Roeshaun Murry, a 39-year-old health care talent recruiter, was leaving an urgent care clinic in Chamblee, Georgia, on Dec. 8, 2022, where she’d just been treated for a respiratory infection, when Doraville Police officers met her at her black BMW in the parking lot. They asked her to verify her name and birth date.
Once she did, they told her they had a warrant for her arrest for using a fake credit card to steal more than $5,000 in roofing materials from a local business, and immediately put her in handcuffs.
Stunned, Murry told the officers that she’d been an identity theft victim earlier that year, and the crime must be related to that. One officer read from the arrest warrant that she was seen on a store surveillance video submitting her driver’s license along with the fraudulent credit card.
Murry insisted it wasn’t her in the video, but the officers told her, in so many words, to tell it to the judge. After her car was towed away to an impound lot, police body camera video shows they loaded her into a transport van, which had small, windowless, metal compartments that set off a panic in Murry.
She told them she was claustrophobic, began sobbing, and said, “I can’t breathe,” and begged to be put in “a regular patrol car. This isn’t right. I didn’t do anything. … This is crazy.”
The officers relented, and she was taken in a police cruiser to DeKalb County Jail, where she spent the next two days worrying about being fired from her job, while also hearing the heartbreaking stories of other women in her pod.
At her bond hearing that week, facing felony charges of theft by deception, theft by taking, and using a fictitious credit card, the defense attorney she’d quickly hired told the judge about her good character. Murry said she got up to the podium and made it clear that she was not a criminal who needed defending, but a victim of identity theft.
She was released from jail on a $3,000 bond, then set out to learn what had landed her in this predicament.
Piecing Together Her Identity Theft
Murry had lost her wallet about a year earlier, and said she’d quickly canceled her debit and credit cards and obtained a new Georgia driver’s license.
“I thought that would be the end of it,” she told Atlanta Black Star.
But in April 2022, Murry got a message through Facebook from a woman purporting to be her neighbor, who said she’d realized that a friend of hers had possession of Murry’s driver’s license and credit cards and was concerned that her friend was “trying to commit credit card fraud.”
But the more they talked, Murry said, the more it sounded like the woman was fishing for more personal information from her.
The “neighbor” said her “friend” had tried to deposit an insurance refund check that she’d found in the wallet, which Murry had put a stop on at her bank. She even shared with Murry a notice from another bank showing the $274 check had been credited and then debited from the woman’s account because of the stop payment order.
Alarmed, Murry went to the Atlanta Police Department to report the identity theft and the attempted theft of her check. She says an APD officer told her that for thefts of less than $500, he couldn’t take her report, and that she should report it to the national credit bureaus and also make a police report online. Murry says she did both but wasn’t sure if the police report had been generated, because she didn’t get an acknowledgment from the APD website.
Fallout From Felony Charges
As she awaited word from the court and her attorney regarding the disposition of her case, Murry says she began to feel the negative consequences of the pending felony charges.
As a self-employed HR professional who recruits for health care businesses and government agencies, at the time of her arrest she had a lucrative contract with Johns Hopkins Medicine in D.C. She says after she didn’t show up for work the two days after her arrest, she explained the situation to her manager there, but her contract that was supposed to last for another six months was terminated a month later.
“I would just say being an African-American woman, with any sort of stigma of fraud attached to your name, it doesn’t go over well,” she said.
Though she earned an average of $15,000 a month as a freelance contractor prior to her arrest, Murry says she was no longer able to participate in government contracts while the charges were pending.
She also lost out on two firm job offers after the criminal background checks came back. In May of 2024, she was offered a talent recruiting job for $105,000 for a medical provider, which was rescinded, she was told, “because the background checks did not meet company standards.”
Last April, an offer for a recruiting position with a medical provider working with the Georgia Department of Community Health, at the same salary, was withdrawn for the same reason.
Meanwhile, her efforts to relocate to more affordable housing were also stymied by her criminal record. An Atlanta apartment community denied her application due to a background screening that found “criminal and other public records unsatisfactory.”
A Plea For Resolution To The DA
Exasperated, on April 20 Murry sent a letter to the DeKalb County District Attorney’s office requesting an “immediate update and resolution” to her case.” She told the DA that for three and a half years she had not received a court date, been indicted, or notified of any prosecutorial action on her case.
She said the “prolonged state of uncertainty without due process or closure” had made “an unfair burden on my life, career and well-being,” causing her to miss out on multiple employment opportunities, causing financial distress and taking a “significant emotional toll.”
“I am simply asking for the opportunity to clear my name and regain stability in my life,” she wrote.
Three days later, an assistant district attorney for DeKalb filed a notice dismissing all of the charges against Murry. The notice said, “While there was probable cause for arrest, the State cannot sustain its burden of proof at trial.”
Revealing Police Video
Murry, who had heard little from her attorney in the intervening months and years, filed a FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) request to obtain the records of her case from Doraville Police.
From incident reports and her arrest warrant, Murry learned that a woman had presented her driver’s license to a store manager at a commercial roofing company in Doraville on Oct. 28, 2022, to purchase $5,232 in shingles using a fake credit card imprinted with her name, but with her last name misspelled with an extra “A,” as “Murray.” The woman had also signed a purchase order and a credit card receipt that way.
The transaction had been authorized by LGE Credit Union, and the shingles were delivered to a local address, but the woman had called the credit union to dispute the transaction and received a refund. Learning this from their bank, the roofing company had realized the transaction was fraudulent and called the police in hopes of filing an insurance claim.
Police bodycam video shows the store manager telling a responding Doraville police officer on Nov. 28, 2022, that the name and signature on the customer’s credit card did not match the license and that the store had multiple surveillance cameras that would likely show the woman who placed the order.
The officer expressed no interest in reviewing the video, saying a detective would follow up later. Doraville police eventually did obtain that footage, as did Murry through her public information request in May.
The video shows a young Black woman, small in stature, parking her car and entering the roofing business, wearing a baseball cap and smiling brightly as she placed the order.
The woman bears little resemblance to Murry, whose driver’s license listed her as 5 feet 6, 240 pounds, and, at the time, 35 years old.
Murry says she was floored when she viewed the video.
“That woman looks nothing like me, in size or complexion,” she says. “The card she gave them and her signature don’t match the name on my license, which the store manager pointed out. The detectives had 10 days to review the video and do their jobs before they arrested me, but they just ignored it. They based their entire investigation on my license, made me their chief suspect, and that laziness has cost me so much.”
Doraville Police’s Actions Cost Her Everything
The incident report also revealed that Detective Carrie Greene had advised patrol officers to find Murry by putting out a FLOCK camera alert for her car on Dec. 7, 2022, which led them to her BMW outside the urgent care clinic the following day.
Murry said her life since moving to Atlanta from Dallas in 2021 in hopes of advancing her career has been challenging in ways she never expected.
“It’s really scary,” she said. “You have people coming here for economic opportunity, and then you lose your driver’s license, and you become a subject of a criminal matter, which you have nothing to do with. The detectives don’t do anything, the court allows the case to sit in the system, and it’s just really ridiculous.”
Murry spent $7,000 on two criminal defense attorneys trying to get the charges dropped and to clear her name.
She also hired an attorney who has filed a lawsuit on her behalf against the company that handled the background check for the medical provider that revoked the job offer in April, as well as the provider. She says both companies violated the Fair Credit Reporting Act by taking adverse employment actions against her without giving her a reasonable amount of time to dispute inaccuracies in the background check report (the dismissed pending felony charges).
Murry said she is in the process of obtaining a new lawyer to help her assess a potential civil suit against the city of Doraville and its police department for her “prolonged prosecution” and the financial setbacks and emotional distress it has caused her.
The City of Doraville spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Atlanta Black Star about Murry’s case.
Turning Her Misery Into a Mission
For now, Murry wants the public to learn from her frustrating journey in the criminal justice system.
On June 18, she posted a snippet of the police body cam video from her traumatic arrest on Instagram, along with a message that said, in part, “What I learned is that anyone can find themselves navigating a criminal justice system that is often difficult, expensive and emotionally exhausting. … This experience taught me the importance of due process, accountability and understanding our rights as citizens. It also showed me how a single accusation can impact employment, housing, finances, mental health and a person’s reputation long before a case is ever resolved.”
The message was posted from the IG account of the nonprofit she founded in 2024, United Women Reentry Foundation, which aims to assist justice-impacted women with job training, legal assistance and other resources.
Murry says her 48 hours in jail sparked her interest in helping formerly incarcerated women who are under community supervision (on probation and parole), “because those women are more likely to experience going back into recidivism, because they have so many restrictions on them, as well as so many needs.”
She says her cellmate at the DeKalb Jail was a kind woman who worked as a forklift driver and who was, like her, worried about losing her job due to her arrest. The woman recounted previously leaving prison “with only a paper bag including the belongings she’d walked in with, that’s all she had,” Murry said.
Her foundation provides modest financial assistance such as monthly bus and train cards to help women get to jobs, interviews, and meetings with parole and probation officers. It also offers résumé-building workshops and help with getting criminal records expunged.
The UWRF, which has received small grants from local and national foundations, recently announced $500, $ 1,000, and $ 1,500 scholarships to support justice-impacted women in Georgia who are currently enrolled in a career, degree, or workforce training program.
Murry says she recently used her human resources savvy to help a woman who had worked as an inpatient coder in a hospital system, a job she can no longer hold due to a couple of drug charges. Murry told her that while she can’t work directly with people, her medical assistant skills were transferable, and that she could work with animals. She helped the woman get a front-desk job at a veterinary clinic.
“My life for the last three and a half years, there’s been more dark days than happy days,” she said, “but giving back to the community, being able to see people move on with their lives, has definitely been helpful to make each day a little bit more easy and meaningful for me.”
