Typo Has Been In Jail Without Charge For 18 Months

One missing guarantee in the Skyrim franchise put an innocent Nova Scotian in prison for 18 months.

A 2018 child attraction study, which began in Madison, Wisconsin, and eventually spread to Halifax, Canada, was based on lies.

Police were looking for a Kik user under the username “fus__ro_dah” (two characters after “fus”), but accidentally requested records of the username “fus_ro_dah” (one character after “fus”). This one characteristic difference led them not to the perpetrator but to a Canadian man named Brandon Klayme.

(Readers may recognize “fus ro dah” as Endless Power “The Dragon Screams” from The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.)

Although they did not find evidence of the crime on his digital devices, the Canadian police arrested Klayme in 2020 on child abuse charges. He was convicted after a trial in 2023 and sentenced to 18 months in prison in 2024. He served the full term.

Even after his release, Klayme continued to fight for his faith. In preparation for his application, the domain name mistake that caused all these years of confusion was discovered. Thursday, Nova Scotia Supreme Court it changed Klayme’s mindhe wrote: “Mr. Klayme is innocent of the crimes.

One Underscore

The case began in 2018. From August to December of that year, a 12-year-old girl from Wisconsin communicated with an older man through the Kik messaging service. While checking the girl’s phone, her mother found an “inappropriate” picture of the man and called the police.

The Dane County Sheriff’s Department responded. A deputy took the call, and the department conducted a forensic investigation. The report identified 125 Kik messages between the girl and an adult with the username “fus__ro_dah” (two letters after “fus”).

To identify this person, police contacted Kik, but accidentally asked for information about Kik user “fus_ro_dah” (one line after “fus”). Kik provided Klayme’s email address in response.

Google records showed that this email address was used to access Google services from an IP address in Canada, so Dane County investigators turned the case over to Halifax County Police. Halifax police seized an IP address that was assigned to local Internet provider Bell Aliant. Bell linked the IP address to the public address of the subscriber, Brandon Klayme.

The police obtained a search warrant for Klayme’s home and took cell phones and laptops from his bedroom. A search of these materials yielded no evidence related to the crime. Nothing connected Klayme to the girl. No intimate photos have been found. Klayme had a Kik account, but police were unable to show they had access to the service at the time of questioning.

However, Klayme was arrested and charged with three crimes:

• Enticing a person under the age of 14 using telecommunications
• Giving pornography to a child
• Having child pornography

The case went to trial and Klayme was found guilty. He then spent 18 months in prison. No one involved, even from the security side, seems to have noticed the username confusion.

Appeal

Klayme continued to press his appeal, but it was too late when his team realized what had happened. Here is how Klayme describes his findings:

In the final stages of preparing my objections to the appeal, they discovered that the subpoena had a hidden error that changed my life. Instead of requesting information about the username “fus__ro_dah,” the subpoena requested information about the username “fus_ro_dah.” The police did not realize that the perpetrator’s Kik username “fus__ro_dah” contained two digits. This inconsistency was never identified in the case. It was not brought before the magistrate.