The court sent me a check for jury duty I never served. Forty dollars and mileage, for four days in 2023, at a courthouse ninety miles from here. Somebody sat in that jury box for four days, signed in every morning, and the clerk still has the sheets. She mailed me copies without me even asking, which tells you how uncomfortable she was about it. The signature was a decent version of mine, but on the third morning whoever it was signed in twice by mistake, crossed one out, and under the crossed-out line they started to write a different name.
I stared at that name for a long time because I recognized the last name immediately. It belonged to someone I hadn’t spoken to since high school. I called the clerk and asked whether she could tell me anything else about the person who had signed in. She said the jury roster was still sealed, but the attendance sheets weren’t, and the name appeared nowhere else in the file. Then she asked me whether I knew why someone would use my name to serve on a jury. I told her I had no idea, and she said quietly, “Neither did we until this morning.”
She explained that the payment had been flagged because the bank account receiving it didn’t match any account I had ever used. Someone had apparently completed the entire process, including mileage reimbursement, using my identity. I asked where the check had been sent, and she said it had been mailed to my current address, even though the person who served had provided a completely different address. That meant someone had deliberately made sure the check would eventually reach me. I asked what was written on the final attendance sheet, and she told me there was one handwritten note beside my name. It said, “He’ll understand when he sees the second signature.”
I asked her to send me a copy, and she did. The second signature belonged to the same person whose name had been started on the crossed-out line. I searched the name that evening and found an obituary from two years earlier. The man had died before the jury service supposedly took place. But the photograph attached to the obituary was the same man I remembered from high school, and underneath the photograph was an address I knew even better. It was the house where I grew up, and according to the property records, someone had been paying the taxes on it in my name for the last three years.:::
