A lawsuit seeks money for damages caused when a SWAT raid targeted the wrong house (Photos from the lawsuit)
An Indiana woman alleges a SWAT team caused $16,000 in damages to her home in a raid searching for a fugitive they mistakenly thought was inside using the internet to get onto Facebook, a new lawsuit said.
Amy Hadley said police launched dozens of tear gas grenades into her South Bend home in June 2022 and ransacked it, making it uninhabitable for days until fumes dissipated enough to breathe inside.
The police raid destroyed family photos and childhood drawings, clothes, electronics, and furniture, she said. Insurance partially covered the damages, but South Bend and St. Joseph County government agencies rejected her pleas for compensation.
“Amy did nothing wrong to invite the destruction that government officials deliberately inflicted on her property,” said her attorney, Marie Miller, with the nonprofit Institute for Justice, a law firm that protects property rights nationwide, in a news release. “The public as a whole, not Amy alone, must pay for the cost of that law enforcement action.”
In a statement through her lawyer, Hadley said she was traumatized.
“The raid turned our lives and our home upside down,” she said. “The police clearly made a huge mistake, but there has never been an apology for the way we were treated or an offer to cover the damage. If one of the agencies won’t take responsibility, I hope the court will make them.”
A spokesperson for South Bend declined to comment, citing pending litigation. A representative for St. Joseph County did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Law&Crime.
It happened on June 10, 2022, when officers from the South Bend Police Department and St. Joseph County Police Department surrounded Hadley’s house after misidentifying it as the place where a fugitive was active on social media, according to the complaint.
Hadley lived at the home with her son and daughter and had no idea who the fugitive was and had no connection to him. When police surrounded her house, Hadley’s 15-year-old son was inside playing a video game. He complied with officers’ orders to come out with his hands up. Once outside, it was clear to officers he wasn’t their man.
“Officers immediately acknowledged, ‘That’s not him’ — ‘him’ referring to the fugitive — ‘That’s a kid,”” court documents said.
Yet they cuffed him anyway and took him to the police, even though he “clearly posed no threat to the officers, who told Noah he was not suspected of a crime,” the complaint said.
The mistake happened when a St. Joseph County officer tried to track what he thought was the fugitive’s Facebook account to an IP address possibly associated with Hadley’s house. Despite the tenuous information, the lawsuit said, police got a warrant to search the home for the fugitive.
Police remained steadfast, directing orders at the house through a bullhorn for about 40 minutes despite not seeing anyone enter or exit the house. Some officers asked each other how sure they were the fugitive was inside the house, the lawsuit said.
The officer who made the initial claim about the fugitive’s whereabouts maintained the fugitive was active on Facebook in the house after Hadley’s son had been removed, court documents said. But nobody was there except for the family cat, court documents said.
Eventually, a neighbor called Hadley and told her about the commotion, and Hadley relayed the message to her daughter. They headed home.
When they arrived at the end of the block, mother and daughter asked officers what was happening. Police told them they were looking for a dangerous suspect, showed them a picture of the fugitive and said they believed he was inside their home.
“Indeed, the officers believed the fugitive was passing the time on Facebook,” the complaint said.
They told officers they had never seen the man and insisted police had the wrong house.
But officers fired tear gas and flash-bang grenades into the house and stormed in wearing gas masks, searching for the fugitive. The Xbox her son had been playing was destroyed. Authorities tossed furniture, tore window curtains down, broke a mirror and storage bins, and ripped a bathroom fan fixture from the ceiling and a wood panel from the wall, the complaint said.
“Officers searched every room, the refrigerator, oven, clothes washer and dryer, cupboards, drawers, vents, and closets, court documents said. “One officer crawled through the attic space. Another punched holes in the basement’s exterior wall.”
Despite a second intrusive search, the fugitive was not found. He was caught elsewhere about four days later, the lawsuit said. Police released Hadley’s son to her at the police station, where she picked him up after the raid.
But the house was a shambles, and the local government wouldn’t pay up and gave her the runaround.
She sent letters. Only South Bend responded — declining to acknowledge her constitutional claims and demanding she complete an enclosed form for claims under the Indiana Tort Claims Act. She replied to that letter, reiterating her claims fell under state and federal constitutions, but the city did not respond, court documents said.
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