A SWAT team stormed 77-year-old Ruby Johnson’s Montebello home after a serious misunderstanding about how to use the handy Apple app, according to the lawsuit filed Wednesday by the ACLU of Colorado.
At least eight officers in full body armor toting automatic weapons raided Johnson’s home in search of several stolen items, including six firearms and an iPhone, on Jan. 4.
Johnson’s suit named Gary Staab, the lead detective in the botched raid.
The complaint claims Staab used a “hastily prepared, bare-bones, misleading affidavit” to obtain a warrant and perform an “illegal search” of Johnson’s home.
Ruby Johnson is pictured At least eight officers donning full body armor and toting automatic weapons raided Johnson’s home in January. NBC News She’s seeking a jury trial and unspecified damages, according to the filing — and is suing Staab “in his individual capacity.”
Police were searching for a stolen truck that allegedly contained four semi-automatic handguns, a tactical military-style rifle, a revolver, two drones, an old iPhone 11 and $4,000 in cash.
Stills from bodycam footage taken that day show a confused Johnson being ordered outside her home while wearing a bathrobe.
Ruby Johnson is pictured at the time of the raid of her home Officers ordered the Colorado grandmother, wearing a bathrobe, out of her home to complete the raid. NBC News Staab had ordered the raid of Johnson’s home after speaking to the owner of the stolen vehicle, who said he had used the Find My iPhone app and saw his phone had pinged at Johnson’s address the day it was stolen.
A screenshot from the app, however, later revealed the phone “pinged” somewhere in the vicinity of Johnson’s home and did not give a precise location. Even without the exact location, Staab allegedly insisted the stolen items were inside Johnson’s home.
The complaint asserts that Staab’s affidavit violated Johnson’s right to be “free of unreasonable searches and seizures” and that the affidavit “lacked probable cause that evidence of crime could be found” at Johnson’s home, since the ping on the Find My iPhone app was not a precise location.
“Crucially, if a device’s location cannot be determined precisely, the user will see a blue circle around the device’s marker on the map. The size of the blue circle shows how precisely the device’s location can be determined. For example, the larger the circle; the greater the inaccuracy,” the complaint states.