By Frank DeLoache
fdeloache@salisburypost.com
KANNAPOLIS ó A moment of forgetfulness has cost a 50-year-old man his freedom and has police officers trying to figure out his real name.
Kannapolis police say a middle-aged man used a copy machine at an office supply store Thursday but left some papers in the copier when he left.
Employees found a picture of the man placed over another person’s picture on a Massachusetts driver’s license.
The employees called the Police Department, but they didn’t know the man’s name.
Officers asked store officials to call if the man returned for his papers, and, sure enough, he did.
When officers arrived, the man cooperated with them, allowing them to search his car where they found a number of other documents and IDs, according to Detective Sgt. Chris Nesbitt said.
The man told officers his name was Joshua Eli Cinner, and he even had a birth certificate and other identifying documents with Cinner’s name on them.
But when officers searched computer records, they determined that Cinner is a white male, while their suspect was black.
They also didn’t know how the unidentified man had gotten the Massachusetts driver’s license of another man as well as financial cards and documents indicating he had visited or done business in at least three other states ó Massachusetts, Florida and New Jersey ó and the District of Columbia.
Finally, an officer noticed one money order made out to Don Steven Wright with a Massachusetts address.
The officers began calling law enforcement agencies in Massachusetts and tracing financial transactions on the IDs the man had. Finally, Nesbitt said, an officer in Amherst, Mass. ó not the Massachusetts address on the money order ó sent investigators a picture that matched their suspect.
And investigators have charged Wright, 50, 1694 Mission Oaks St., Kannapolis, with identity theft and manufacture or possession of counterfeit identification.
A magistrate set Wright’s bond at $100,000, partly because “we’re still not sure he’s who he says he is.”
Wright told officers that he works in construction and has lived in Kannapolis about six months because he has relatives here.