A Michigan man who spend nearly five years in prison for a murder he didn’t commit has been exonerated and released from prison. He’s now suing a rental car company that his attorneys say held vital information that would have kept their client from prison in the first place.
Herbert Alford was wrongly convicted in 2016 of second-degree murder. A receipt from the Hertz Corporation, however, showed Alford was renting a vehicle from the Lansing airport just minutes before the murder occurred, making it impossible for him to have committed the crime, which took place at a strip mall in Lansing, 20 minutes away.
“Had the defendants not ignored and disobeyed numerous court orders requiring them to produce the documentation that eventually freed Mr. Alford, he would not have spent over 1,700 days incarcerated,” Alford’s attorneys wrote to the court in a complaint obtained by CNN.
The National Registry of Exonerations explained that Alford was mistakenly identified as the man who killed 23-year-old Michael Adams on October 18, 2011. Adams was shot in the back while running through the parking lot of a strip mall. Police arrived on the scene and tried to interview witnesses, one of whom provided a slip of paper with the license plate number of the vehicle the gunman entered after the shooting.
“A computer check identified the vehicle as a green 2002 Dodge Durango registered to Willine Pentecost,” the NRE reported. “A police bulletin was broadcast with a description of the car and a description of the gunman as a Black man with braids. Later, at the hospital where Adams was pronounced dead, his mother told police she suspected the gunman was a man named ‘Herb,’ a Black man with braids.”
A police informant claimed he witnessed Alford commit the shooting, a claim he later denied. Police learned that Alford had been living with the owner of the vehicle used in the attack, Pentecost, and his photo was sent to Crime Stoppers and shared with media. The next day, a woman who said she witnessed the attack said she recognized the photo of Alford she saw on the news. The woman had been with another man in a car at the strip mall to buy drugs.
Police arrested a man named Gilbert Baily in May 2015 on drug and firearm charges. Baily is Pentecost’s son, and cut a deal with police to lessen the charges against him by claiming Alford was the shooter.
During a pretrial hearing in January 2016, Alford’s attorneys said they had subpoenaed Hertz for records showing Alford was at the airport car rental just minutes after he allegedly shot Adams. Hertz didn’t respond.
The Hertz rental car location was a 19-minute drive from the strip mall, yet the records showed Alford was there five minutes after police were dispatched to the shooting. Prosecutors maintain that Alford had enough time to commit the shooting and get to the airport, claiming cellphone data put him near the crime and traveling toward the airport after.
A judge ordered a new trial, yet the prosecution declined to retry him, believing they couldn’t prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Alford was the shooter.
Alford is now suing Hertz, alleging he never would have been convicted in the first place if the car rental company hadn’t ignored numerous requests for records. A spokesperson for Hertz sent The Daily Wire the following statement:
We are deeply saddened to learn of Mr. Alford’s experience. While we were unable to find the historic rental record from 2011 when it was requested in 2015, we continued our good faith efforts to locate it. With advances in data search in the years following, we were able to locate the rental record in 2018 and promptly provided it.
This post was updated to include the full statement from Hertz.
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