It Took 11 Days to End a Nightmare

Tony Lee Bell stepped into a San Francisco police cruiser one day this month and rode straight into the worst nightmare of his life.

Picked up for a misdemeanor narcotics offense, Bell spent 11 days behind bars while he tried to convince authorities to check his fingerprints to prove that he was not the man they said he was--a fugitive with a similar name wanted in Los Angeles.

But it was only after he was shipped to Southern California on a sheriff’s bus filled with felons, booked into Los Angeles County Jail and hauled into Municipal Court that law enforcement officials realized that Bell, after all, had been telling the truth.

“He was the wrong guy,” said Los Angeles County Deputy Dist. Atty. Irvin S. Cohen, who arranged the court-ordered fingerprint check that finally set Bell free--but not before he suffered one further indignity.

Before Bell was released from jail, youth gang members who shared his holding cell robbed him of $20 that court personnel had contributed to help him return to San Francisco. Bell was turned loose without a dime in his pocket, 400 miles from home. Charges were never filed in connection with his original arrest.

Bell, who is unemployed, doesn’t pretend to be Mr. Clean. He had been arrested once on suspicion of forgery, but never has been convicted of a crime. Still, he said, what happened to him shouldn’t happen to anyone.

“I’m going to need some time to get my head together,” Bell said quietly after his release early last Friday. “This whole experience is really a mind-blower.”

Law enforcement officials in San Francisco and Los Angeles were unable to provide a complete explanation of what happened. But the officials told The Times that the chain of events that led to Bell’s 11-day trip through the Twilight Zone was most irregular, to say the least.

“This is one of those things that happens once in a million, I guess,” said Detective John C. Beimer of the Los Angeles Police Department.

Bell’s problems began Sept. 9, when he and another man were arrested in the doorway of a building on Jones Street in San Francisco. Police found an unused hypodermic syringe in Bell’s pocket. Bell said the other man had dropped the syringe and he had picked it up.

After Bell was booked and fingerprinted, officers checked a statewide computer system to determine if he was wanted elsewhere. After a time, they came up with what appeared to be, in police parlance, a “hit.”

The Los Angeles Police Department was looking for a Ron L. Bell, who had failed to appear in court on a felony narcotics charge in 1982. Ron L. Bell was born on Feb. 17, 1957, weighs 170 pounds, stands 5 feet, 6 inches tall and is black, according to the information on the computer printout.

Unfortunate Coincidence

In what turned out to be an unfortunate coincidence, Tony Bell had also been born on Feb. 17, 1957. He weighs 164 pounds, is about 5 feet, 8 inches tall and also is black.

San Francisco police sent a teletype message to Los Angeles, indicating that they had found the fugitive, Ron Bell.

The next morning, that message arrived on the desk of Detective Beimer, who works in the warrant section of the Los Angeles Police Department’s narcotics division. But when Beimer telephoned San Francisco to find out more about the suspect, a secretary in the San Francisco warrants section said that Bell had been released.

“I was told that the San Francisco Police Department had determined that the guy in custody was not the man that we wanted on our warrant . . . ,” Beimer said, “so I thanked them very much, phoned up the (Los Angeles) warrant section and told them to put the warrant back into the system. Then I went on vacation.”

But back in San Francisco, Tony Bell was still very much in custody, even though charges involving the hypodermic needle were not filed. Bell recalled that when he was brought to court the day after his arrest, “the bailiff walked into the holding cell and said, ‘Tony Lee Bell, your case has been dismissed.’

“At that time, I said, ‘Good, can I go home now?’ And they said, ‘No, you’re being held here on a warrant out of Los Angeles County.’ ”

Despite Bell’s protests, he was sent back to San Francisco County Jail, where he was held for a week. As far as he knows, Bell said, no one at the jail ever compared his fingerprints with those of the Los Angeles fugitive.

‘Tried Everything’

Bell said he repeatedly asked the San Francisco public defender’s office to look into his case. On Monday, Sept. 16, Deputy Public Defender Jan M. Lecklikner went to see Bell at the County Jail.

Lecklikner discovered that Bell was to be picked up the next morning by a Los Angeles County Sheriff’s bus that travels up and down the state collecting fugitives and bringing convicts to and from state prisons.

“I tried everything I could do to stop it from happening,” Lecklikner said. But, she added, “The bureaucracy is fairly unyielding.”

The next day at 8:15 a.m., Tony Bell was on his way to Los Angeles, re-christened as Ron L. Bell.

The most disturbing part of the ride, Bell said, was a stop at the Correctional Training Facility at Soledad. “I had just heard on the news that Soledad had a big riot and some deputies got stabbed or shot or something and the whole prison was in a big lockdown,” Bell said. He did not enjoy the several hours he spent handcuffed next to four Soledad convicts.

After a night in Los Angeles County Jail, Bell landed in court again on Sept. 18. Through his new public defender, Bernadette Everman, Bell again requested a fingerprint comparison. Los Angeles Municipal Judge Elva R. Soper issued the order and the check was carried out the next day. Fourteen hours later, at 5:30 a.m. last Friday, the paper work was completed and Bell was out.

Authorities interviewed by The Times agreed that Bell’s nightmare should not have happened.

Officer Linda S. Wittcop, a public affairs officer for the San Francisco Police Department, said it was an employee in the department’s warrant section who determined that Bell was a wanted man. That employee is on vacation for a month and cannot be reached.

“I don’t know what happened there,” Wittcop said. “Either (the employee) made a mistake in not properly confirming the warrant or not giving the information to our jail, or the jail got the information and didn’t act properly on it. That’s also a possibility.”

“We don’t control the warrant bureau,” said Lt. Thomas Chelini, a watch commander at the San Francisco County Jail, which is operated by the Sheriff’s Department. “Once a guy comes to us, we mostly assume the Police Department has checked this guy out.”

Los Angeles Detective Beimer said that if he had known that Bell was still being held when he called San Francisco, he would have asked detailed questions about Bell’s physical appearance and fingerprint classifications before ordering Bell shipped to Los Angeles.

In any event, Bell should not have been transported by Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies without an explicit request from Los Angeles police, Beimer said.

Bell said the experience left him in shock.

“It almost came to a point where I felt that I was going to have a nervous breakdown. One more day in that jail would have kicked me over,” he said. “I’m still having trouble dealing with it.”