It was supposed to be a quiet evening at the movies with her 5-year-old grandson. Instead, 49-year-old Nickie Sledge, a business owner and grandmother from Lithonia, Georgia, found herself handcuffed, strip-searched, and jailed for three days. She was accused of crimes committed by a white woman from Kentucky she had never met.
The December 2024 arrest, a case of mistaken identity so egregious that it has sparked outrage and legal action. The arrest began when deputies from the Rockdale County Sheriff’s Office appeared at a Conyers movie theater, claiming her car had been hit in the parking lot.
The ruse lured Sledge outside, where she was confronted by deputies holding a warrant for “Nikki Sledge,” a white woman wanted for elder abuse and exploitation of a disabled person.
“I thought I was being punked,” Sledge recalled, according to WSB-TV. “Elder abuse? My elderly mother lives with me.”
But this was no prank. Deputies arrested her on the spot in front of her grandson, loaded her into a patrol car, and took the boy away in another vehicle.
What followed was a nightmare.
A Case of Shocking Mistaken Identity
According to civil rights attorney Harry M. Daniels, Esq., who represents Sledge, deputies ignored basic verification steps that could have spared her the trauma.
The warrant they carried was for a 43-year-old white woman from Covington, Kentucky, a suspect accused, along with her husband, of neglecting his cancer-stricken grandfather in Woodstock, Georgia, and using his credit cards to rack up over $3,500 in fraudulent charges.
The Cherokee County case report, Daniels noted, included photo evidence clearly showing two white suspects.
Yet none of that stopped deputies from transporting Sledge, a Black grandmother who has lived in Georgia her entire life and runs an HR consulting firm, NSure Your Future, across county lines.
She was strip-searched twice, once in Rockdale County and again at the Cherokee County Jail, where she spent three days before being allowed to see a judge.
At her hearing, the judge reviewed the file and remarked, “It says on here ‘family violence.’ Well, I can clearly see she ain’t related.”
That comment effectively ended Sledge’s wrongful imprisonment, but not her ordeal.
No One Bothered to Notice
Attorney Daniels said the failure of law enforcement went far beyond simple error.
“This is absolute dereliction of duty,” he told Atlanta Black Star. “There was a full investigation, a signed warrant, one arrest, two strip searches at two different jails, multiple days in custody and a bond hearing, and no one bothered to notice that a 49-year-old Black grandmother from Georgia wasn’t the same woman as a 43-year-old white suspect from Kentucky.”
Daniels said he plans to file a civil suit against Cherokee County and its Sheriff’s Department, seeking accountability for what he described as “gross recklessness.”
The Cherokee County Sheriff’s Office said in a statement that it had only recently become aware of the situation and is “actively reviewing the matter.”
Trauma and Aftermath
For Sledge, the humiliation still lingers. She has begun mental health counseling for anxiety and trauma and worries the wrongful arrest will continue to haunt her.
“This is a record that won’t disappear,” she told reporters. “It’s gonna follow me the rest of my life.”
Her story, Daniels said, represents a broader failure of policing that disproportionately harms Black Americans, where “innocence must be proven, even when the evidence is obvious.”
For now, Sledge takes solace in one small victory: she uncovered the truth herself. After obtaining the case report while in custody, she noticed the suspect’s race and age didn’t match her own. That discovery was what finally led to her release.
“She’s just a sweet, nice woman,” Daniels said. “And she was devastated by this experience. No one should ever have to solve their own case to get out of jail.”
