Michael Lowe didn’t know why he’d just been forced to spend more than two weeks in an overcrowded rural jail in New Mexico. He also didn’t know why authorities had suddenly decided to release him. Dragging himself into his home after a brutal two-day bus journey back to Arizona, Lowe couldn’t do anything but “sob until he could no longer stand.”
That’s according to a lawsuit filed Monday by Lowe, who is accusing American Airlines of causing his hellish 17-day incarceration. The airline, he maintains, wrongfully identified him as a shoplifting suspect to police looking into a theft at Dallas-Fort Worth Airport in 2020. Arrested more than a year later, Lowe was thrown in jail in Tucumcari, New Mexico, where he said he was forced to sleep on a concrete floor smelling of urine and feces, and terrorized by corrections officers who refused to wear face masks.
The experience shook “his identity to the core and cast a pall over his view of the world,” according to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, which first reported the suit. Because of “American Airlines’ mistake,” court documents read, Lowe now suffers from anxiety, depression, and “an ongoing state of hypervigilance that has robbed him of any ability to rest or relax.”
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Memories of his time in jail “all play in his head without warning and evoke the corresponding feelings of shame, fear, anger, and helplessness that he felt at the time he experienced them,” according to the suit, which accuses the airline of negligence and mental, physical, and financial damages.
After this article was published, a spokesperson for American Airlines told The Daily Beast, “As required by law, American cooperates with and responds to court orders for information related to possible criminal activity, and that’s what we did in this instance when we were presented with a search warrant.”
Lowe, a Grand Canyon tour guide, boarded the flight that would change his life forever on May 12, 2020. Flying from his home in Flagstaff to Reno, Nevada, he had a layover scheduled in Fort Worth. The next day, Dallas-Fort Worth Airport authorities began investigating a shoplifting incident at a duty-free store that had occurred just before Lowe’s flight to Reno. Surveillance footage showed a suspect boarding the same plane.
The suspect, unmasked, had his hair shaved into a buzz cut, according to the Star-Telegram. A selfie of Lowe aboard the flight, taken for his girlfriend and included in Monday’s suit, showed him in a mask and with a full head of silver hair.
For unknown reasons, however, when police asked American Airlines for passenger manifests on each person on the Reno flight, the company only sent in Lowe’s information. Police then issued two arrest warrants for Lowe, according to court records.
Lowe remained blissfully unaware of this for the next 14 months. But while attending a party in New Mexico on July 4 the next year, Lowe’s ID was run by officers responding to a report of a disturbance. His name came back with a search warrant attached, and Lowe was arrested.
In the Tucumcari jail, Lowe alleges, “the terror” he experienced over “the next 17 days was existential.” No one in the facility wore a mask as COVID surged, and authorities refused to explain to him why he had been accused of criminal mischief and felony burglary of a building. It was eight days before he saw a judge, and he was never given a lawyer. Ordered to fully undress and bend over for a “demeaning” strip search, Lowe’s “profound” confusion quickly turned into a “constant state of fear,” his suit claims, as he was housed alongside violent offenders. In one instance, he watched in horror as a young inmate was punched repeatedly in the face; the resulting blood was left on the floor and a wall for days.
His detention stretched on, apparently “without any end in sight,” for 17 days until he was released without explanation. Lowe walked until he found a bus stop, making it back to Flagstaff in the dead of night more than 48 hours after his release.
According to his suit, Lowe was only able to clear his name after convincing a detective at Dallas-Fort Worth Airport to compare his picture at the time to the surveillance footage of the suspect. All charges against were subsequently dropped.
“I’ve never heard of this fact pattern in my life or my career,” Scott Palmer, Lowe’s attorney, told the Star-Telegram. “If it can happen to him, it can happen to anyone.”
