INNOCENT. Alex Heineman Was Cleared Of Rape. Judge Apologized. Girl Lied. So Why Is Alex Being Threatened/Attacked?
When Alex Heineman was 16 years old, he stole off into the woods behind the Hudson YMCA with Sierrah Parmeter, a girl he liked.
Alex had learning disabilities, his home was a disaster. His mother had him young. His biological father was a nonfactor, but his stepfather hated the sight of him. Sierrah was another poor kid from a broken home, born to a meth-addicted mother who abandoned her in infancy. They were similar that way, and shared an on-again, off-again attraction… Discreetly, they followed the bike path through the woods. They kissed. He left a conspicuous hickey on her neck. Then they returned to the YMCA and parted ways. Forty minutes later, the girl’s biological father told police that his daughter had been assaulted.
Alex was soon charged with second-degree sexual assault, a felony punishable by 20 years in prison. Alex’s mother urged him to follow his public defender’s advice to plead guilty to a lesser charge of third-degree sexual assault. Alex’s conviction triggered a cascade of collateral consequences that derailed his life. “I felt horrible about that,” she says now. “Maybe we should have done more. Maybe we could have done something different.” Alex dropped out of school, registered as a sex offender, and was ordered to undergo treatment. He made no progress in treatment. In the world of correctional therapy, an unrepentant sex offender lacks the self-awareness required for reform—a Catch 22 for the wrongfully convicted. No one believed him when he protested his innocence. Once separated from family, he deteriorated rapidly.
…”I was like, ‘Screw this, no one cares about me.’ Alex fought with other inmates and tried to kill himself half a dozen times. On his 18th birthday, Alex was released to a halfway house. His roommates were grown men in their 30s who scared him.
…In June 2019, a woman who volunteered as a mentor for disadvantaged youth called the Hudson Police Department to report 18-year-old Sierrah Parmeter might have falsely accused Alex Heineman of rape. According to police reports, Sierrah told the mentor she had sex with a boy who wasn’t her boyfriend, so she was planning to accuse him of rape in order to save her relationship. The mentor thought of the Hudson incident two years prior and asked Sierrah if it had really happened as she claimed. Sierrah admitted it wasn’t a true story. The mentor then informed Sierrah’s grandmother. The grandmother consulted Sierrah’s social worker about what to do. The social worker said let it “lie.” The mentor could not.
Hudson Police interviewed Sierrah Parmeter. According to the report, she said she and Alex had been planning to have sex when they went for a walk in the woods on May 5, 2017. They made out. He started giving her a hickey, and at one point stuck his hand down her pants. She told him to stop, so he did and walked away. She said he never pushed her.
The following month, the St. Croix County District Attorney’s Office moved to vacate Alex Heineman’s sexual assault conviction due to actual innocence. Circuit Court Judge Scott Needham apologized. At last, Alex Heineman was scrubbed from the sex offender registry. It didn’t matter that he’d been cleared in court. In Hudson, Alex couldn’t shake the reputation of a sex offender. The town became a prison. People called him from blocked numbers and sent him hate mail from fake Facebook accounts. He deleted his social media. Still strangers came to the door. “Alex was treated terribly by obviously people in the public and frankly by law enforcement officers,” Hudson Police Sgt. Glen Hartman says.
While the local news broadcast his charges, no one ever bothered to report his exoneration. Exoneration alone cannot fix all the harm that stems from miscarriage of justice. The consequences—social ostracism, job loss, public housing denial—are virtually infinite. Judges are often willing to clear a record if the district attorney agrees to it. But prosecutors are all different.
In March, Sierrah Parmeter was charged with two counts of misdemeanor defamation and one count of obstructing an officer. Alex Heineman, now considered the victim, was invited to attend her first hearing. He brought his mother to help manage the anxiety. “Imagine you have a bear in front of you. Your whole body’s shaking and you can’t move. You can’t even look at the person. All that fear comes down your body. That’s what it felt like,” Alex recalls.
“If she hadn’t lied, I never would have had to go through any of this. I could have had a normal life. I could have been in college by now. I haven’t even graduated high school because I’ve been in the system so long. Alex gets rejected everywhere he applies for work. College is an illusory dream. His best shot is to get a GED and learn a trade. But it’s hard to feel motivated to do anything in a world full of closed doors.
citypages.com-Susan Du
