When Michael Buckholz moved from San Diego to Tulsa, Okla., A decade ago, he was looking for a new start.
He had spent a large part of his twenty and 30 years inside and outside the prison and prison, and before his last visit there, in June 2011, he wrote a letter to the judge, asking to be sent somewhere with a drug treatment program.
“I 100% take responsibility and responsibility for my actions and my behavior,” he wrote. “I do not ask the court to neglect what I did. I just want to be able to work to be a productive member of the community instead of a threat. ”
In Tulsa, he won a job with Sand Springs Railway, loaded and unloading of freight.
“I took responsibility for my life and I lived sober and without crime since my release in 2014,” he told San Diego Union-Tribune in a recent interview.
But in June 2024, a verification of routine history by his employer showed that he had recently been accused of having attacked several people in San Diego – even if he had been in Tulsa at the time.
“They said,” Hey, Michael, you know, you have to get repaired “”, he recalls. “Because I arrived, they knew I was at work on these dates.”
Then, in January, the boss of Buckholz on the railroad learned that there was a mandate for his arrest in San Diego. He said that his boss thought he had done nothing to provoke the mandate, but the employer’s hands were linked. Buckholz was dismissed.
The mandate had Buckholz’s name on it. But the police were looking for a different man – a man from San Diego 18, his junior named William Pixler.
. . .
Pixler, who received a diagnosis of schizophrenia in adolescence, had been detained by police in August 2023 at Pacific Beach while taking a psychotic break. Images of body cameras obtained later by his lawyer show that police wondering to take Pixler in a nearby psychiatric hospital.
Then, an officer excavating a mandate database found a photo of Michael Buckholz.
Like Pixler, Buckholz is a white man with brown hair. But it measures 3 inches higher than Pixler and almost two more decades. His eyes are brown. The pixler are green.
Pixler had no identity on him. Images of body cameras examined by his lawyer, Keith Rutman, do not show the police to ask Pixler if he was Michael Buckholz.
“Sedate, calm, conforms, disengaged,” is the way Rutman describes Pixler’s behavior. “He sat down quietly in the police car.”
Pixler was arrested like Michael Buckholz, imprisoned like Michael Buckholz and charged Michael Buckholz.
Buckholz said he had no knowledge of this mandate, which was issued in November 2015 for a violation of probation.
“I have had legal problems at some point in my life, but I was free and away from any type of thing since, many, many years,” he said.
San Diego police tried to pixle fingerprints before taking him to prison, but the portable scanner did not work.
However, Pixler would have been fingerprints when it was reserved in prison, to “guarantee precise identification of the individual with fingerprints”, according to the policy of the San Diego sheriff.
Policy also requires special precautions when booking a person with mental illness that may refuse to provide a name or insist that they are someone else.
We do not know why Pixler was reserved as Michael Buckholz, despite a different set of fingerprints.
Seven weeks passed before being able to convince a prison deputy that he was not Michael Buckholz. The deputy helped him call his parents, who had made a report on people who have disappeared from weeks earlier and were sure that their son was dead. He was released from prison that day.
But the experience was traumatic, said his father, Dennis Pixler.
He had been transferred to the George Bailey detention center, a high security prison which does not have psychiatric unit. There, Pixler was attacked, struck in the eyes, requiring stitches, his tray and seriously trampled wrist.
He told his parents that he had tried to explain to the deputies, the judge and his public defender that he was not Michael Buckholz. No one believed it.
“He was able to grab me and I took him out,” said his father. “But from there, his life made snowball. It just sank after that.”
. . .
In the months following its release, Pixler, Who lived with his parents would get angry without reason.
He would refuse to see his doctor or take his medication. Even if Dennis and his wife watched William take him, Dennis would later find the pills in the trash.
Last May, Pixler was arrested for battery after stuck a man with a pen in a supermarket.
In October, while Dennis was preparing dinner, William hit him several times.
Dennis called the county psychiatric emergency intervention team – something he had done in the past when his son had an episode. Instead, several San Diego police cars arose.
William was arrested and accused of several crimes, even if his father, 70, said that he did not want to file a complaint; He was fine.
“They couldn’t find a mark on me,” he said. “I don’t say he didn’t attack me. I just say that I don’t want him to be accused of mistreatment and things like that. Well, they did it anyway. ”
The complaints of the district prosecutor were filed against Michael Buckholz and describe Buckholz as striker Dennis Pixler.
Until the questions by Union -Tribune, the online database of the Court, have shown Pixler like Buckholz Aka and 1971 – the year of Buckholz was born – as a birth year in Pixler.
Some files display Buckholz listed like Aka from Pixler while others show Pixler listed like Buckholz Aka. For most Pixler appearances, it is called Michael Buckholz.
“The defendant indicates that his real name is William Pixler,” notes one of the recordings. It is only in an audience of March 10 that the files only list the name of Pixler and its correct date of birth.
After being arrested for hitting his father, Pixler obtained a supervised release. During the objections of Dennis, he received the order to stay away from his father.
In early January, while Pixler did not appear for an appearance in court, an arrest warrant was issued – for Michael Buckholz.
. . .
As recently as Thursday, a history verification Showed Buckholz as having been accused of several crimes in October.
San Diego’s Superior Court of Superior Court, Emily Cox, said that the court database had been updated and that the Buckholz files for the Pixler Crime Affairs were sent to the California Ministry of Justice.
Steve Walker, spokesperson for the Summer District Prosecutor Stephan, said the prosecutors were based on the information provided by the Sheriff’s office when filing the charges.
“Sheriff data includes information captured at the time of the first arrest and subsequent reservations,” he said.
At the beginning of December, Pixler brought legal action against the county and the San Diego police service, arguing that his arrest and his sentence of imprisonment in August 2023 raped his protections from the fourth amendment against searches and unreasonable crises.
In a request for rejection of the case, the county prosecutors argued that it was the responsibility of Pixler to leave the police, the deputies of the prison and the court know that he was not Michael Buckholz.
A response tabled by Rutman, Pixler’s lawyer, replied that the physical differences between the two men alone created the duty to investigate the identity of the reserved person.
“Mr. Pixler’s fingerprints did not correspond to those of the subject of the mandate, Mr. Pixler was 3 inches shorter, 18 years less and 35 lighter pounds than the person sought in the mandate and Mr. Pixler underwent a mental health crisis and unable to request an investigation,” Rutman wrote.
Two weeks later, after being stabilized in psychiatric drugs, Pixler tried to tell the deputies that he was not Michael Buckholz.
“They did nothing about it and told him that Pixler was just an alias,” said the trial.
“The size, the weight, age and fingerprints of Mr. Pixler were all different from Michael Vincent Buckholz,” said Rutman’s file. “These facts were sufficient to create a duty to investigate. No one cared to worry about it. ”
Pixler remains in prison and risks several years in prison for accusations, including battery, mistreatment of the elderly, a threat of large bodily injuries and resistance to arrests. His father hopes that a judge will accept to condemn him to hospital psychiatric treatment instead.
Buckholz, after spending months and thousands of dollars trying to empty his name, obtained a job last week as a welder.
But he is still concerned that somewhere, at some point, a website or a database wrongly bind his name to crimes he has not committed.
“If I tell someone’s story, he looks at me as if I was crazy,” he said. “” You are a mante’s criminal. “”
Originally published:
California Daily Newspapers
