A Case of Mistaken Identity Leads to 32 Months in Hell for a Homeless Man

Joshua Spriestersbach, now 50 years old, was in a long line waiting for food when he dozed off outside a Honolulu shelter in May 2017. When he was awakened by a police officer, he thought he was being arrested for violating a city ban on sitting or lying on public sidewalks.

Instead, he found himself being arrested for a crime he didn’t commit. It was not the first time. Spriestersbach had been arrested twice before after being mistaken for another man wanted for a probation violation on an assortment of criminal charges.

The latest arrest resulted in Spriestersbach spending four months in an Oahu jail and an additional 28 months in a psychiatric care facility. The more he protested that he was not the man he was being mistaken for, the worse things got for him.

The psychologists at the Hawaii State Hospital determined that he was delusional and required medication, which was then administered against his will according to a lawsuit he has filed in the U.S. District Court of Honolulu. That wasn’t the end of it though, the hospital sought and received a court order to administer stronger anti-psychotic medications that Spriestersbach says caused him “much physical and emotional anguish.”

According to Alphonse A. Gerhardstein, one of Spriestersbach’s attorneys in the case, the warrant has still not been cleared up. There is a good chance that if his client returns to Hawaii, he could still be arrested.

While most of the authorities involved in the case have declined to speak publicly about the situation, the Honolulu Police Department’s interim chief, Rade Vanic, has said that they will be reviewing the department’s policies and procedures to determine if changes are required. He also indicated that:

“We are also continuing to work with city attorneys to fully investigate and address the allegations in the lawsuit.”

It would seem that a lot went wrong here. Police failed to do due diligence to assure they had the right individual and the public defenders assigned to the Spriestersbach case didn’t believe him when he said he was the wrong guy. Instead, they asked for psychiatric evaluations which resulted in his commitment to a mental health facility.

According to his family, Spriestersbach does suffer from schizophrenia, but there were many failures here that resulted in his ordeal. His attorney not only wants authorities to make restitution for what they’ve done to his client but also to change the system to better protect those with mental health issues from something like this happening in the future.

So, how did something like this happen in the first place?

The trouble began for Spriestersbach back in October 2011 when he was found sleeping rough beneath a stairwell at a Honolulu middle school. A police officer woke him up and asked for identification which he didn’t have. He gave them his grandfather’s last name of Castleberry for unknown reasons.

A database search turned up a warrant for Thomas R. Castleberry who had a warrant out for his arrest for allegedly violating probation in a 2006 drug case. Not only did the information retrieved not match Spriestersbach or his grandfather’s first name — the man they were looking for was completely unrelated or known to either of them who had left Hawaii two years earlier.

Even after the error was straightened out, Spriestersbach remained in the system under the Castleberry alias. This once again became a problem for him in 2015, when he was arrested for sleeping in a public park. However, this time, he was let go after his fingerprints and photo didn’t match those on file for Castleberry. Still, the misidentification remained in the system.

This is what led to the May 12, 2017, arrest of Spriestersbach while he was sleeping outside the shelter. Though he did not have identification on him, Spriestersbach was able to give officers his full name, date of birth, and social security number. Still, he was arrested again as Castleberry. Despite taking his mugshot and fingerprints, this time they didn’t compare them to those on file for Castleberry. This simple thing would have proved he was not who they were looking to arrest.

Furthermore, Castleberry was already behind bars when Spriestersbach was arrested. The former had been incarcerated in an Alaskan prison since 2016 for holding a woman hostage at gunpoint at an Alaska campsite. His sentence there means he won’t be eligible for release until 2022.

After his psychiatric evaluations, Spriestersbach was forced to attend group sessions for drug abusers. He protested this and was given antipsychotic medications that he says made him drool and struggle to walk.

It wasn’t until November 2019, when one of his doctors took it upon himself to investigate his patient’s claims further. He was able to determine through internet searches that Spriestersbach was on another island when Castleberry was initially arrested, proving they weren’t the same person.

He then obtained a copy of Spriestersbach’s s birth certificate and finally realized that his patient had been telling them the truth all along. Still, Spriestersbach wasn’t released until January 17, 2020. He was quietly returned to the shelter where he had previously been arrested with fifty cents, copies of his birth certificate, and discharge documents.

The lawsuit filed by Spriestersbach claims that police, public defenders, and doctors all had access to information that would have properly identified him and failed to make efforts to do so.

Upon his return to the shelter, Spriestersbach’s sister, Vedanta Griffith, was contacted. Griffith had been looking for her brother for 16 years. She had moved to Hawaii in 2003 when her husband had been stationed on Oahu with the army. They had taken her brother with them, but at some point, Spriestersbach had ended up on the Big Island and disappeared while suffering mental health issues.

He has now returned to live with his sister in Vermont on her ten-acre farm. He has currently declined all interviews on the matter, but his sister has said:

“Part of what they used against him was his own argument that he was not Thomas Castleberry. I didn’t commit these crimes. This isn’t me. So, they used that as saying he was delusional, as justification for keeping him. And then when light is shown on it, what do they do? They don’t even put it on the record. They don’t make it part of the case and they don’t come to him and say, `We are so sorry´ or, how about even `Gee, this wasn’t you. You were right all along.'”

Spriestersbach is currently self-confined to his sister’s property, refusing to leave out of fear he may be arrested again. She said that he is terrified that they might take him again. It will be interesting to see how his lawsuit pans out once all the details of his case are reviewed.