A Chicago woman has filed a federal lawsuit against the Chicago Police Department after they allegedly executed a search warrant on the wrong home on the city’s South Side.
“When they came in, I actually thought we were going to be shot,” Cynthia Eason, whose house Chicago police entered on the night of Aug. 9, said.
According to Eason, a police SWAT team descended on her Back of the Yards home, pointing guns at her grandchildren, and looking for someone she says she didn’t even know.
Eason and her attorney Al Hofeld Jr. say that police had a warrant for the wrong house, but still did a search of the home, which she says trashed the property.
“They have protected them from gang bangers, but they couldn’t protect them from Chicago police officers,” Hofeld Jr. said.
The attorney says that his office has been seeing more cases like this one, representing at least three clients who say Chicago police wrongly entered their homes and pointed weapons at them.
Eason says that the officers were particularly focused on her grandson during the incident.
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“They just focused on him,” she said. “And I don’t know why. I was uneasy with that. I was like ‘something was going on here.’ Why are you focusing on him like that?
Eason said that officers ordered her out of the home while the search was conducted, and that she had to stand outside for an hour in her shirt and underwear while officers were inside.
Now, her daughter Ebony Tate, whose children were in the home at the time, says that her kids will never look at police the same way again.
“My kids don’t trust the police,” she said. “They look at police in a different eye. There is no trust there, at all.”
