GWINNETT COUNTY, Ga. — After spending four months behind bars and losing his career, ex-bounty hunter Omar Lee has been acquitted of impersonating a police officer in Gwinnett County.
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It ends a more than two-year legal nightmare that began during a routine fugitive search in 2022.
“It was breathtaking,” Lee told Channel 2 Gwinnett County Bureau Chief Matt Johnson. “It was a weight lifted off my shoulder. It was truly a blessing from God that I was acquitted.”
He was acquitted for felony impersonating an officer Friday, according to court records. The Gwinnett County jury also found him not guilty of first-degree burglary and criminal trespass charges.
“I most definitely knew it was going to turn out this way, because I knew I had probable cause to be there,” he said. “I knew that I was doing my job.”
The case began in November 2022 when Lee and another man went to a Lawrenceville-area home looking for a fugitive. Surveillance video showed Lee wearing a vest and badge at the front door of a home off Tab Roberts Road.
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A woman who lived at the residence with her disabled mother, and six children under the age of 12, called 911 to report men with guns and what she thought was a fake search warrant had entered her home.
Lee maintained he was legitimately working as a bounty hunter for a Philadelphia bonding company trying to locate the ex-boyfriend of the woman’s daughter.
“He just felt like, because I physically didn’t have the physical paper warrant, that I wasn’t supposed to be there,” Lee explained about the responding sergeant who arrested him. “The sergeant had run-ins with other bounty hunters and he kind of just categorized us in one category.”
Lee was charged with felony impersonating an officer and held initially without bond.
“I was frustrated. I was embarrassed. It was not a great feeling. It was just a lot of emotions. I was in denial, like, this cannot be me,” Lee recalled of his arrest.
The case devastated his life, Lee said.
“I lost my job, where I couldn’t get a job, where I was basically in danger,” he said. “Because everybody knows me from the news.”
Now exonerated, Lee plans to move forward with his life but has decided not to return to bounty hunting. He intends to go back to school and start over.
He offers advice to others in his former profession: “Just make sure you’re on point. Just make sure that you have everything to the T. What you think you don’t need, you need. Because every county is different.”
A second man arrested in the incident has a case still pending.
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