Woman says mistaken identify led to jail in St. Louis death

ST. LOUIS -- A woman said investigators' tunnel vision and mistaken identity led to her being jailed without bail for nearly a year in St. Louis in connection to a 2015 fatal shooting.

Jadda Kennedy, 26, initially was charged with murder in the death of 35-year-old Corey Stovall. The charge was dropped in October after the defense disclosed information that put Kennedy's alleged participation in the crime in question, according to city attorney Jennifer Joyce's office.

But Kennedy and her lawyer, Erika Wurst, said authorities had tunnel vision. Wurst said no physical evidence tied Kennedy to the crime, a witness to the shooting recanted her identification of Kennedy in July and DNA evidence found in the victim's car matched another woman with a similar first name and appearance, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported.

"I was feeling like I was never going to get out of there," Kennedy said. "I thought I was always going to be there, serving time for somebody else's crime."

The witness told police she knew the killer, described her as a drug user and provided a cellphone number she said belong to the woman. Yet detectives did not attempt to check the number, because if they had, it would have led to a woman who had a similar name and appearance to Kennedy, Wurst said.

What ultimately led prosecutors to drop charges against Kennedy was information found by a public defender's investigator, Wurst said. The investigator emailed prosecutors a link to a woman's Facebook profile that connected to the phone number the witness originally gave police. The woman's name on Facebook was similar to Kennedy's first name, and the profile showed she had two daughters, as the witness originally claimed.

Wurst said the DNA evidence taken from a cigarette butt found in Stovall's car matched the other woman in a national database, not Kennedy. And none of the fingerprint DNA from the car matched Kennedy.

The investigation into Stovall's case remains open.

Kennedy has considered filing a lawsuit over her arrest but so far has not pursued one. For now, Kennedy said, her goal is to go back to school and potentially pursue a career as a court stenographer. She said drugs negatively affected her life in the past, but she's now sober and re-establishing a relationship with her son.

Mistaken witness identification is common, according to Iowa State University psychology professor Gary Wells. He noted data show approximately seven in 10 convictions overturned by DNA testing were because of eyewitness identification.

Information from: St. Louis Post-Dispatch, http://www.stltoday.com