Topeka ? A series of errors allowed a rape suspect to leave the Shawnee County Jail and spend more than five hours at large last week before he was arrested again, the county’s corrections director said.

In a report Thursday to county commissioners, Elizabeth Gillespie also said disciplinary action has been started against four corrections officers involved in the matter.

The inadvertent release of Jeremiah Nave on Oct. 5 was the jail’s first since it adopted new procedures in July 2004, after a man with the same last name as another inmate was mistakenly freed.

Nave, 23, entered the Shawnee County Jail on Sept. 19 following his arrest on one count of rape. From then through Oct. 2, additional cases against Nave were forwarded to the jail – eight in all, including a warrant for aggravated indecent liberties.

Between Sept. 26 and Oct. 5, Gillespie said, the Shawnee County district attorney’s office sent the corrections department written notice to release Nave from custody on five of the eight cases, pending later filing of charges.

When prosecutors sent the last release notice on Oct. 5, however, a corrections officer mistakenly thought Nave had been released on all cases and forwarded his file to another classification officer.

The second officer assumed the first had verified all the pertinent information and continued the release process without checking the information himself, Gillespie said.

Nave then was sent to the booking area for release, where a booking officer completed the release without independently verifying the inmate was eligible to be freed.

Gillespie said all three officers erred in the process: the first for deciding that all cases had been dismissed and the next two for not verifying the inmate’s status for themselves, as they were required to do by departmental procedures. A fourth officer had erred, she said, in incorrectly entering case information into the computer.

Nave left the jail around 1:15 p.m. and was re-arrested about 6:45 p.m., after a Topeka police detective noticed the jail’s mistake.