A pair of AirPods and what lawyers say was some shoddy police work resulted in an innocent middle-class Ferguson family having their front door smashed in by the St. Louis County SWAT team last May.

Around 6:30 p.m. on May 26, Brittany Shamily was at home with her children, including an infant, when police used a battering ram to bust in her front door. “What the hell is going on?” she screamed, terrified for herself and her family. “I got a three-month-old baby!”

Body camera footage from the scene shows Shamily come to the front door, her hands up, her face a mix of fright and utter confusion at the heavily armed folly making its way from her front porch into her foyer. “Oh my god,” she says.

The SWAT team was looking for guns and other material related to a carjacking that had occurred that morning. Their search didn’t turn up any of that — though it has led to a lawsuit, filed Friday, that may lead to a better public understanding of how county police decide whether to deploy a SWAT team or serve a search warrant in a less menacing manner.

Because in this case, the police clearly made the wrong call.

The carjacking that led to the raid happened about 12 hours prior, 16 miles away, in south county.

Around 6 a.m., two brothers were leaving the Waffle House on Telegraph Road near Jefferson Barracks when a group of six people pulled up outside the restaurant and carjacked them. Two of the carjackers took off in the brothers' Dodge Charger while the other four fled the scene in their own vehicles.
https://www.riverfronttimes.com/news/swat-team-raids-innocent-family-over-stolen-airpods-dropped-on-their-street-42172867

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