her boyfriend.

Conrad acknowledged that the officers should have searched the house for the missing gun, purse and cell phone, and gotten the number of the woman's phone to see if it was used after the men were taken into custody.

The crime victim later said she saw one of the perpetrators on the street when all of them were either in custody or home incarceration.

Staff Writer Andrew Wolfson can be reached at (502) 582-7189