FAMILY SUES AFTER SWAT TEAM RAIDS THEIR APARTMENT BY MISTAKE

Kenyan immigrant Nancy Njoroge had been living in the United States
for a year when a Montgomery County SWAT team burst into her
Gaithersburg apartment at 4 a.m., handcuffed her and her two teenage
daughters, and searched her apartment, court records show.

Police found nothing.

The reason: Njoroge lived in No. 202 of her apartment complex. The
police had a search warrant for apartment 201. After rejecting an
offer from the county’s claims adjuster of a “couple of movie passes,”
the American Civil Liberties Union is suing the county on the family’s
behalf for unspecified damages, according to ACLU records filed in
court.

The ACLU said the purpose of the lawsuit was to hold the police
department accountable for its mistake. “Officers had but one
apartment to locate, in a quiet and well-lit hallway in the dead of
night, without distraction and with clearly marked doors and numbers,”
ACLU lawyer Fritz Mulhauser said in a letter to the county.

Njoroge and her daughters have suffered emotional distress since the
attack and have seen their work and school lives disrupted, according
to their lawyers.

“I have a lot of problems,” Njoroge told a police investigator about a
month after the 2005 incident. “From that day, when I see a police
car, I shake.”

Adding to her duress, Njoroge said she was wearing a “very short
nightdress” when she was made to lie on the floor for 30 minutes after
the police handcuffed her, and her family back in Kenya heard of her
alleged troubles with the police.

“My name is already spoiled,” she said.

When the police realized their mistake, they freed Njoroge and her
daughters, apologized for the botched raid, and offered to fix her
front door, court records show.

Police later served the search warrant on the correct apartment, where
they found 600 grams of cocaine and $27,820 in cash, according to a
report by the Drug Enforcement Administration, which partnered with
the county on the drug investigation.

Court records don’t give a clear reason why the police raided the
wrong apartment, and the county attorney assigned to the case did not
respond to inquiries for the story. But in court records, a SWAT team
leader indicated that it was an isolated incident.

“In six years as the supervisor of the tactical section, I have led
approximately 600 raids,” Sgt. Darin Magee, whose job was to lead the
SWAT team to the correct apartment, said in a statement. “This is the
first such error that I have made and I hope this will be considered
when the situation is judged.”