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You know where this is going. They got the wrong guy. Someone else had used Covert’s wireless connection to download child porn. Law enforcement officials say the case is a cautionary tale. It sure is. I can certainly think of some lessons we might draw. One might be: Maybe the cops should check to see if a suspect’s wireless network is secure, and therefore that they have the right guy, before they break into his home and point their guns at his head. Another lesson: Maybe it’s not such a good idea to send the SWAT team after someone suspected...

SPRING VALLEY, N.Y. (WPIX) — It was a classic case of mistaken identity for a Spring Valley family Thursday when federal agents and police raided their home and reportedly held their teenage daughter at gunpoint. The father, David McKay, said police dragged his wife, brother-in-law and daughter out of bed, separated him from his family and even threatened to shoot their dog, according to a report in The Journal News. The federal Drug Enforcement Administration had an arrest warrant for a man they believed lived in the Spring Valley family's house, but it turned out he lived a couple houses...

Posted: Friday, May 21, 2010 10:05 am By Amy Sherrill TIMES RECORD • ASHERRILL@SWTIMES.COM | 2 comments Drug investigators entered the wrong house while trying to serve a search warrant last week. Investigators from the Sebastian County Sheriff's Office, the 12th/21st Judicial Drug Task Force and the Barling Police Department had the homeowners handcuffed by the time they realized the mistake, said Capt. Kevin Nickson. All the paperwork for the search warrant was correct, said Prosecuting Attorney Dan Shue. The night-time search warrant was to be executed at a Holly Avenue residence, according to court records. Instead, authorities entered another...

PORTSMOUTH — A Kensington man was found guilty of criminal threatening for holding an open pocket knife at his side while asking two people who were walking behind him at midnight, "Why are you following me?" The pair walking behind Dustin Almon, 28, of 27 Wild Rose Lane, were state Liquor Enforcement cops, both in plain clothes without any indicators that they were members of law enforcement, according to testimony during a Thursday Portsmouth District Court trial. Both were also carrying concealed handguns and Tasers, they testified. One of them, Officer Anthony Cattabriga, said he was walking behind Almon on...

BUTLER COUNTY, Pa. -- Police in Butler County fatally shot a man after a standoff on Wednesday night. But before the shooting, officers fired tear gas into the wrong house. Channel 4 Action News' Paul Van Osdol reported that when he went inside the home that was mistakenly tear-gassed, even 24 hours later, his eyes started burning. State police mistakenly fired tear gas into a house on Bredin Street, across from the home actually involved in the standoff. "They've blown a hole, two holes in our front window. One shot actually came through our house the whole way and struck...

Developing story in Georgia, where church pastor Jonathan Ayers was shot and killed by undercover narcotics officers during a botched drug sting on Tuesday afternoon. Ayers was not the target of the investigation. Police were apparently after a woman Ayers had dropped off just prior to stopping at the convenience store where police confronted him. Surveillance video shows a black SUV pulling up to the store, and plain-clothes officers jumping out with their guns drawn before the vehicle has stopped. Ayers' car then backs into the picture, and the officers fire into his car as he drives off. Ayers was...

WALLINGFORD - A usually quiet mobile home park was shaken Friday morning when about 15 officers from the U.S. bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and local police descended on one of their neighbor's homes with force. "They had their guns drawn and were surrounding the house," said Jennifer Monroe Lynne Boynton, of 15 Hosford Bridge Road, went to her husband's truck for coffee money at about 6 a.m. and was pushed to the driveway and handcuffed with an officer's knee in her back and a gun to her head. ATF officers surrounded her father-in-law's home at Western Sands...

Story Updated: May 22, 2009 at 10:37 PM EDT GOSHEN — It was a case of mistaken identity in Goshen, as SWAT officers knocked down the wrong door Thursday. Officers were searching for a suspect accused of impersonating a police officer. Instead, they found an elderly couple who had no idea what was happening. The SWAT team meant to hit the house next door. Instead, the brunt force of their battering ram wad focused on Harvey Borntrager's front door. Dents still marked the inner door to the Borntrager's home Friday. The handle of what used to be a screen door...

Andrew Leonard was watching television with his wife not long after returning from Ash Wednesday services when police burst through the front door of his North Baltimore home. He was handcuffed, plunked in a chair and told to keep quiet as officers rifled through the house and interrogated him for 15 minutes about drugs and a dealer he knew nothing about. As it turned out, police had the wrong house. The man they were looking for lived two doors down. Leonard, a 33-year-old chemist who has no criminal record, said he and his wife, a 29-year-old credit analyst, were frightened...

CNN) -- Robbie Tolan sits in a Houston, Texas, hospital bed with a bullet from a police officer's gun lodged in his liver. ------------------cut----------------------- "There's no doubt in my mind that if these had been white kids this does not happen," said David Berg, Tolan's attorney. It was 2 a.m. on December 31 when Tolan and his cousin, Anthony Cooper, were confronted in the driveway of their home by Bellaire, Texas, police officers. Police officials say the officers suspected the two young men were driving a stolen car. --------------------------cut---------------------- As they walked up the driveway to their home, Anthony Cooper...

Scott Co. deputy fires during domestic call An internal investigation is underway after a seemingly ordinary domestic dispute call turned into an officer opening fire on innocent residents in New Market on Sunday. The Scott County Sheriff's Department said they were called to a home on the 23000 block of Logan Avenue on reports of a fight. When no one answered the door, Officers Marcus Hoffer and Adam Volek forced their way into the home. "The first time he yelled he was a sheriff to me, was after he fired five times at us," said Justin Friedges. According to Friedges,...

A call about a domestic dispute led to shots being fired by a Scott County deputy in New Market. Scott County sheriff Kevin Studnicka tells KARE 11 the deputy, whom he won't name until he's interviewed by investigators, was sent to a home in New Market on reports of a fight. When nobody answered the door at that address, the deputy forced his way inside. "He knocked on the door and was refused entrance. And again we were called to a domestic there, so he made forced entrance." "I was just watching TV and then the guy comes banging on...

A domestic dispute 911 call prompted a Scott County deputy to shoot after he says the occupants hollered that they had a gun. No one was injured. By KATIE HUMPHREY, Star Tribune Last update: January 5, 2009 - 11:07 PM A Scott County deputy responding to a call of a domestic dispute burst into a house and, when the occupants yelled that they had a gun, fired several shots. The house, however, was the wrong building. The call had come from a second building on the property, in the 23000 block of Logan Way. No one was injured in the...

In a split decision Thursday, the state Supreme Court rejected a plea by a Kent property owner seeking compensation for damage done during a drug raid. Affirming lower court decisions, five of the court's nine justices found the city of Kent was not required to pay $5,000 for damage to buildings owned by Leo Brutsche during a failed 2004 anti-methamphetamine operation. During the raid, narcotics officers used battering rams to knock down doors in buildings owned by Brutsche while searching for a meth lab they believed Brutsche's son to be operating on the property, according to court records. No drugs...

Armed with a battering ram and shotguns, Buffalo police looking for heroin broke down the door and stormed the lower apartment of a West Side family of eight. The problem is that the Wednesday evening raid should have occurred at an apartment upstairs. And, that’s only the tip of the iceberg, according to Schavon Pennyamon, who lives at the mistakenly raided apartment on Sherwood Street with her husband, Terrell, and six children. Pennyamon alleges that after wrongly breaking into her apartment, police proceeded to strike her epileptic husband in the head with the butt end of a shotgun and point...

WASHINGTON (Map, News) - The violent assault on Berwyn Heights Mayor Cheye Calvo’s home late last month was certainly not the first bungled raid by a government SWAT team, but the bad publicity it generated should make it the last time these trigger-happy squads target innocent civilians. Tracking a 32-pound package of marijuana that had been addressed to Calvo’s wife, Trinity Tomsic, Prince George’s sheriff’s deputies forcibly entered the mayor’s home on July 29 and killed his two dogs before handcuffing him and his mother-in-law. But like so many other SWAT team raids across the country, this one turned out...