Lawsuit: Man was framed by childhood friend, charged by CMPD, then fired
Charlotte-Mecklenburg police charged the wrong man with felony drug crimes and misdemeanor breaking or entering, which hurt his reputation and cost him a teaching job, he told The Charlotte Observer.
“You go and you serve your country — you would never expect to come home and something like this happens to you,” said military veteran Kendrick Gonzalez, who filed the lawsuit.
Yet it did happen, he and his attorney said, and left him without his jobs as a middle school football coach and science teacher.
Gonzalez has sued three officers and the city of Charlotte for malicious prosecution and gross negligence in the 2023 incident.
“By failing to properly train, supervise, or discipline its employees on this issue, the City has shown a deliberate indifference to a highly likely recurring situation,” the Feb. 14 complaint said.
Gonzalez said he hopes his lawsuit closes a likely policy gap. He suspects other people have been in his position.
The three officers named as defendants and the city all asked a judge to toss the lawsuit on May 15.
“We won’t be able to provide a comment on pending litigation,” CMPD said in an email to The Charlotte Observer.
WCNC first reported on Gonzalez’s lawsuit.
What’s alleged
The ordeal began in February 2023, when three Charlotte-Mecklenburg police officers arrested a man sleeping in a hotel room that was supposed to be vacant, according to the lawsuit.
First, the suspect told police his name was Khalil Wiggins. When they kept questioning him, he said he was Kendrick Gonzalez.
In fact, “Kendrick Gonzalez” was Kemardrick Sherrod — a childhood friend of the real Kendrick Gonzalez.
The two lived on the same street growing up, and Gonzalez was friends with Sherrod and his siblings, he said.
He said he remembered when Sherrod started getting arrested. They drifted apart naturally while Gonzalez was focused on school.
Gonzalez’s lawsuit said Sherrod “did not provide any identifying documents” to the police, and even after they checked a state Department of Motor Vehicles record and thought a photograph attached did not look like their man, they still arrested him and took him to the Mecklenburg County jail.
The charges: felony possession of heroin, misdemeanor breaking or entering, resisting public officer and possession of drug paraphernalia.
On Feb. 28 that year, the county clerk’s office sent a letter to Gonzalez’s home in Graham notifying him about a May 1 court date.
“How in the world do I got a court date in Charlotte for some charges I didn’t do?” he remembered asking his wife.
What he didn’t know was that a conviction had already been filed under his name, according to the lawsuit. Sherrod pleaded guilty under Gonzalez’s name to the breaking or entering charge on March 1, before the letter arrived, according to the lawsuit and Gonzalez’ attorney.
Incident cost man coaching, teaching jobs
When Gonzalez did an internet search, he started to piece together what had happened.
“I found the mugshot of him with my name. It had my mother’s address and all of my information as well,” he said.
At some point in the confusion — the timing bleeds together because of how stressful it was, he said — he called and talked with someone working at CMPD. The person he spoke with said the charges showed as pending, but nothing would actually be on his record because it was going to be moved to Sherrod, Gonzalez recalled.
Still, the charges cost him his new job teaching science to eighth graders and a different job coaching middle school football players.
“I literally taught one day — taught one day — and then I went to practice after school that same day, and that’s when they called me and were like, ‘Yeah, you have these felonies — full-blown, you’ve got to get out of here. Got to go.’”
After his military service, Gonzalez said he and his wife moved to the Alamance County area and tried to be involved in the community. It took time to build a good reputation, he said.
With the false charges, he was in a situation he could not explain his way out of, he said. He failed the background check and his employer wasn’t interested in hearing his explanation, he said.
For attorney Dominique Camm to clear Gonzalez’s name was a long, multistep process, the attorney said.
But Camm said that even today, after the record has been corrected officially and the charges under Gonzalez’s name have been expunged, some bells cannot be unrung.
“There are still pockets and places where this information still exists,” Camm said, like private mugshot websites.
Searching for a fix
The betrayal from a childhood friend and the embarrassment in a place where Gonzalez worked to build a good reputation left him with an “insurmountable” mental health toll, he said. He is not interested in going back to the old coaching or teaching jobs.
Today, he is studying medical coding and taking care of a new baby.
He and Camm said they hope the lawsuit will clarify how CMPD handles situations where someone lies about their identity in the future.
“We just want to make sure there’s a uniform policy that prevents this from happening, in this area, to anyone else,” Camm said.