A woman was arrested for drunken driving, booked into jail and testified in court before anyone realized that she was not who she said she was.

Leanna J. Conrad, 26, of Oak Grove Road, was charged March 27 with identity deception and perjury, both Level 6 felonies.

Charges were filed after police discovered that Conrad — also known as Leanna Jett — had given a deputy a driver’s license belonging to another woman, 35-year-old Lacey Hess of Forest Hills, during a traffic stop March 17.

“When she handed me a driver’s license, the girl on the picture on the driver’s license she gave me looked very, very similar to her,” Brown County Sheriff’s Deputy Chad Williams said March 27.

“A lot of times, driver’s licenses are a couple of years old, and people change in a couple of years, hairstyles or whatever. She looked similar to the girl she gave me the driver’s license for.”

On March 27, Prosecutor Ted Adams said that he had filed a motion to dismiss all charges against Hess. He also filed an immediate reinstatement of her driving privileges, and to remove any suspension data from her driving record relating to this case.

“I have never seen this before in my entire legal career. I have heard of it happening, but I’ve never actually seen it before in my career,” Adams said.

He said he has “full intentions” of bringing the same charges that were mistakenly brought against Hess against Conrad. Charges were filed March 28.

“As always, I am ethically required to say that Leanna Conrad, or Leanna Jett, is innocent until proven guilty, these are just merely allegations as we sit here today,” Adams added.

When he stopped her in traffic, Williams said that Conrad responded to Hess’ name.

“People lie to us all the time, and usually before they are taken to jail, we determine their true identity. With this, with both of the girls looking very, very similar, I didn’t question it,” he said.

“Then when I kept calling her by that name, she responded to me. That didn’t give me any reason to believe she was somebody else.”

Hess was mistakenly charged on March 19 with operating a vehicle with an ACE of 0.15 or more, a Class A misdemeanor, and operating a vehicle while intoxicated, a Class C misdemeanor.

When Conrad was booked into the Brown County jail after the traffic stop on March 17, jail staff booked her in as Hess.

“They (jail staff) just go basically on our word saying, ‘This is who this person is.’ By me handing them her driver’s license, they are assuming that is who that person is,” Williams said.

Conrad continued to use Hess’ identity during a court appearance on March 20.

She had texted a court employee who knew her true identity to say she would be in court that morning and not to judge her. She said in the text that she would explain later, Williams wrote in a probable cause affidavit.

After the court hearing — during which she claimed her name was Hess under oath — the court employee told the magistrate that the person who claimed to be Hess was actually Conrad.

Williams had burned a DVD of video from Conrad’s arrest, and he took it to the prosecutor’s office. An employee there told Williams that the person arrested was not Hess, but was Conrad. The employee printed off a photo of a tattoo that Conrad had posted on Facebook, and it matched the photos that were taken during book-in.

Williams also also able to get a copy of Conrad’s mugshot from a 2010 arrest in Porter County.

He then contacted Conrad’s boyfriend, who told him that Conrad was the woman he arrested, and she had told him she’d lied to police. The boyfriend said she figured she would get in more trouble for using the driver’s license, so she didn’t say anything, according to the affidavit.

Williams called Hess, and she said that she’d lost her license “awhile back.” Hess and Conrad are both from Valparaiso, but Williams said he did not have reason to believe they knew each other.

Williams said he has not been able to speak with Conrad since she bonded out of the Brown County jail on March 18. A warrant was filed for her arrest on March 28.