A man’s life was changed after he spent 17 days in a New Mexico jail because American Airlines wrongfully accused and identified him to police as a shoplifter at the Dallas-Fort Worth Airport, according to a lawsuit filed Monday.The horror comes not only from the kafkaesque facts of getting hauled to jail on a mystery warrant, but also from the gulag-like conditions in the Quay County lockup. This isn't some third world prison, or even an overcrowded underfunded city jail in some coastal megalopolis; just your basic county hole in rural-ish New Mexico.
Michael Lowe boarded a flight at DFW Airport in May 2020. More than a year later, he said, he was on vacation in New Mexico when he was arrested on warrants he had never heard of for a crime he did not commit.
For more than two weeks, Lowe was held in Quay County Jail at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in “grossly unsanitary conditions,” according to the lawsuit. Lowe said he didn’t even find out what he was charged with until after his release.
It's not just bad that an innocent man was subjected to these sort of conditions, but that anybody is, here in these United States.
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