This morning I was given an assignment to drive to a home in Eastern Henrico County where police had surrounded the house and detained a 16-year-old girl with the EXACT same name as a 19-year-old wanted along with two other males in the murder of a teenager in Powhatan County. Police say they used an AK-47 to shoot the victim and another victim who was injured.

I got to the scene and took out my equipment and started filming. There were crews from all the local television stations and T-D reporter Bill McKelway was there also. We were waiting for the police to take the girl from the scene when a car pulled up with a woman screaming that they “had the wrong girl.“ It was her mother.

It seemed almost impossible at first that the police could have grabbed the wrong girl. They knew the name and age of the girl they wanted.

When the dust finally settled and the girl and her parents were free to go back home, there was an ethical dilemma at hand:

A suspect is in custody in a high-profile murder. The police make a mistake and detain the wrong girl. But do we use the footage I took to make a video about the story?

There is a story about the mistaken identity detaining and it will appear in the paper tomorrow, but the ultimate decision was that a video was unnecessary and would be unethical because of how it would breach the privacy of the family that was stuck in the middle of this case of mistaken identity.

The last thing this family needs is to have their pictures plastered on the Internet or all over TV when they did absoultely nothing wrong.

The real story is about how the police departments investigating detained the wrong person.