A 78-year-old grandmother was just awarded $3.76 million in a judgment after her Colorado home was raided and wrongly searched two years ago by a SWAT team in a sting gone wrong.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado filed a lawsuit on behalf of Ruby Johnson, a retired U.S. Postal Service worker whose home was the target of a botched raid on Jan. 4, 2022.
According to the complaint against two officers, Denver Police obtained a search warrant for a home in their efforts to locate a stolen truck filled with four semi-automatic handguns, a rifle, a revolver, two drones, $4,000 in cash, and an Apple iPhone 11.
Investigators used Apple’s Find My Phone app to pinpoint the location of the phone so they could find the truck. The problem was that the app does not track the phone’s exact location, only its general vicinity. So, the truck could have been parked at any of the other neighboring homes around Johnson’s. Yet, authorities raided Johnson’s home anyway.
The complaint notes that Johnson had just gotten out of the shower and was watching TV when she heard someone outside her house yelling through a megaphone for everyone inside to exit with their hands up.
Wearing only a bathrobe, Johnson opened her door to find several police vehicles, armed men in full military-style gear, and a police dog. She was home alone at the time.
The truck and its contents were not found at her home. Police used a battering ram to get into her garage even after she explained how to open the garage door and broke ceiling tiles to search her attic.
The vehicle police were looking for belonged to Jeremy McDaniel. It was stolen from the Denver Hyatt the day before the raid. Two days after they searched Johnson’s home, authorities found it six miles away in Aurora.
Johnson was so traumatized by the incident that she couldn’t return to her home. She stayed with her son in Texas for three months.
The ACLU filed a suit in December 2022 accusing Denver Police Detective Gary Staab of drafting a “hastily prepared, bare-bones, materially misleading affidavit” to secure the search warrant. The complaint stated police executed an “unreasonable search and seizure” that violated Johnson’s constitutional rights and caused her severe physical and emotional distress. The jury award was announced on Monday, March 4.
Her lawsuit was filed under a new state bill passed in 2020 that allowed Colorado citizens to sue police over constitutional rights violations. Before that law was enacted, people with complaints similar to Johnson’s had to turn to the federal courts, where their cases were more difficult to resolve due to qualified immunity police protections, according to The Associated Press.
The ACLU said Johnson’s suit was the first significant case to go to trial after the bill was passed.
