DAY OF HUMILIATION

Ellis Elliott was awakened suddenly by an insane pounding on the metal door
of his Bronx apartment. It was clear that someone was trying to break the
door down.

Terrified, Mr. Elliott leaped naked from his bed and grabbed the unlicensed
.25-caliber pistol he kept in a night stand.

He ran into the front room, still naked, and shouted: "Who is it? Who is it?"

By this time the top half of the door was caving in and most of the door
had been forced open a few inches. Whoever it was would be inside in a
moment. Panicked, Mr. Elliott fired a warning shot over the top of the door.

That shot was answered by a fearful barrage of gunfire. Mr. Elliott dived
behind a table and squatted there, trembling. Bullets pierced a freezer, a
reclining chair, a living room cabinet, the wall of a closet, the wall
behind his sofa.

A couple of dozen shots were fired before the barrage ceased. Only then,
said Mr. Elliott, did he hear someone call out, "Police!"

Oh Lord, thought Mr. Elliott. He didn't know whether to be relieved or even
more frightened.

The cops hollered for him to slide his gun toward the door.

"Yessir," he remembered replying. "Please don't shoot no more. I didn't
know you were the police. I've never done nothing wrong in my life."

A contingent of plainclothes officers armed with a warrant and a battering
ram had gone to Mr. Elliott's apartment on Sheridan Avenue about 7 or 8
A.M. on Feb. 27, presumably in search of a drug dealer. Somehow they
invaded the wrong apartment. Mr. Elliott, 44, had never been in trouble
with the law and is due to serve on a Bronx grand jury in the spring.

It was an honest mistake, the police would later say.

But this is what happened to Mr. Elliott before the mistake was realized:
He was dragged naked into the fourth-floor hallway and his hands were
cuffed behind his back. He was repeatedly addressed as nigger and black
mother-so-and-so. He said that when he begged to be allowed to put on some
clothes, the officers told him: "You're nothing but an animal, nigger. You
don't deserve any clothes."

He was walked naked down a stairwell to the third floor. "They made me sit
on the cold, dirty floor with my back against the wall," he said. A woman
who was about to leave her apartment for work spotted Mr. Elliott in the
hallway, shrieked and ran back into her apartment.

Meanwhile, police officers were inside Mr. Elliott's apartment, wrecking
the joint. No drugs were found.

Mr. Elliott continued to beg for some clothing. Finally, in a particularly
sadistic gesture, the officers gave him some of his girlfriend's clothes to
wear. That's the way he was dressed when he was taken out on the street in
front of a crowd of onlookers.

More humiliation awaited him at the 44th Precinct station house. "Everybody
was looking at me and laughing," he said. "The police officers were saying,
'Look at Buckwheat' and 'See how funny they look when we make these early
morning arrests.' "

He was put in a cell and left there for some hours, still in women's
clothes and, for at least part of that time, still with his wrists cuffed
behind him.

"This is not America to me," said Mr. Eliott's lawyer, Joseph Kelner. "This
was an innocent man, but no one would listen to him."

Mr. Kelner, a veteran attorney who once represented the families of the
victims of the Kent State massacre, denounced the recklessness of the
police break-in and charged that similar foul-ups occur more often than
most people realize. He said, "Bullets fly, doors are smashed with police
battering rams, lives are endangered and homes are wrecked by Keystone Kop
mentalities that have never heard of the Fourth Amendment."

Investigators eventually learned that they had made a terrible mistake with
Mr. Elliott and he was released about 1 A.M. the following day.

He walked home, still clad in women's clothes. When he got to his apartment
(which no longer had a door), he found police officers relaxing in his
living room, eating snacks and watching television.

They seemed amused by the department's mistake. He remembered one of them
saying: "You better get a good lawyer and sue the [expletive] out of them."

Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company