Another Isolated Incident
Law-enforcement officers raided the wrong house and forced a 77-year-old La Plata County woman on oxygen to the ground last week in search of methamphetamine.
The raid occurred about 11 a.m. June 8, as Virginia Herrick was settling in to watch "The Price is Right." She heard a rustling outside her mobile home in Durango West I and looked out to see several men with gas masks and bulletproof vests, she said.
Herrick went to the back door to have a look.
"I thought there was a gas leak or something," she said.
But before reaching the door, La Plata County Sheriff's deputies shouted "search warrant, search warrant" and barged in with guns drawn, she said. They ordered Herrick to the ground and began searching the home.
"They didn't give me a chance to ask for a search warrant or see a search warrant or anything," she said in a phone interview Thursday. "I'm not about to argue with those big old guys, especially when they've got guns and those big old sledgehammers."
They'd been investigating the trailer next door for a month, but still managed to hit the wrong home.
Herrick's son, David Herrick, said investigators surveilled the neighbor's house before the raid, and it was extremely unprofessional to enter the wrong house.
"There is a big difference between 74 and 82," he said, referring to the house numbers.
What's more, Herrick doesn't understand why his 77-year-old mother was handcuffed.
"Why they thought it was necessary to handcuff her and put her on the floor I don't know," he said. "And then they had to ask her what the address was."
(Link fixed—sorry.)