A registered sex offender who had been ordered held without bail on charges that he raped a woman in Herring Run Park a decade ago is being sought after sheriff's deputies in Baltimore County mistakenly released him from custody last month.
Police did not disclose they were searching for a man they consider dangerous until questioned by a reporter Monday. Only then did officials release a photo of the suspect, 34-year-old Ernest Clark.City police acknowledged that, despite linking Clark in 2006 to the attack through DNA evidence, detectives in the sexual assault unit essentially shelved the case after deciding the victim did not want to proceed with pressing charges.
The department's cold case squad launched a new investigation in 2009 that led to Clark being charged two months ago in the rape. Between the time he was first named a suspect in 2006 and the most recent criminal complaint, Clark was arrested eight times on various charges.
City police are in the midst of an extensive audit of rape reports after it was revealed by The Baltimore Sun that detectives deemed "unfounded" more rape cases than any other city in the country, leading to accusations that police might have pressured some women to drop their complaints.
Baltimore police spokesman Anthony Guglielmi said he could not say whether the woman in this case felt unduly pressured by detectives - who, he stressed, worked under a previous police administration - but he did say that the cold case officers "weren't happy with the way it was handled."
For police, the focus now is getting Clark back into custody. He was charged in May with first-degree rape and 10 other offenses related to the 2000 case. At the time the charges were filed, he was serving a four-year prison term for failing to register as a sex offender.
On June 14, jail officials took Clark to the Baltimore County Detention Center. The next day, he appeared at a paternity hearing in Baltimore County Circuit Court. But while returning him to the county jail, the sheriff's office lost the document ordering Clark be held.
Instead of sending Clark back to his prison cell in Baltimore to await trial in the rape case, county jail officials released him. On June 16, the judge in the paternity case ordered him returned to custody. A Baltimore circuit judge issued an arrest warrant on June 24 when Clark failed to show up for the initial hearing on the rape case.
"We just misplaced the paperwork," said Col. Robert Haukdal of the Baltimore County Sheriff's Office. He said his agency is responsible for about 14,000 detainees a year and that a mistake like this has never happened before.
"We own up to it," Haukdal said. "We did it."
Members of the Warrant Apprehension Task Force have been searching for Clark for the past three weeks. A notation in the court file says: "Defendant Ernest Clark was released in error."
The attack in Herring Run Park in Northeast Baltimore occurred Aug. 2, 2000. According to police charging documents, the victim, 18 at the time, met a man outside City Hall about 11 p.m. and walked with him to the Old Town Mall. From there, she hitched a ride with him and his friends to Shannon Drive in Belair-Edison.
The charging documents say the man pretended to escort her to a bus stop but instead forced her into woods in the park, where he hit her on the back and the front of the head with a bottle and then raped her. The woman called police but no suspects were found at the time.
On June 19, 2006, state forensic officials notified city police that they had matched DNA found on the victim collected during an exam after the attack, and matched it to a sample taken from Clark after one of his arrests. But detectives did not pursue the case.
Guglielmi said notes in the file show that the investigators initially had a difficult time locating the woman, then concluded "at the time she was unwilling to go forward. It was possible that the victim was traumatized and did not want to proceed."
The spokesman said detectives did not classify the case as unfounded, but instead passed the file to a unit that investigates old, hard-to-solve cases. Guglielmi said new detectives assigned by Commissioner Frederick H. Bealefeld III took a fresh look at the case starting April 6, 2009.
On March 12, Detective Dominick Griffin and Sgt. Chris Jones "responded to the victim's home for the purpose of re-interviewing," the charging documents state. The victim "was able to recall the events substantially as originally reported."
After picking Clark's picture from an array of mug shots, police said in the charging documents that the woman said, "I think it's the person but I'm not really sure," and added that she "never had consensual sex with any of these men" whose photographs she viewed.
Police then charged Clark with rape and other related offenses in May.
Clark has an extensive arrest record, including a 1996 rape charge that prosecutors put on the inactive docket, a 2000 case of rape and kidnapping of a minor in which he was found not guilty, and a 2001 conviction for child abuse of a minor.
Clark was sentenced to five years in prison in the child abuse case but the judge suspended four years and seven months of the term. That case landed him on Maryland's Sex Offense Registry. In 2004, he was again charged with rape, along with a handgun violation and false imprisonment, but court records show prosecutors dropped the case.
Court records show that Clark was arrested eight times between 2006, when police were told of the DNA link but declined to arrest him, and November 2009. During that time, he was convicted three times of failing to register as a sex offender and once for drug possession, all while city police had what usually is considered solid evidence that he had raped a woman in the park years earlier.
Guglielmi said that detectives assigned to the case in 2009 "had concerns with the way the case was handled and wanted to re-interview the victim. ... I can't answer for what happened outside this current administration."
Baltimore Sun reporter Justin Fenton contributed to this article.