By Emily Mukasa
 When near midnight on July 31, 2006, Sonya Alexander was jarred awake by a state trooper telling her the rental car, in which she was rested roadside near Limon, had been reported stolen, her journey home to Los Angeles took a major turn.
“As I drove I felt drowsy, so decided to rest at a nearby gas station. It was 1 a.m. when an officer knocked at the window of the Chrysler PT Cruiser in which I napped and asked whether I knew that the car was reported stolen,” recalled Alexander, a 39-year-old Black writer and filmmaker. “’No!’ I said boldly.”
From that time on, Alexander confessed to facing the worst nightmare of her life.
Little did the University of California at Los Angeles graduate know she would remain stranded in the Lincoln County Jail for nearly half a year, while the car and her belongings were shipped back to California. An original bond of $50,000 and her strong belief in her innocence that kept her from pleading guilty kept her locked up in Colorado for five and a half months.
“I think it’s kind of outrageous that someone would rent a car in California and be put into jail for six months and put on trial in Colorado,” said Shareef Aleem, a community activist in Denver who accompanied Alexander to a June trial date at the district court in Hugo. “I don’t even know why Colorado is prosecuting this case. It seems like it should be extradited to California.”
“It didn’t seem like her public defender was defending her too vigorously,” said Aleem, also a KGNU radio DJ who believes Alexander’s severe legal treatment is due to racism. “In Limon and Hugo and that whole area out there, thousands of Black men and Latinos are incarcerated. It seems like when any Blacks or Latinos come through those towns, (the locals) come down on them harder than anybody else.”
Alexander, whose writing credits include the Cosby Screenwriting Fellowship Program and movie review Web sites, rented the cruiser from Rent-4-Less to travel to New York City for a screenwriting job. Shortly after arriving in the Big Apple, housing problems forced her to return to Los Angeles for a promise of better conditions.
Alexander said she notified the Santa Monica, Calif.-based rental company by mail from New York about when she would drive the car back. She was too distracted by her roommate to call the company.
“I sent them certified mail telling them when I would drive the car back,” Alexander said. “The mail showed that they received it. I then did not need to call, but they said I did not write.”
Alexander said she only rented from Rent-4-Less, because it was the cheapest company she could find. She further explained she perceived the company was discriminatory from the beginning, but she was too rushed to find another cheap company.
She admitted to not studying the fine print from the company prohibiting her from going outside of the 100-mile radius of their location, but was surprised they did not point out such an important detail to her. Rent-4-Less would not return phone calls when asked for a comment.
Prosecutors earlier on offered Alexander a plea deal of 90 days in jail and a year of probation on aggravated motor vehicle charges, which she declined and stayed in jail.
Alexander said there were daily examples of racial discrimination in her treatment in jail and court, including disparaging remarks, name-calling, and frequent exaggeration and untruths spread about her case.
“They treated me differently because I'm Black and educated. They constantly tried to make me feel like I wasn't as smart as I thought I was,” Alexander explained. “One of the ministers who came to the jail even told me that maybe ‘writing wasn't for me.’”
The California screenwriter sent complaints about her initially-appointed counsel, Jeff Ruff, and District Attorney Sibylle Clark, who called her a “menace to society” to Cynthia Mares of the Colorado Supreme Court Office of Attorney Regulation Counsel. The Spectrum could not obtain comments from Mares, who was on vacation and unreachable by print deadline, and the Lincoln County Sheriff’s Office would not return the calls.
Earl Ofari Hutchinson, a Los Angeles-based author of nine books on race, politics, and social issues, said, “Racial profiling is an even more common occurrence in smaller towns with a small Black population and a provincial police department. These towns at one time were called ‘sunset towns’ where Blacks risked life and limb to be caught in them after dark. Many Black motorists tell stories about being stopped for frivolous reasons, their cars searched, ID checks made on them, and even detained for questioning.”
Also a syndicated columnist and political analyst, Hutchinson said, “There's no smoking-gun proof that Sonya was specifically profiled because of race. However, the refusal of the police and prosecutors to verify her story about the car, the extremely excessive time she spent in jail, the insults and indignities she has experienced in court, the lack of adequate counsel, and the harassment of having to make repeated trips to court suggest an especially harsh treatment of her, and race could be the only explanation for that.”
Alexander said friends who offered to bail her out were discouraged because of her ever-increasing bail amount, until she eventually touched the heart of a bail bondsman, Felix Rivera.
“The bond was lowered from $50,000 to $2000. They put a very high bond on her because she knew no one. I spoke to her and she sounded like a legitimate person,” said Rivera.
Rivera also convinced Alexander that it was in her best interest to show up to court, even if she thought she had not done anything wrong.
Released from jail on January 15, Alexander discovered the loss of all her belongings including her passport, certificates, clothes, and computer disks containing her writing, which had been shipped with the car to the rental company. Rent-4-Less has the rental car back, it has charged more than $500 on her credit card, and still, the company wants her to pay them $11,000, she said.
She complained to the Better Business Bureau and filed a fraud complaint with the bank. In the meantime, she has been traveling between the West Coast and Colorado to make court appearances in the district court. Her next and possibly last court date is scheduled for August 3.
While Rivera feels that a bunch of people in this case made mistakes, he also advocates that the case should be dismissed because Alexander already served her punishment in jail.
Alexander advises people not to deal with small “fly-by-night companies,” and to consistently read the fine print on the rental contract before rushing off with a car.
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