Around 2:45 p.m. today, we published a story about Jericho Upshaw, a Halifax man charged with first-degree murder, and his association with the North End.

It relied on two sources who said they had encountered him in the neighbourhood on several occasions. Unfortunately, the story was wrong: we had the wrong Jericho. The details in the story were about another young man with the same first name. Our two sources had seen Upshaw’s photo in a local paper and identified him as the man they had encountered in the North End. They were mistaken, and we were wrong in publishing the story.

Within about five minutes of posting the story online and sending out a tweet about it, we realized we had the wrong Jericho. We removed the story from our site and deleted the related tweet.

Our practice is to not unpublish content. We don’t want to erase the record; we prefer to correct it.

But in this case, the story was based on a mistaken identification by two sources. It was built on the information from those two sources. As a result, we felt it was essential to remove the story and publish this explanation of what went wrong. We also redirected the URL from the mistaken story to this blog post in order to ensure that anyone who finds that piece of content will understand why it was removed.

On behalf of OpenFile Halifax, I apologize for this error and will do everything I can to make sure something like this doesn’t happen again.

Neal Ozano

Editor, OpenFile Halifax