Police perform midnight raid on innocent family home in search of man accused of DUI

TheNewspaper
Jul. 13, 2006

Police in the north Seattle suburb of Lake Forest Park barged into the home of an innocent family in the middle of the night to search for a man accused of driving while drunk. Miciah Massey, 31, says police entered his residence in November without a warrant and without permission, terrorizing his eighteen-month-old daughter, Taimona, and his 62-year-old father, Donald. This week, Massey filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court over the home invasion and continued harassment of his family.

Police are not after Massey, but a friend, Thomas Brooks, who fled Washington to avoid trial on misdemeanor charges. Brooks had been accused of driving drunk in Massey's automobile in May 2005. Now that car is flagged in the police database and Massey is continually stopped by officers looking for Brooks, who now lives in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Police assert the "reasonable belief" that the DUI suspect is in the home justifies the search. Massey's lawyer, Christopher Carney, told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer that would be a blank check for continual harassment.

"If you have a friend who gets an arrest warrant, and he once spent the night in your home, you are going to get searched in the middle of the night to see if he has come back," Carney said. "The police could search Miciah's home every day for the next year to see if Brooks comes back."

Source: Couple sues Lake Forest Park police for barging in without warrant (Seattle Post-Intelligencer (WA), 7/11/2006)