03-08-2025
Ty'Ran, not Tyren: Law enforcement mistake leads to 67-day nightmare in jail
With no way of knowing what he was walking into, Ty'Ran Dixon stepped off a flight from Europe at the airport in Boston 10 months ago, thinking he'd quickly be going home to South Carolina.
Home. There's no word like it.
Going home. There's no experience like it.
Or so Dixon thought.
The football player didn't know that a case of mistaken identity would soon lead to his wrongful arrest, that he'd spend the next 67 days behind bars, 21 of them in solitary confinement, that no amount of pacing, pushups or pass rush drills in claustrophobic spaces can keep a 27-year-old mind and a 295-pound body fit, that feelings about home itself could change, be twisted, corrupted, ruined by poor police work that would make Dixon consider ending his own life and, when his ordeal was finally over, make him return to Finland, not wanting to see America again.
Law enforcement wanted him in the killing of a pregnant woman he'd never met, in Barnwell County, SC, where he'd never been, but Dixon didn't know that when he grabbed his bag from a bin and stepped off the flight that now divides his life into before and after.
He was spotted and swarmed by a group of state police officers with multiple warrants for Ty'Ran Dixon's arrest even though the man implicated in the crime was named Tyren Dickson.
They asked him for his passport, said he was wanted on several warrants, cuffed him, walked him to a room, rummaged through his luggage, advised him he wouldn't see a judge until the next morning, and drove him to a nearby jail. His first night of sleep was fitful, to say the least.
Had Dixon done anything wrong? He had not.
His nightmare was just beginning.
Dixon went from being a chubby 10-year-old tying on his cleats for the first time to a graduate of Columbia High School and Newberry College in South Carolina, where he tore his ACL and meniscus and got a double major in sport management and exercise science, a minor in business administration and a master's degree in organizational development and leadership.
He didn't realize his NFL dreams, but he didn't get discouraged.
He played far from home for the Las Vegas Vipers in the XFL and then farther from home for the Lohja Crusaders in the Vaahteraliiga league in Finland, where he has lived for a couple years.
On Sept. 30, 2024, he was headed home to Columbia for two weeks to see his mother and to Newberry for homecoming at the college where he was named all-conference for being such a fearsome defensive lineman. He was the defensive player of the year on his first Finnish team.
Today, he is back in Finland, 28, playing football for a team in Helsinki and coaching kids who draw inspiration from his strength. He doesn't want to return to the U.S. though he imagines he'll return to see his mom. They talked daily when he was detained and talk almost every day now.
'I hate America now,' Dixon said by Zoom this week from Helsinki as he shared his complex thoughts about home. 'I want to start a life here. I don't want to be nowhere in the vicinity (of America). Period.
'Here it feels like home,' he said. 'Don't get me wrong. The States will always be home. My mindset has shifted after that whole experience. I don't want to be in the States. It is what it is. Here, I'm able to find a little bit of peace.'
An 18-page lawsuit against the Barnwell County Sheriff's Office filed by Columbia lawyers Joseph McCulloch and Robert Goings lays out why peace of mind is so hard for Dixon to come by these days, citing, 'fundamental police investigative failures, and shoddy, incompetent, and utterly inexcusable actions' by the office.
The suit says the office's false statements also subjected Dixon to ridicule, contempt, disgrace, suffering, anguish, horror, nervousness, grief, anxiety, worry, shock, humiliation, and shame.'
A 12-page response from the sheriff's office asserts immunity, among other defenses, but this is not a simple mix-up. It's an error easily avoided, and seriously punishable.
Not only are the two accused men's names different, they don't look similar. Both are Black and more than six feet tall. But Ty'Ran Tyrell Dixon is 6'3'' and 295 pounds. Tyren Rommel Dickson is 6'1'' and 180 pounds. Side-by-side photos appear in the lawsuit, which says Dickson 'looks nothing like Dixon, a fact easily determined by a simple exercise of fundamental police work.'
Dixon was released on Dec. 6, not long after he finally arrived at the Barnwell County Sheriff's Office after stops in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Oklahoma and Georgia. He said he got an apology and a ride to his mother's house. He said she 'never hugged me that tight in her life.'
Twenty-two days later, the sheriff announced Dickson had been arrested in the 2023 killing of 21-year-old Jasmine Roach and her unborn baby. Dickson's criminal case is proceeding in Barnwell County Second Judicial Circuit Court. Dixon's suit is in the court of common pleas.
Barnwell County Sheriff Steven Griffith, elected in 2020 and re-elected last year while Dixon was being wrongfully detained, did not respond to requests for an interview or a statement about the case.
In his office's court response, it says a photo lineup used to 'confirm the identity of the appropriate suspect' had 'inaccurate information unbeknownst' to the office. It also 'asserts it had no control' over Dixon's transportation once he was in the custody of U.S. marshals. It says repeatedly that once it realized the mistake, it 'quickly released' Dixon — as if 67 days is quick.
Behind bars, the man who eats more for breakfast than many of us do in a day — a dozen eggs, bacon, two slices of wheat bread, yogurt and fruit with granola — went from more than 4,000 calories a day to far less, ate leftovers from other people's trays, lost 45 pounds, lost his mind.
He couldn't sleep. He contemplated suicide. He started to hallucinate and wondered if he had killed the pregnant woman, as the Barnwell County Sheriff's Office alleged in its warrants, after an informant said someone with a name sounding like his — but not his — had done the crime.
He often thought about George Stinney, an innocent 14-year-old Black child who the state of South Carolina executed in 1944, the youngest person legally executed in the U.S. that century.
He also talked to God every day, was shown strength by Him, was shown kindness by fellow humans — in jumpsuits and uniforms — who told him to keep faith and keep fighting his injustice.
He kept telling officials they had the wrong guy.
'They all say that,' came one response.
'Tell it to the judge,' came another.
Who could blame him if he lost some of his faith in humanity. But his faith in God grew.
He stayed in five detention centers in four states as part of the wrongful arrest that involved the Barnwell Sheriff's Office letting the U.S. Marshals Service return Dixon to South Carolina. At the first, he was given a Bible that he kept by his side until the third detention center took it from him.
He was told inmates smoked pages of the Bible, and he wouldn't be allowed to keep its lifelines.
'Stay strong,' he scribbled on a scrap of paper. 'Don't let this be for nothing. God strength.'
He still has the piece of paper. He still has that strength. He's more spiritual than ever.
The 67 days that Dixon moved slowly closer to South Carolina are seared into his memory. Over 90 minutes on Zoom, Dixon relived a nightmare that would have broken the spirit of many of us.
'I'm a positive spirit,' he reflected. 'I'm a positive soul. I'm in there around darkness, great darkness. It took every piece of mental fortitude that I had from all of the years that I've been playing football and going through life. That took every ounce that I had left.'
Once too ashamed to talk about it, he now realizes he has nothing to be ashamed of.
'Of course I want to be compensated, yes,' he said of his lawsuit. 'They need to take some accountability for that. At least give me something back, but I won't ever get my life back.
'I never had anxiety before this,' he added. 'I'm having anxiety attacks now, PTSD, having nightmares that people are stabbing me. They feel vivid. Even going in the elevator out here, I freak out sometimes because it reminded me of that situation. I can't be in a small car anymore. I get sweaty and panicking and stuff.'
This almost unbelievable story is his to tell, and he is telling it now, talking to media outlets in South Carolina and in Finland since his lawsuit was filed in April and the case has begun to proceed.
'Deep down in my heart, I know I'm never going to be the same again,' Dixon told me. 'It stole a piece of the drive from me.'
Football keeps that drive alive, though.
'The thing that I embed myself in is the kids and the people that I can help, that I can affect in a positive manner,' he said. 'Whenever I get to tripping out or I'm starting to have anxiety, I do private sessions for kids out here…. I am embedded in the kids, honestly.'
He helps them because they helped him, he said.
'I'm broken, and I feel like people are using my energy to help them because of what I went through, because of the strength that I had to sustain while being there,' he said.
'People look at it as an inspiration, especially these kids out here. They always ask me how did you make it out of that prison and how are you back playing football so fast. I'm like, man, if you guys only knew, it's because of y'all.'
In other words, Dixon hasn't given up. He's giving back.
The Barnwell County Sheriff's Office should be forced to do right by Dixon, who was so clearly wronged and has so clearly suffered because of the office's abject failure to get a name right.
For now, what may give Dixon comfort is the knowledge that anyone who hears his story will remember his name and that home is where your heart is full when they call it.
Matthew T. Hall is McClatchy's South Carolina opinion editor.
