After completing his first season of professional football overseas, South Carolina native Ty’Ran Dixon was more than excited to return to the U.S. and see his family. But when he arrived to Boston Logan International Airport in Massachusetts, instead of smiles, he was met by authorities arresting him on a warrant for first degree murder.
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The 26-year-old was taken away and forced to spend a night in jail before a court hearing revealed he was charged with the tragic murder of 21-year-old Jasmine Roach. She was four months pregnant when she was fatally shot back in Oct. 2023, WJBF reported. Six others were also shot.
The mass shooting launched a nation-wide manhunt for the person responsible, but a technical mistake resulted in authorities detaining the wrong man for months, a recent civil lawsuit obtained by The State said.
Dixon spent a total of 67 days in five out-of-state jails– three weeks of which he sat in solitary confinement for a crime he never committed– according to the filing. Eventually, he was transferred to Columbus, S.C. when officials realized they had the wrong guy and let him go in
The mistake came down to a clerical error. According to court documents, Barnwell County Sheriff Steven Griffith received a text from a trusted source identifying the correct suspect hours after the 2023 murder took place. The source reportedly texted Griffith an accurate spelling of the name and social media of the alleged shooter, a man named Tyren Dickson. Somehow down the line, officials mixed up Dickson’s name with Dixon, and mistakenly put his name on the warrant.
“His name’s not even spelled like mine, and he looks nothing like me,” Dixon said. “Second of all, he’s 180 pounds. I’m 300 pounds.” Now, the football player is suing big time. “They didn’t even have any evidence of me doing anything, and I still got locked up,” he continued to WRDW.
Dixon first filed a lawsuit against the department and Sheriff Griffith in April 2025. Now– about four months later– Dixon just filed a second one against individual deputies in the department, according to the suit.
According to the lawsuit, police ignored Dixon’s alibi putting him 80 miles away when the murder occurred, WRDW reported. Dixon’s lawyer, Robert Goings, told McClatchy News “We take our freedom and liberty for granted until they are wrongfully stripped from us.”
If deputies searched Dixon’s name they would’ve found information on his football career, including photos and social media belonging to the 26-year-old, the filing said. Instead, lawyers said Dixon’s arrest was “the product of fundamental police investigative failures, and shoddy, incompetent, and utterly inexcusable actions of the (Barnwell County Sheriff’s Office).”
The Barnwell Countty Sheriff’s Department has since responded to the first lawsuit, insisting the mistake was not done in malice.
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