ATLANTA - A man turned himself in to authorities in Fulton County Tuesday evening after Clayton County’s interim sheriff said in the afternoon that he was an “armed and dangerous” murder suspect mistakenly released from jail last November. The man’s lawyer calls that “a fabrication.”

“He wasn’t hiding, they just never came to get him,” defense attorney Anastasios Manettas tells WSB Radio.

Manettas says the case that landed Kaiser Suggs in court in Clayton County was one in which he was falsely accused of aggravated assault. At the preliminary hearing, it became evident that the accusers had made it up, and the case fell apart.

“The real story was, he was actually the victim of an aggravated assault,” says Manettas. The district attorney’s office dismissed the charges and Suggs would have been free to go--but for a pending case in Fulton County involving a murder. He was indicted there in 2021 and had been denied bond.

Manettas says that Fulton County deputies were supposed to come pick up Suggs within 48 hours of his case dismissal, and failed to do so.

“Of course, Clayton doesn’t have jurisdiction to continue to hold someone who’s been exonerated,” says Manettas.

In a statement, Clayton County Sheriff Levon Allen said of Suggs’s release, “The two employees who are responsible for this threat to public safety are now on administrative leave and my Internal Affairs unit are investigating how this unacceptable action occurred.” It is unclear how Suggs’s absence became a focus on Tuesday.

WSB Radio has reached out to the Fulton County Sheriff’s Office to verify whether they were responsible for retrieving Suggs.

The lawyer says in the Fulton County case, Suggs had been out on the town with friends--a trio of brothers--when the brothers got a call from their teen sister, a minor. She told them that a man at a home she was visiting had tried to rape her. Manettas says the brothers went into the house to rescue her, while Suggs waited in the car. The man the 15-year-old had accused was soon found fatally shot.

“They’ve charged Mr. Kaiser Suggs as a party to the crime in that murder, although he had no involvement in it,” says Manettas. “What happened in the house is for the other defendants and the other lawyers to speak on.

“But I can speak for Mr. Suggs in that he was innocent in Clayton County and was exonerated, and he’s innocent in Fulton.”

Manettas says he already has a new motion for bond before the Court.

He also tells WSB that Clayton County deputies arrested Suggs’s brother in a case of mistaken identity as they searched for the “missing” defendant. The brother was also let go Tuesday.

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