Guzman, who was sentenced to life for the savage 2022 murder of his 19-year-old girlfriend, Delila Grayson, was accidentally released on March 27 from Clayton County Jail. The reason? An unbelievable clerical error — jail personnel failed to recognize that Guzman was incarcerated for murder when processing unrelated dropped charges. Instead of flagging the situation, they let him walk out the front door — as if he were just another petty offender.

He vanished without a trace.

It wasn’t until April 8 — nearly two weeks later — that the Georgia Department of Corrections was alerted by the Office of Victim Services that Guzman was no longer listed in the system. The terrifying realization kicked off a frantic manhunt, as officials scrambled to locate the man who should have never left a cell in the first place.

The horror deepened for Delila’s family, especially her mother, who lives in Florida. She described living in constant fear that Guzman could show up at her doorstep. “I was terrified,” she said. “I kept thinking — is tonight the night he comes for me or my children?”

That fear wasn’t misplaced. Law enforcement eventually discovered Guzman had fled across state lines and was hiding out at his mother’s house in Ocoee, Florida — over 400 miles from where he was released. On Friday morning, U.S. Marshals raided the residence and arrested him without incident, ending a nationwide manhunt and averting what could have become an even darker chapter in an already tragic story.

The case has triggered massive outrage. Clayton County Sheriff Levon Allen admitted that jail staff had dropped the ball in a catastrophic way, blaming a lack of training and failure to follow protocol. An internal investigation is now underway, and disciplinary action — including possible terminations — is on the table.

But critics say that’s not enough. “This wasn’t a mistake — this was criminal negligence,” one legal expert said. “When a man serving life for murder walks free because someone couldn’t read a file, that’s a system failure of the highest order.”

For now, Kathan Guzman is locked up in Florida’s Orange County Jail, awaiting extradition back to Georgia, where he will resume his life sentence — the one he was never supposed to escape. But the damage is done. A grieving family was retraumatized, the public’s trust in the justice system shattered, and a convicted murderer walked free for 14 days — because someone wasn’t paying attention.