Herbert Alford was held in custody for five years waiting for Hertz to give the court his car rental receipt that would exonerate him of murder charges. Hertz finally got around to contacting the court, and the corporation is "deeply saddened" about what happened. Alford is suing Hertz, which is no doubt making the car rental company even more deeply saddened.
From CBS News:
"While we were unable to find the historic rental record from 2011 when it was requested in 2015, we continued our good faith efforts to locate it," [Hertz] spokeswoman Lauren Luster said Wednesday. "With advances in data search in the years following, we were able to locate the rental record in 2018 and promptly provided it."
Alford was convicted of second-degree murder in 2016 in the shooting death of Michael Adams, White said.
The Hertz receipt showed Alford was renting a car at a Lansing-area airport around the time that Adams was shot, White said. He was killed in a Lansing neighborhood 20 minutes away from the airport.
WLNS reports that prosecutors said that Alford's cell phone records showed he was driving to the airport in the moments after the shooting, but that evidence was never introduced in the case.
The conviction was thrown out and charges were finally dropped in 2020, after Alford had served nearly five years in prison and jail.
