The Story of Bronti Kelly
For four long years, Bronti Kelly couldn’t
figure out why no one wanted to hire him. He
handed department store managers across southern
California a resume full of sales experience,
but was rejected hundreds of times.
Those
rare times when he got a job, he would be
fired within days.
Along the way, Kelly filed for bankruptcy,
lost his apartment, and became
homeless. “For years as this went on,
I blamed myself — for not being hired
for employment, the conditions I went through,” Kelly
says.
But Kelly’s self-blame turned to anger
when he finally learned the real cause
of much of his trouble: A man had given Kelly’s
identity to authorities when
arrested for shoplifting and other crimes,
and the tainted profile found its way
into a range of computer databases used in
background checks by employers.
Kelly’s plight illuminates the growing
threats to privacy in an age of ever easier
computer access to public information.
Bronti Wayne Kelly, now 33, hardly foresaw
the cyber nightmare that would grow from what
seemed an old-fashioned wallet snatching in
May 1990. He reported to police his wallet only
contained $4, along with his driver’s
license, Social Security card, and military
ID for the air force base in southern California
where he served as a reservist. But seven months
later, Kelly, a salesman in the Robinson-May
department store in Riverside, was ushered into
the personnel director’s office and told
he had been caught shoplifting by security guards
in another Robinson’s. Kelly produced
a letter from his air force commanding officer
saying that Kelly was on duty when the crime
occurred, but he was fired anyway.
He
says he was equally confounded by the blur
of job rejections that followed,
usually with no explanation.
For two years he held on. Kelly’s work
as a mechanic at the local air force
base earned him about $700 a month. But in
June 1993, the six-year reserve
stint was up.
With no job in sight, Kelly filed for bankruptcy
to stave off bill collectors.
He was evicted from his apartment in San
Bernardino, California.
Kelly stayed with friends until he wore
out his welcome. He turned to
sleeping in his car, then the streets, using
public parking garages downtown
to shield him from the elements.
He tried to keep clean using a pool shower
at his old apartment complex.
He
applied for food stamps and welfare but was
rejected because he had no
residence or mailing address.
He finally landed a job selling clothes at
Harris department store in nearby
Riverside, but the day before his first day
of work he was told that his
services were not needed.
Kelly, crying at the news, tried to find
out why. The personnel manager told
him to contact Stores Protective Association,
which exchanges information
about employees with more than 100 member
retail chains.
Kelly wrote to SPA, and received a written
explanation in January 1995,
pegging him for the same shoplifting offense
he thought had been purged
from the records four years earlier. “
I couldn’t believe the information
was still on file,” Kelly says. “I
had
never even heard of [SPA] before.”
But the vast majority of employers Kelly
had applied to were members of
SPA.
It took until the next month for the
association to remove the false
information from its files on Kelly, and
then only after a local television
station reported his woes.
A lawyer for SPA, which Kelly is suing in
a defamation lawsuit that also
names Robinson-May’s parent, said that
Kelly had never given it evidence
other than his own statement that he was
not the shoplifter.
Kelly is seeking
unspecified damages and a public apology
from Robinson-May.
Kelly’s problem was far more complicated
than he suspected. When Kelly
contacted the Los Angeles Police Department
to try to straighten things out,
he discovered that its records showed he
had been arrested five years earlier
not only for shoplifting, but for burglary
and arson as well.
Kelly submitted his fingerprints to prove
to authorities that he was not the
accused culprit, that instead the miscreant
was another white male who had given Kelly’s identity to police.
The
police gave Kelly a “Certificate of
Clearance,” which states that the
police had determined that Kelly was not
the person arrested.
However, Kelly’s identity remains in
police files, even though the most
serious charges against the impersonator
had been dismissed shortly after his
arrest in July 1990. Los Angeles police officials
say they need the charges
on record in case the impostor is arrested
for other crimes.
After SPA removed Kelly’s name from
its files, he was still rejected from another
50 jobs, and he is still wondering why. One
possibility is that the incorrect information
continues to haunt him. The problem was spelled
out last month after the Associated Press hired
an information search company to conduct a search
of Kelly’s background. AP simply gave
Forefront, a subcontractor to Informus Corp.,
Kelly’s name, Social Security number,
and a $124 check to search state court records
in three counties in southern California.
The search came back showing that Kelly
had been arrested in July 1990 for
arson, theft, and disturbing the peace.
But Kelly no longer has to worry. Seven years
after his wallet was stolen, he
has stopped seeking work among strangers.
Today, he is employed part-time cleaning pools
in a family business, and shares an apartment
in Temecula, near San Diego, with a roommate
who has helped him out financially. Trying to
rebuild his self-image, Kelly carries his police
certificate clearing him of crimes wherever
he goes. One look in the mirror confirms it
was not he who dragged down his life. Says Kelly:
“A part of me feels very proud.”
But just to be sure, he is thinking of changing
his name. Bad things can happen to good people,
and they do.
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