For weeks, Stephen L. Morgan, Director of the Center for the Study of Inequality and a professor in the Department of Sociology at Cornell University, has scoured the Internet in order to remove his picture from the news sites, search engine caches and blogs, where it was mistakenly used to represent another Stephen Morgan - the alleged killer of the Jewish Wesleyan University student Johanna Justin-Jinich.

On the day on which the police announced a national manhunt for 29-year-old Morgan, who escaped after fatally shooting Justin-Jinich in Connecticut, Prof. Morgan of Ithaca, NY, was shocked to discover that an old picture taken for his driver's license in Massachusetts in 1998 appeared almost everywhere, used in the story of the fugitive suspect who shares his name.

"The first time we heard about it was from my former student, who called my department and said that she saw a picture of me on MSNBC. She wonderd if I could have possibly shot someone. She said "But how could that it be? He is such a nice guy. But the picture looks so much like him, and it is his name.'" Prof. Morgan recalls.

"It turned out that the police in the very early stages of the investigation pulled my driver's license picture form the Massachusetts database , and they claim that they sent it to Wesleyan only so that Wesleyan could use it to to check the photo against their internal database."

"But Wesleyan sent it to their students and put it on their website for the world to see. The local media picked it, and the next morning it was on CNN, with voiceovers from the police chief and the mayor of the town. The story went out over the AP with my picture, and then it was everywhere. Lots of blogs picked it up, in addition to more traditional news outlets."

The publication of excerpts from the diary of Stephen Morgan the suspect, in which he threatened Jews, only made things more uncomfortable for Stephen Morgan the professor of sociology.

"The ADL [the Anti-Defamation League] sent my picture to synagogues in Connecticut, and to be the apparent subject of a manhunt as someone who had committed a hate crime was quite shocking," he says. "Of course, it's nothing in comparison with what the real victim of this horrible crime suffered. But it was very bizarre and uncomfortable to deal with."

When the suspect killer was still at large, Stephen L. Morgan found himself having to discuss with his wife how best to deal with the situation in which they had found themselves.

"Luckily, the real suspect turned himself in pretty quickly; otherwise we'd really have been concerned for my security. But we still were concerned somewhat for a couple of weeks, because the picture still popped up in every Google search for Stephen Morgan the killer; it took only a day or so to remove it from most major news sites, but it took almost two weeks to get it removed from all of the blogs and from one of the AP stories that made it on to Google news. .."

CNN aired a correction of the story after a few hours ("But we didn't want them to show my picture again"), and the ADL issued a correction to the synagogues. But, despite having the real suspect behind bars, Prof. Morgan admits that some tension still remains.

He recalls an episode in which he saw an unmarked jeep approaching his house. "No one usually gets to our driveway; we live in a very remote area," he says. "I ran up and locked the door... Fortunately, it was someone delivering flowers for my wife. So there was a certain amount of discomfort. And the picture is still on a couple of the automatic news blogs that are aggregating AP news stories, and I'm still trying to figure out how to take it off."

Prof. Morgan is grateful to Cornell University for acting so quickly on his behalf. "They called many, many media outlets. They discovered it earlier than me because I was out for lunch when CNN first called them to ask how to contact me to discuss how to issue a correction. Frankly, I never felt more protected by an institution. Wesleyan University called to apologize, and they have indicated that they never intended to bring me into this situation. Still, they have placed blame for the mishap on the policy, and I am not sure that is the entire story."

While trying to assess the impact of the picture, Prof. Morgan read almost every article about the suspected killer. "He seems like an abysmal person, and it's embarrassing for all Stephen Morgans in the world to be associated with this horrible crime by name," he says. "The hate crime motive makes it all extremely despicable."