Police officers near Wilmington, North Carolina, raided the wrong house.
Avery Marshall and Alisa Carr are innocent residents who live in the targeted home, and suffered through the cop’s “heavily-armed midnight raid” with armed officers “terrorizing a sleeping family, smashing windows and doors, throwing a flashbang grenade into the home, reinjuring Avery's recently operated on back, causing Alisa heart palpitations, and holding the couple's 9-and-16-year-old children at gun point.”
Police didn’t find the suspect they were seeking since he hadn’t been at, and wasn’t at, the home. But they left behind “shambles.”
Now they’ll face accountability in court.
A decision by the United States District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina has denied qualified immunity for officers who inflicted the raid. They were sued by Marshall, Carr and the Institute for Justice.
"This decision is a massive first step toward getting justice for Avery and Alisa after they were subjected to a terrifying raid that never should have happened," said IJ lawyer Marie Miller. "When officers overlook obvious evidence they're raiding the wrong house, they must be held accountable. And when law-enforcement officers destroy innocent people's property trying to catch a criminal, the public as a whole must foot the bill—not the unlucky innocent homeowners.”
It was back in April 2024 when officers from the Lee and Pender county sheriff’s departments were hunting for a suspect thought to have stolen from parked cars.
“They believed the suspect's phone pinged off a cell tower near Avery and Alisa's home in the small hamlet of Willard. But many homes and other properties were within the radius of where the ping occurred, and police decided to raid Avery and Alisa's home simply because there was a Nissan parked out front, and they believed the suspect had been driving a Nissan.”
There were problems: It was a different model Nissan, different plate number, different VIN, different year.
Instead of investigating, they launched a SWAT-style raid in the dark.
“That night caused our family so much trauma and pain, so we're very happy that our lawsuit against those responsible for it can move forward," said Avery. "What happened to our family should never happen to anyone."
The IJ explained, “The court held that the officer who applied for a warrant to search Alisa and Avery's home was not entitled to qualified immunity for falsely swearing to a judge that officers had observed the suspect's vehicle at Alisa and Avery's home. The court also denied qualified immunity to the individual officers who conducted the raid, for two reasons: First, the officers violated the knock-and-announce rule—by intruding into the home less than a minute after arriving in the middle of the night, without adequately announcing their presence and reasonably allowing the occupants to open the door. Second, the officers kept searching the home after explicitly observing ‘that ain't the car’ the suspect had been associated with.”
Source link
