Woman, Mistaken for Another with Same Name, Is Jailed

Lisa Craig said she was strip-searched, shackled and forced to sleep in a jail cell with 25 other inmates after sheriff’s deputies mistook her for another woman with the same name.

“I feel like I’ve lost some part of me,” the mother of three young children said after the error was discovered and she was released.

She lost her job at an escrow company because of the five days she spent in the Kern County jail.

“We’re very busy and she didn’t show up or call to explain where she was,” said Max Baham, the supervisor who fired her. “I didn’t even know about her being in jail.”

Craig, 33, first learned about the other Lisa Craig in 1989. A welfare fraud investigator came to her home in Victorville and asked whether she had worked for a physical therapist while accepting government assistance.

She denied it and showed him her Social Security card.

“Oh, you’re a totally different person,” the investigator said.

He left, but his investigation continued through last year and resulted in a $5,000 warrant for the other Lisa Craig’s arrest.

A sheriff’s deputy encountered Craig and her husband in the parking lot of a bar last month. He ran a check on both their names.

Lisa Craig’s name came back. She cried as she was handcuffed and taken away.

“The whole time I was in jail, all I kept thinking was, ‘It must be the other Lisa Craig,’ ” she said.

On Craig’s first night in jail, her mother-in-law called the house to say she’d heard her daughter-in-law’s name announced among drawing winners at the Kern County Fair.

Her husband had to explain that it must have been the other Lisa Craig.

Even prosecuting attorney Susan Adams was confused.

“I had to look at her driver’s license and have the former employer come down to court and make a physical identification,” Adams said. “The girl who was arrested and was in court wasn’t the same girl who was wanted.”

Adams said charges have been dropped against the other Lisa Craig too.

“She didn’t do anything illegal, either,” Adams said.