Montgomery County has agreed to pay $30,000 to a family whose door was knocked in and their apartment searched at 4 a.m. by a SWAT team that went to the wrong address.
The county had earlier offered the family a “couple of movie passes” to compensate for the botched raid, according to American Civil Liberties Union records filed in court. The ACLU represented Nancy Njoroge, a Kenyan immigrant who was at home with her two teenage children when her apartment was raided.
The Njoroges lived in No. 202 of their Gaithersburg apartment complex. The police had a warrant to search No. 201.
“The ACLU is delighted that Montgomery County had to pay damages for a serious mistake,” said ACLU lawyer Fritz Mulhauser. “And we hope the county will improve the planning of their search warrant execution so that no other family has to suffer as the Njoroges did when the police burst in on them in the middle of the night for no reason.”
A police spokeswoman said the mistaken raid was an isolated incident and the county’s SWAT team had performed several thousand successful raids, often in dangerous circumstances.
“This is the very rare exception to the otherwise excellent record of this high trained specialized unit,” said spokeswoman Lucille Baur.
Police later found 600 grams of cocaine and $27,820 in cash when they raided the correct apartment, court records show.
Njoroge said she would shake after seeing a police car after the 2005 raid, and said she and her family had suffered emotional distress. She said the police made her lie on the floor in handcuffs while police searched her apartment for more than 30 minutes.
She added that her name had been “spoiled” back in Kenya, because word had spread that her family had problems with the police.
There have been a series of lawsuits against county agencies for SWAT raids recently in Maryland.
On Monday, a couple in Howard County filed a $5 million lawsuit against police charging that they had been victims of excessive force after a SWAT team raided the wrong house. The lawsuit also said a SWAT team member shot and killed the family dog “Grunt” without provocation.
And Berwyn Heights Mayor Cheye Calvo is suing Prince George’s County after his two black Labrador retrievers were killed in a highly publicized, errant SWAT raid.
