A mother of three says Chicago police officers pointed guns at her family — including her then-3-month-old baby girl — during a raid at their Woodlawn apartment over the summer.
Toni Tate says more than a dozen police officers came bursting through her second-floor apartment at 6134 S. Vernon Ave. the night of Aug. 5. She’s lived in the building more than two years with her husband and her three children: Cierra Harbin, 22, Christopher Harbin, 18, and infant Cali McCuller.
Police were looking for a suspected drug dealer they believed was selling heroin out of the apartment, according to a copy of the search warrant provided to the Chicago Sun-Times.
Tate says she doesn’t know the man named in the search warrant. But before Tate could get a word in, police started screaming at the family and pointing loaded guns at everyone inside, including Cierra Harbin as she cradled her baby sister.
“I yelled out so many times that I had a baby in my arms ... and to turn around and see a gun pointed at us was just traumatizing,” Cierra Harbin said at a news conference Wednesday at the offices of the family’s lawyer, Al Hofeld Jr.
The family filed a lawsuit against the City of Chicago and sixteen Chicago Police Department officers Wednesday in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois claiming their civil rights had been violated. They’re asking for compensatory damages, punitive damages and attorney’s fees.
“Officers’ shocking actions of repeatedly pointing and training loaded guns at close range on an infant, young people and their mother and detaining them for two hours for no reason constitute serious abuses of power and authority,” the suit reads.
Tate said officers tore up her apartment searching for drugs, money and paraphernalia. They came up empty-handed.
“Once [the officers] got in, I kept asking who they were looking for, but they never said anything,” she said. “They just kept searching and tearing up things.”
Tate asked officers as they left who she should contact to clean up the mess they made.
“One of the officers joked, ‘That’s a whole new search warrant,’” according to the suit.
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In a statement, CPD spokesperson Anthony Guglielmi said police “make every effort to ensure the validity and accuracy of all information that is used to apply for and execute court-authorized search warrants.”
Guglielmi said the Civilian Office of Police Accountability will investigate the incident and “should any wrongdoing be discovered, officers will be held accountable.”
The search warrant to go through Tate’s apartment was petitioned by Officer Suzanne Niemoth, who had been in the department less than two years, records show.
According to the suit and the search warrant, an unidentified informant told Niemoth they had purchased heroin at the building where Tate lives.
But Hofeld argues police did a poor job in verifying those claims.
“Officers could have performed minimal surveillance of the building,” he said. “They could have contacted the building’s owner and landlord. They could have contacted ... a utility company supplying energy to the building. They could have utilized CPD’s database . . . which matches addresses with names. Officer Niemoth did none of these things.”
Hofeld represents eight other families in Chicago and Cook County that have been allegedly traumatized by police officers executing search warrants.
Neither Tate nor her children had previously been arrested, according to Hofeld.
Carlos Ballesteros is a corps member of Report for America, a not-for-profit journalism program that aims to bolster Sun-Times coverage of Chicago’s South Side and West Side.
