When TikToker Madisyn (@mniszewski) was five or six years old, her grandmother was arrested at the grocery store in a case of mistaken identity.
Madisyn got off the school bus at her grandmother’s house every day, but one day, her mom and aunt were there. She asked them where her grandmother was, and they told her that she was in jail.
So, here’s what happened. Her grandmother was standing in line at the pharmacy, chatting with another woman while they waited for their turn.
When she finally reached the front of the line, she waited for someone to bring out her medications, but they never did. She had no idea what was going on because she was deaf and only had 10% of her hearing.
The pharmacist came up and told her to sit on a nearby bench while she waited. Then, the police showed up and arrested her. She also had Madisyn’s baby sister with her at the time.
The police tried to take the baby away, but Madisyn’s grandma insisted that they get the car seat from her car and install it in the back of the cop car.
The police drove them to jail and called Madisyn’s mom. At the jail, her grandma still didn’t know why she had been arrested because she couldn’t hear anything that was being said.
Eventually, the police realized they had the wrong woman. Apparently, another woman with an eerily similar name to her grandmother had been seeing the exact same doctor and going to the same pharmacy that her grandmother used.
She had been lying to the doctor in order to obtain painkillers and sell them. There was a warrant out for her arrest.
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“When my grandmother got there, the pharmacist called the cops, but there were a few letters off in the name, and the pharmacist got fired,” said Madisyn.
“And the grocery store paid my grandmother like $10,000 so she wouldn’t sue them, and she took it, which was dumb.”
A decade later, her grandmother saw the same woman she had been talking to in line at the pharmacy and had the chance to tell her that she was falsely accused and arrested at the grocery store.
In the comments section, several TikTok users shared stories about pharmacy mix-ups and family members getting arrested.
“A week after I had my baby, I went to the pharmacy to pick up my blood pressure medication, and they gave me the wrong medicine and gave me Adderall instead because [this lady and I] had the same name,” commented one user.
“My husband’s 80-year-old deaf grandma got arrested a couple of years ago. In her defense, she was trying to do the right thing. A litter of kittens showed up at her house. I think the mama had the kittens there and then abandoned them. She’s on a fixed income and can barely afford life as it is, so she loaded the kittens up, so they wouldn’t die, and took them to this rich-looking neighborhood and dropped them off…Someone saw it on their camera footage. The police came to her house and arrested her,” wrote another.
“My parents’ house got searched because they were looking for a man with an almost identical name to my dad. There was an ‘ing’ instead of an ‘er,’ same first name. Guy was a doctor’s son who stole a prescription pad and was selling painkillers and other drugs. They had a warrant, but both lived out in the country, so they asked for directions and were sent to my parents’ place,” added a third.
By Emily Chan
Emily Chan is a writer who covers lifestyle and news content. She graduated from Michigan State University with a degree in... More about Emily Chan
