AUSTIN -- An Austin resident and University of Texas employee alleges that a Cedar Park police detective issued a false warrant for his arrest in an attempt to detain a man with a similar name, according to a lawsuit obtained by Channel 6's sister-station KVUE.
Austinite Nathan Cook filed a lawsuit May 16 against Cedar Park detective Kristy Whitley, Cedar Park Police Chief Sean Mannix and the City of Cedar Park.
Cook claims that when he and his teen daughter returned to the Austin airport in August 2017 after a trip to Mexico, a police officer pulled him out of the line and told him he was under arrest for the felony offense of theft of services, the lawsuit said.
The lawsuit said he was handcuffed in front of his daughter, who was left alone at the airport. He alleges that he was then "taken to the Travis County Jail, where he was booked into custody, strip searched and imprisoned for several hours."
The lawsuit claims that Cedar Park detective Whitley "had sworn out a completely false warrant for his arrest" in an attempt to detain a different man with a similar name.
According to the lawsuit, a woman rented a laser engraver for her business and stopped making regular payments. On the rental application for the engraver, the business owner listed her husband's name, "Nathan Cook," as the co-signer.
The application said that the woman's husband "does not share any identifiers with Plaintiff Nathan A. Cook, beyond their incredibly common name. Nathan Cook has a different middle name, different middle initial, different home and business address, different date of birth, different phone numbers, and a different physical description. All of which a moderately competent police officer would have quickly discovered," the lawsuit added. Furthermore, "a simple internet search suggests there are eight people named 'Nathan Cook' living in the Austin area alone," the lawsuit stated.
The lawsuit goes on to list other reasons as to why the plaintiff should not have been falsely accused of the crime.
KVUE reached out to the Cedar Park Police Department for a statement but a spokesperson said the department could not immediately comment on the claims.