ST. LOUIS — After he was convicted of armed robbery in 2000, Cornealious Anderson was sentenced to 13 years behind bars and was told to await instructions on when and where to report to prison. But those instructions never came.
So Anderson didn’t report. He spent the next 13 years turning his life around — getting married, raising three kids, learning a trade. He made no effort to conceal his identity or whereabouts. Anderson paid taxes and traffic tickets, renewed his driver’s license, and registered his businesses.
Not until last year did the Missouri Department of Corrections discover the clerical error that kept him free. Now he’s fighting for his release, saying authorities missed their chance to incarcerate him.
Last July, Anderson’s life was turned upside-down.
‘‘They sent a SWAT team to his house,’’ Anderson’s attorney, Patrick Megaro, said Wednesday. ‘‘He was getting his 3-year-old daughter breakfast, and these men with automatic weapons bang on his door.’’
Anderson, 37, was taken to Southeast Correctional Center in Charleston, Mo., to begin serving the sentence. A court appeal filed in February asks for him to be freed.
Anderson had just one arrest for marijuana possession on his record when he and a cousin robbed an assistant manager at a Burger King restaurant in 1999. The men, wearing masks, showed a gun (it turned out to be a BB gun) and demanded money about to be placed in a deposit box.
Anderson was convicted and sentenced and waited for word on what to do next.
‘‘His attorney said, ‘Listen, they’re going to get you some day, so just wait for the order,’ ’’ Megaro said. ‘‘As time goes by, the order never comes. What does a normal person believe? Maybe they forgot about it. It’s only human nature to hope they just let it go. He really didn’t know what to do.
‘‘A year goes by, two years, five years, 10 years. He’s thinking, ‘I guess they don’t care about me anymore,’ ’’ Megaro said.
What happens next isn’t clear. Missouri Attorney General Chris Koster on Tuesday filed a court response that said the state is justified in making Anderson serve the sentence.
However, Koster wrote that Megaro could refile the case as an action against the director of the Department of Corrections, which could give Anderson credit for the time he was technically at large.
Governor Jay Nixon could also commute the sentence. A spokesman for Nixon declined to comment.