ATLANTA — Before dawn on Oct. 18, 2017, FBI agents broke down the front door of Trina Martin’s Atlanta home, stormed into her bedroom and pointed guns at her and her then-boyfriend as her 7-year-old son screamed for his mom from another room.
Martin, blocked from comforting her son, cowered in disbelief for what she said felt like an eternity. But within minutes, the ordeal was over. The agents realized they had the wrong house.
On Tuesday, an attorney for Martin will go before the U.S. Supreme Court to ask the justices to reinstate her 2019 lawsuit against the U.S. government accusing the agents of assault and battery, false arrest and other violations.
A federal judge in Atlanta dismissed the suit in 2022 and the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld that decision last year. The Supreme Court agreed in January to take up the matter.
The key issue before the justices is under what circumstances people can sue the federal government in an effort to hold law enforcement accountable. Martin’s attorneys say Congress clearly allowed for those lawsuits in 1974, after a pair of law enforcement raids on wrong houses made headlines, and blocking them would leave little recourse for families like her.
FBI Atlanta spokesperson Tony Thomas said in an email the agency can’t comment on pending litigation. But lawyers for the government argued in Martin’s case that courts shouldn’t be “second-guessing” law enforcement decisions. The FBI agents did advance work and tried to find the right house, making this raid fundamentally different from the no-knock, warrantless raids that led Congress to act in the 1970s, the Justice Department said in court filings starting under the Biden administration.
In dismissing Martin’s case, the 11th Circuit largely agreed with that argument, saying courts can’t second-guess police officers who make “honest mistakes” in searches. The agent who led the raid said his personal GPS led him to the wrong place. The FBI was looking for a suspected gang member a few houses away.
Martin, 46, said she, her then-boyfriend, Toi Cliatt, and her son were left traumatized.
“We’ll never be the same, mentally, emotionally, psychologically,” she said Friday at the neat, stucco home that was raided. “Mentally, you can suppress it, but you can’t really get over it.”
She and Cliatt pointed out where they were sleeping when the agents broke in and the master bathroom closet where they hid.
Martin stopped coaching track because the starting pistol reminded her of the flashbang grenade the agents set off. Cliatt, 54, said he couldn’t sleep, forcing him to leave his truck driving job.
“The road is hypnotizing,” he said of driving tired. “I became a liability to my company.”
Martin said her son became extremely anxious, pulling threads out of his clothes and peeling paint off walls.
Cliatt initially thought the raid was a burglary attempt, so he ran toward the closet, where he kept a shotgun. Martin said her son still expresses fear that she could have died had she confronted the agents while armed.
“If the Federal Tort Claims Act provides a cause of action for anything, it’s a wrong-house raid like the one the FBI conducted here,” Martin’s lawyers wrote in a brief to the Supreme Court.
Other U.S. appeals courts have interpreted the law more favorably for victims of mistaken law enforcement raids, creating conflicting legal standards that only the nation’s highest court can resolve, they say. Public-interest groups across the ideological spectrum have urged the Supreme Court to overturn the 11th Circuit ruling.
After breaking down the door to the house, a member of the FBI SWAT team dragged Cliatt out of the closet and put him in handcuffs.
But one of the agents noticed he did not have the suspect’s tattoos, according to court documents. He asked for Cliatt’s name and address. Neither matched those of the suspect. The room went quiet as agents realized they had raided the wrong house.
They uncuffed Cliatt and left for the correct house, where they executed the warrant and arrested the man they were after.
The agent leading the raid returned later to apologize and leave a business card with a supervisor’s name. But the family received no compensation from the government, not even for the damage to the house, Cliatt said.
Martin said the most harrowing part of the raid was her son’s cries.
“When you’re not able to protect your child or at least fight to protect your child, that’s a feeling that no parent ever wants to feel,” she said.
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Whitehurst reported from Washington.