CHICAGO _ Chicago police turned a boy's fourth birthday party into a traumatic memory of guns drawn, presents destroyed and parents handcuffed after officers raided the wrong home in the South Side Gresham neighborhood last month, a federal lawsuit claims.
The boy's mother, Stephanie Bures, said that more than a dozen officers used excessive force and repeatedly shouted obscenities at the party on Feb. 10 on South Paulina Street.
The raid was supposed to target a man allegedly possessing the drug ecstasy. But officers had an old address and barged into an apartment where 15 people, four of them children, were gathered with a birthday cake, according to Bures' attorney, Al Hofeld Jr.
Hofeld said about 17 officers, all dressed in plainclothes, entered the apartment with their weapons drawn and shouted, "Get your (expletive) hands up!" and "We are doing a (expletive) raid."
The boy's 7-year-old sister feared the men were going to shoot her, her brother and everyone else in the basement, Bures said during a Tuesday news conference.
"To hear her say that, to worry about her or her brother getting shot by someone that is supposed to protect and serve them, it's terrifying," Bures said. "It's horrible."
A spokesman for Chicago's Law Department, Bill McCaffrey, declined to comment Tuesday, saying the city had not been served with the lawsuit.
The suit accuses the officers of ignoring numerous requests to show residents the search warrant, handcuffing several adults in front of the children even though no one disobeyed orders and ransacking the family's home. Officers took a door off its hinges, pried open wall panels, flipped mattresses, threw a TV to the floor, doused the presents with hydrogen peroxide and poured vodka over clothes, according to the lawsuit.
They also tossed the birthday cake to the floor, Hofeld said. It had sat uncut inside a box on a dining table, but by the end of the raid it had been thrown off the table, landing upside-down on the floor. One of the officers then stuck a number "4" candle in the middle of the smashed cake.
"It was a cruel, dehumanizing joke that mocked and symbolized a 4-year-old's ruined birthday party," Hofeld said. The suit also alleges the officers broke a flat-screen television.
Just before the officers left _ with no arrests, charges or uncovered drug stashes _ they placed a copy of the search warrant on the dining table, according to the suit.
The warrant identified the man suspected of holding ecstasy as a 46-year-old who had moved from that address five years earlier.
The case is Hofeld's fourth against the city alleging officers used excessive force against children. In June, the city settled for $2.5 million with the family of a 3-year-old girl who says she suffered post-traumatic stress disorder after an officer pointed a gun at her chest during another raid at a wrong address.
Bures said her son now fears leaving the house to attend school, and his sister wakes up shaking from nightmares.
Before her children had trusted officers, Bures said. "She don't know if they gonna attack her, shoot her or help her," she said. "It shouldn't be like that."
