LF: SWAT team enters wrong home, homeowner cited for window broken by police

ST. LOUIS, Mo. (KMOV.com) - A homeowner is suing the city of St. Louis after a SWAT team broke down his front door, but they had the wrong house.

Leon Walker and his family live in the 5600 block of Geraldine, where a SWAT team broke down the door to execute the search warrant, which was for a man who lived two doors down.

"Once they are at the premises, why didn't Detective Vaughn say, 'wait a minute, I did the surveillance and this is not the right house, everybody stop,'" said Attorney Bevis Schock, who represents the Walker family.

After finding nothing at the Walker house, a building inspector issued the Walker family a citation.

"In this case the insult was to have the building inspector cite them for the window that had been broken by the police an hour earlier as part of the entry, and that's outrageous," Schock said.

The St. Louis Police Department referred News 4 to the City Counselor's Office for comment on the SWAT procedures, but they did not respond.

Good question. Probably looking for an easy violation to issue a citation for. And since the cops had been there, he knew there would be some damage to cite.

I guess it's a new tactic to extort money from innocent victims of their thuggery.

Had Walker tried to defend his home against the armed invaders, he would have been killed, and the world would have never known about it. The blurb on the nightly news would have been that police kill an armed man who fired on them.

“Obviously they think they’re being invaded,” family attorney Bevis Schock said. “The hope is that they won’t fight back but that they’ll cower in fear – the flight response rather than the fight response.”

Schock says that police should have stopped their madness once they realized they were at the wrong home. However, they were on an apparent mission to destroy and intimidate.

After the life-threatening home invasion and subsequent destruction of their home, the St. Louis Police Department sent out a building inspector. In turn, the inspector issued the Walker family a citation for a window the SWAT team broke during the raid!

“In this case the insult was to have the building inspector cite them for the window that had been broken by the police an hour earlier as part of the entry, and that’s outrageous,” Schock said.

The Walker family could have been killed by these barbarians as they followed their controller’s orders to seek out illicit substances. Instead of an apology for threatening all their lives and ransacking their home, the Walkers were extorted!