WOODBURY — He says he's Carl Grant Dunston, not Carl A. Grant.
He has been saying it for years, trying to get some police officer, lawyer or judge to believe him.
Yesterday, the 43-year-old plumber from Camden prevailed. But not before a 26-day stay in jail.
Dunston walked out of the Gloucester County Jail shortly before noon with
criminal charges dropped against him and just enough money - compliments of the jail - to afford the bus fare back to Camden.
Before he left, prison officials said, Dunston vowed to sue.
He made that same threat last week in a Gloucester County courtroom. That was after Superior Court Judge Donald Smith Jr. gave the Prosecutor's Office a week to prove once and for all if Carl Grant Dunston was Carl A. Grant - a man wanted for allegedly passing a $667.75 bad check to a former waterbed company in Washington Township in February 1986.
That was easy to prove, Dunston had told the judge during the hearing. Carl A. Grant, he said, is white. Dunston is black.
Smith sent Dunston back to his jail cell to await the results of Assistant Prosecutor Keith Johnson's research. Johnson announced his findings shortly after 9 yesterday morning.
"We contacted the victim in the matter, who has no recollection of whether (the check issuer) was male, female, white, black, Hispanic," Johnson told Smith.
Based on that lack of evidence, the judge promptly ordered the indictment dismissed and Dunston released. Dunston was not in the courtroom for the brief proceeding. He could not be reached for comment after he left the jail, where he had been since he was picked up on a bench warrant for the bad-check charge June 11.
A sheriff's officer who did not want to be identified said Dunston expressed concerns about the effect his time in jail would have on his business reputation.
As far as Jack Michaud knew, Dunston had a solid reputation. That was in 1989, when Dunston was doing plumbing work as a subcontractor for Michaud's business, Delta Builders in Medford.
"I always thought he was a pretty straightforward and hard-working guy," Michaud, now in the real estate business, recalled yesterday.
That's why it came as a shock to him, he said, when he returned to his office on Stokes Road in Medford the afternoon of June 1, 1989, and learned that Dunston had been arrested on a bad-check charge.
"It just didn't sound like the Carl I knew," Michaud said.
