Convicted killer mistakenly released from Georgia jail is caught 2 weeks later, officials say
Police in Georgia and Florida caught a convicted killer who was mistakenly released about two weeks ago from a county jail south of Atlanta, the U.S. Marshals Service said Friday.
Kathan Guzman was apprehended Friday by the U.S. Marshals Service in Florida, spokesman Brady McCarron told The Associated Press.
Guzman, 22, was supposed to be spending the rest of his life in prison after he admitted to strangling his girlfriend, 19-year-old Delila Grayson, who was found dead in a bathtub in August 2022.
Both attended Poinciana High School in Kissimmee, Florida, her mother, Christina Grayson, told CBS affiliate WKMG in 2022, before moving to Georgia to "start a new life" in late 2021. She said her daughter was set to come back to Florida and attend Valencia College to study nursing.
After his release, authorities believed Guzman may have gone back to Florida, specifically Osceola County south of Orlando.
That's where the victim's mother lives. "I feel like I'm a sitting duck," she said.
Grayson told CBS affiliate WKMG on Thursday she believed her daughter's killer could return to the area. She said officials told her, "Police are supposed to watch my house around the clock until he's apprehended."
Jail employees in Clayton County mistakenly released Guzman late last month because they didn't read the paperwork carefully, failing to see that he'd been convicted of murder and assault by strangulation and was sentenced to life in prison, the county sheriff said.
However, it wasn't until Tuesday that the Georgia Office of Victim Services couldn't locate Guzman in the corrections system and notified the prosecutor's office, Clayton County District Attorney Tasha Mosley said in a statement. Mosley said her employees then checked the jail's computer system, which appeared to show Guzman had been released, so they immediately notified the sheriff.
Because of the delay in figuring out what had happened, Grayson said she wasn't told her daughter's murderer was on the loose until Tuesday, after the district attorney learned of it, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported.
She told WKMG that Georgia police released Guzman due to a coding error.
Mosle told the Atlanta newspaper that she was extremely frustrated.
"All appropriate paperwork was sent to the appropriate people. I have no idea why they released this man," Mosley said. "We are just as disappointed and pissed off as everybody else."
Guzman was arrested "without incident" Friday at a residence in Ocoee, near Orlando, the U.S. Marshals Service said. Booking records showed he was being held in the Orange County Jail.
"Today we tracked him down and got him in custody," said Michael Sonethavilay, deputy commander of the agency's Florida/Caribbean Regional Fugitive Task Force.
The agency's Southeast Regional Task Force, based in Atlanta, "did some digging and found some information that he may be in Florida," Sonethavilay said. They got in touch with the Florida task force, which worked with the Orange County Sheriff's Office and picked him up.
As of Friday morning, the Clayton County sheriff's office had not issued any public notifications about the mistaken release or Guzman's possible whereabouts. A sheriff's spokesman told The Associated Press that the agency was preparing a statement that would be sent to residents through the "Nixle" alert system, which would also include a photo of Guzman.
