DENVER — Kirsty Shelton was at home preparing lunch and watching television with her daughters and their grandmother when they were startled by loud banging on their apartment door by a SWAT team looking for a man who lived across the hall. Shelton’s mother told them they had the wrong apartment but, according to a lawsuit filed Tuesday against the Denver officers, she and her daughter were ordered outside at gunpoint.
When the officers then entered the apartment, they encountered two girls, ages 5 and 6, in their bedroom. According to the body camera footage of the June 2023 incident, an officer told them they could play there and that he would get their grandmother, but the girls began to scream.
Police then put the family, including another adult who had just gotten out of the shower, into a locked police car for about an hour and took over their apartment as they continued to search for the suspect, according to the lawsuit. It says police knew the man they were looking for lived in apartment 307, not 306 where the Shelton family lived, and that the numbers were clearly marked. It claims police didn’t admit to making a mistake but instead denied the raid ever happened.
The operation’s commander wrote in an after-action report that, due to the layout of the apartment building, the family was “contacted, advised of the situation and evacuated for their own safety,” the lawsuit says.
Shelton said the police officers’ actions traumatized her family and required them to get extensive counseling.
“The police promised an investigation but instead covered up the raid, failing to produce their report to this day, over a year and a half after the incident. They continue to pretend that this terrifying raid never happened,” she said in a statement.
Police didn’t immediately respond to requests seeking comment about the lawsuit.
Two of the Shelton family’s lawyers, John Holland and Dan Weiss, said some reports by individual officers failed to mention that they even went into the family’s apartment as they searched for a suspect who was wanted for serious violent crimes. The man was arrested hours later in the apartment directly opposite theirs, the lawsuit says.
Holland and Weiss filed the lawsuit in state court under Colorado’s 2020 police reform law, which does not allow officers to try to block lawsuits under the claim of qualified immunity, as they can in federal court. It alleges that at least 10 officers violated the family’s constitutional right to be free of unlawful searches and seizures, and that the family was subjected to excessive force.
It’s rare for SWAT teams to enter the wrong location, said Thor Eells, a former SWAT member and commander for the Colorado Springs Police Department and the executive director of the National Tactical Officers Association. Nationally, instances of tactical teams going into wrong locations has significantly decreased in the last decade mainly because of better training and a move away from hasty drug-related operations, he said.
But when police do make a mistake and suspect they’ve entered the wrong location, they can’t immediately just back away because the location needs to be searched to make sure there are no threats, he said.
“Once they start the entry, they’re not going to stop until they secure the apartment for the safety of everyone involved,” said Eells, who declined to comment on the Denver case.
Experts in tactical operations say sending a SWAT team to arrest someone in an apartment building is challenging because people move in and out frequently, unit numbers can be unclear and gunshots can pass into another unit.
When time allows, officers can do surveillance, get the target location’s floor plans and send someone to check it out before an operation, said Mark Lomax, former executive director of the National Tactical Officers Association and a retired major for the Pennsylvania State Police.