Police throughout the region are searching for rape suspect 34-year-old Ernest Clark, who was mistakenly released by Baltimore County sheriff's duties in mid-June, despite being held without bail awaiting his trial.
Even beyond the error, which occurred when paperwork got lost, there are many troubling aspects to the case.
The woman told Baltimore police she was raped in Herring Run Park back in August 2000. Police investigated but were unable to locate a suspect. Six years later, detectives learned that DNA found on the woman matched Clark's genetic code. But a police spokesman said detectives in the sex assault unit had trouble reaching the woman, and when they did reported that she did not wish to move forward.
The police are in the midst of an audit to determine why so many rape cases were deemed "unfounded," leading to complaints that detectives pressured women into dropping cases to preserve good crime stats (here's a complete package of stories on the rape issue). It's not clear whether something similar happened here. Police said the case was not unfounded, but rather pushed off to the department's cold case squad, which investigates old, hard-to-solve crimes.
In 2009, those detectives re-investigated, talked to the woman and filed charges against Clark, who by then was in prison serving four years for failing to register as a sex offender from an earlier conviction that he assaulted a minor.
In mid-June, court officers took Clark to Baltimore County for a routine paternity hearing. After the hearing, Baltimore County sheriff deputies returned him to the county detention center, but official there tell me they lost his "detainer," which authorizes his transport back to prison in Baltimore City. Without that, the guards had no way of knowing Clark was to be held, and they released him.
Even more troubling is that law enforcement officials, who are never shy about notifying the media to help them find wanted men and women, never asked for help in this case, despite a convicted child sex offender being on the loose. It wasn't until we at the paper began asking questions did authorities concede that they had mistakenly let him out.