A Mocksville man who spent over five years in prison found out last week he won’t be going back.
Randy Adam Howard, 43, fled to Australia over a decade ago to avoid charges for second degree rape. He was located there, deemed an “unproductive citizen” by the Australian government, extradited to the US, and spent more than five years in prison.
In late June 2011, Howard, who had been living off Main Church Road, moved in with his mother, Bonnie Maness, at Mocks Place off Main Street. As was required, Howard went to the sheriff’s department the day after he moved to update his sex offender registry. He wrote down his mother’s address, 401 S. Main Street …
A month later, Howard realized he had written the wrong apartment number and went back to the sheriff’s department to change it.
What he failed to realize is that he wrote S. Main when he should have written N. Main.
When detectives went to 401 S. Main St., they found a boarded-up house with rotting floors that had not had electricity or water to it for years.
Howard’s attorney, Ashley Cannon, called it a “simple clerical error.”
That error led to one charge of failure to report a change of address as a registered sex offender, a felony …