Wrongful conviction overturned for Haywood man who was falsely accused

District Attorney Ashley Welch took the incredibly rare step this week of overturning a prior conviction against a man now known to be innocent.

Tom Lasley, 76, was wrongfully charged, prosecuted and convicted of assaulting a woman, according to court documents filed by Welch’s office.

Lasley was misidentified by witnesses as being the man on a motorcycle who assaulted another driver through her car window in fit of a road rage. Lasley and the actual suspect both have handlebar moustaches, grey ponytails, similar builds and facial structure — and both live off the same road in the Jonathan Creek community.

Neighbors who routinely saw the motorcycle rider believed it was Lasley, although the face of the motorcycle rider was always concealed by a helmet and no one actually saw the motorcycle pulling in or out of Lasley’s driveway. For the record, Lasley doesn’t own a motorcycle.

Multiple false identifications led to Lasley’s initial conviction, but one of the key witnesses who misidentified Lasley came to Welch to recant his prior testimony after digging into new suspicions that it wasn’t Lasley after all.

That key witness happens to be Waynesville Police Officer Tyler Howell, who is also running for sheriff on the Democratic ticket this fall.

Howell lives in the same Jonathan Creek community where he’d seen the motorcycle multiple times and thus served as a witness, though he was not an officer in the case. It happened outside town limits and thus was in the jurisdiction of the Haywood County Sheriffs Office.

Months after testifying against Lasley, Howell encountered the motorcycle again. This time, he got the license plate, traced its ownership and checked DMV records — discovering it belonged to another man who lived nearby. He then came to Welch with a statement recanting his prior testimony.

Since Lasley had appealed his district court conviction and a new trial was set in superior court in November, Welch did not need a judge’s order to overturn the conviction. Instead, the charges could be dismissed simply by not pursuing the case into appeal.

How it unfolded

The following chain of events is taken from court documents filed by District Attorney Ashley Welch’s office asking for the conviction to be reversed. The case file included the original investigation report, along with a statement from the District Attorney’s office and a statement written by Howell.

Last November, Haywood County Sheriff Corporal Jesse Mease was called to an incident along Qualla Road in Jonathan Creek. A female driver said she had missed a turn and, when turning around, rolled down her window to talk to a man who had gotten off his motorcycle and approached her car.

He reached through the window and punched her six times in the side of the head. The man then hopped back on his motorcycle and rode off.

The woman described the man as being about 60 years old, riding a black Kawasaki 1000 motorcycle with a yellow gas tank.

The woman also mentioned that a couple in the neighborhood had encountered and been harassed by the same motorcycle rider on Qualla Road.

Haywood County Sheriff Detective Garrett Sanders interviewed the husband and wife, but on separate occasions. The wife said she didn’t know the motorcyclist’s name, but gave Lasley’s address as to where the rider lived. She told deputies she had found this out via a post in the Nextdoor app.

The husband later described an incident to Sanders where this motorcycle rider drove past the couple several times, agitating their mules and almost having his wife kicked off of her animal.

The husband identified Lasley by name and gave his address. When asked by the deputy how he knew this information, the man stated that he had gotten information through the Nextdoor app and had confirmed who lived there through county GIS records.

In court, however, he could not positively identify Lasley, just saying he believed it was him.

Detective Sanders drove around Qualla Road and Coleman Mountain Road that day, but did not find the motorcycle. He also rode by Lasley’s home.

“I did not observe any motorcycles at the residence but noticed many sheds/buildings on the property he (could) possibly store the motorcycle in,” Sanders wrote in his incident report.

Sanders happened to know Waynesville Police Officer Tyler Howell lived in the area, so he reached out to him and asked if he knew who rode that bike.

Howell stated “without hesitation” that it was Lasley, according to Sanders’ initial investigation. Howell had encountered the motorcycle driving recklessly while going home for lunch one day. He was in an unmarked patrol car.

“The described motorcycle in question passed by on a double yellow line, almost causing me to strike him as he passed. I initiated a traffic stop on Coleman Mountain Road and spoke with the driver, simply giving him a warning,” Howell wrote in his statement. “It was as simple as an ‘educational speech’ to the motorcyclist and he was sent on his way.”

Although the motorcyclist was in a helmet that obscured most of his face, Howell believed it was Lasley due to the similarities. Howell even told the detective that Lasley stores the motorcycle in a shed on his property, according to the investigation report.

Detective Sanders attempted to go back to the area a few days later to look for the bike, but never found it. It’s at this point in the incident report that Sanders points out that Lasley does not own a motorcycle registered to his name.

During a follow-up interview with the woman who had been punched by the motorcycle driver, she mentioned that Lasley also had a wife. Sanders searched whether she owned a motorcycle, but found she did not.

Nowhere in the investigation report did Sanders attempt to speak to Lasley. Sanders also did not go onto Lasley’s property at any point in the investigation, according to the incident and investigation reports.

However, based solely on the witness’s identifications, a warrant was sworn out by a magistrate charging Lasley with assault on a female and injury to personal property.

District Attorney Ashley Welch’s office proceeded to prosecute the case against Lasley based on the evidence brought by law enforcement.

Going to trial

In April, the case went in front of District Court Judge Kimberly Gasperson-Justice for a bench trial, filling in from nearby Henderson County.

Assistant District Attorney Andrew Buckney called numerous witnesses, including the woman driver, the patrol deputy who responded to the assault, the husband from the married couple, Detective Sanders and Howell. While detailed records are not kept of district court cases, this witness list was part of the prosecution’s statement in the dismissal.

Nobody could positively identify Lasley as the man who had assaulted the woman.

“The woman who was attacked testified that she could not positively identify me, but that it looked like me. The key thing for her identification was that the guy had a gray mustache. That was it,” Lasley said.

Howell testified that he had stopped Lasley and easily recognized him as someone that he went to church with. And, since Howell was a law enforcement officer that gave his testimony extra credence, it ended up being crucial to the case.

“That didn’t put me at the scene of the crime,” Lasley said. “That meant that maybe I owned a yellow motorcycle. Is that evidence in a court for convicting someone of beating a woman? Doesn’t sound like it.”

Lasley’s defense team had multiple witnesses testify they had never seen Lasley ride a motorcycle and that they didn’t believe he could due to his physical limitations. Lasley has neuropathy in his feet.

Lasley also says three of the witnesses called on his behalf testified that he was out of the county at the time of the assault.

Lasley himself testified that he had not ridden a motorcycle in the past 20 years due to those physical limitations.

“The State argued that despite the defendant’s denial and witnesses testifying that he had not ridden a motorcycle in many years, the identification of the defendant by a sworn law enforcement officer should be dispositive,” Assistant District Attorney Andrew Buckner wrote in a statement, explaining his rationale for prosecuting Lasley.

Revelation

In August, four months after Lasley’s conviction, Howell saw the motorcycle out again. This time, despite not being an officer in the case and only being a witness, he looked up the license plate in the law enforcement database.

It came back registered to a man living nearby on Windswept Way — not Lasley. The man did, however, look similar to Lasley, sporting a “grey colored goatee, skinny(ish) face.”

“New evidence came to my attention that raised concerns about the accuracy of the identifications that led to the charge against him. Even though the case was closed, I took it upon myself to conduct additional research,” Howell said. “As soon as I completed this work, I immediately brought the new information I had uncovered to the original investigators, and then the DA’s office, so we could initiate a process to exonerate Mr. Lasley.”

Howell contacted Detective Sanders to share what he’d found. But Howell didn’t stop there.

He went through DMV records and found the current owner of the motorcycle had purchased it in 2016 and had owned it since that date.

“When I read it, I feared I had identified Mr. Lasley wrong,” Howell wrote in his statement to Welch’s office.

That was turned over to Lt. Dustin Toon of the sheriff’s office, as well as District Attorney Ashley Welch, in September.

The timing comes weeks away from an election where Howell is on the ballot for sheriff.

“Despite the potential personal and political risks, doing the right thing was never up for debate. I am proud of the initiative and actions the investigators, the DA’s office and I took to clear Mr. Lasley’s name,” Howell said.