‘Don’t hurt us.’ Kids scream as SWAT team with ‘guns ready’ raids wrong home, CO suit says
After telling a SWAT team they had the wrong address, a grandmother was ordered out of her Denver apartment at gunpoint by the officers she heard banging on her door, a new lawsuit says.
When she stepped into the hallway, she found members of the SWAT team aiming assault rifles at her, including one pointing his weapon at her chest, on June 6, 2023, according to a complaint filed Feb. 25 in Denver County, Colorado.
“This caused her to fear for her life, her heart to race and her legs to tremble, as she obeyed their commands to put her arms up, and continued telling them, to no avail, that they were at the wrong apartment and there were little girls inside,” the complaint says.
The officers rushed the grandmother down the stairs of her apartment building and also seized her daughter, the mother of her two granddaughters, according to the complaint, which says both women were illegally taken into custody.
The SWAT team was searching for a next-door neighbor, a man suspected of violent crimes who lived at apartment 307, the complaint says.
But officers instead raided the family’s home, apartment 306, according to the complaint.
Though the grandmother and her daughter repeatedly warned that the suspect was inside unit 307, not their home, the officers “entered #306 alone with their guns ready, and the children inside,” the complaint says.
The raid was captured by their body-worn cameras.
Inside the apartment, the SWAT team swept the home and encountered two young girls “cowering” and screaming in a back bedroom, according to the complaint.
A still image from police body camera footage shows one girl holding her ears and a second girl hiding behind a chair as an armed SWAT team member stands in the doorway of the room.
The following image included in the complaint shows the girl, who was holding her ears, starting to scream, the complaint says.
The two girls are seen hugging each other, sitting on a bed, in the next few images shown in the filing.
According to the complaint, they kept telling the officers: “Don’t hurt us.”
“Confronted so starkly with what they had done, too late, these officers changed their tone and unsuccessfully tried to calm the children down,” the complaint says.
The girl’s aunt was also inside the apartment when the officers entered the unit, according to the complaint, which says she had just got out of the shower and feared they were going to “shoot and kill her.”
The lawsuit filed on behalf of the family accuses 10 Denver Police Department officers named in the complaint of excessive force, unreasonable seizure and search, in violation of Colorado’s Constitution.
The department declined McClatchy News’ request for comment on Feb. 26 “due to pending litigation and an ongoing internal investigation,” a spokesperson said via email.
Denver-based attorney John Holland, who represents the family, told McClatchy News that he hopes to see justice for his clients and a recognition of how they were harmed. He also said he wants to see police take accountability.
“Our police unfortunately continue to struggle mightily with just telling the truth,” he said in an emailed statement.
Officers accused of a cover-up
The complaint accuses the SWAT team’s members of lying about what happened during the raid to shield themselves from liability.
“The police reports submitted by defendants and other officers deliberately fail to describe the interactions and terrorization of plaintiffs,” the complaint says.
The officers falsified incident reports and denied the family’s actual experience, according to the complaint.
In the SWAT team commander’s report, he wrote the officers were evacuating the family “for their own protection and safety” instead of carrying out a raid, the complaint says.
Holland said that when he began practicing law, “if a police officer was a witness against your client in a case you were really worried because they had so much credibility and were almost always believed.”
“This has profoundly changed because accountability is no longer sufficiently valued,” he said, and added that Denver police “still can’t pull the trigger on telling the truth about this terrorizing raid.”
The complaint says the officers knew they were dispatched to unit 307 before entering apartment 306.
The SWAT team members either didn’t notice or disregarded “#306” displayed on the family’s door, according to the complaint.
The suspect initially sought by the officers was arrested hours after they raided the family’s apartment, the complaint says.
Holland said the suspect was reported seen on a balcony at unit 307.
“They continue to pretend that this terrifying raid never happened,” the mother of the two girls said in a statement to USA Today.
The family, with their lawsuit, seeks an unspecified amount in damages for physical sickness, pain and injuries, including for PTSD and associated symptoms caused by the raid, the complaint shows.
They demand a jury trial.
“There can be no growth here until DPD and these officers confront how it happened that, despite so many of them knowing the right apartment to raid, they instead raided the Shelton residence and pointed guns at innocent adults and terrorized children,” Holland said.
This story was originally published February 26, 2025 at 11:28 AM with the headline "‘Don’t hurt us.’ Kids scream as SWAT team with ‘guns ready’ raids wrong home, CO suit says."
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