Lower Makefield cops raided the wrong house while looking for a drug dealer, lawsuit says. The person they wanted lived next door.
The McLaughlin family says officers from Lower Makefield Police working with DEA agents detained them on their front lawn until a supervisor acknowledged the mistake.
Richard McLauglhin said he woke up at 4:30 a.m. one night in May 2024 to the sound of someone banging at his front door in Yardley.
When he went to investigate, the sound only grew louder. And before McLaughlin could react, his door was knocked down by heavily armed police officers, who handcuffed him, his wife and his two children and pulled the family onto their front lawn.
The officers, from Lower Makefield Police and the federal Drug Enforcement Agency, were serving a search warrant related to an investigation into a multi-state drug ring.
But, according to a federal civil-rights lawsuit filed Thursdayby the McLaughlins’ attorneys, they were off by one house.
Now, the McLaughlin family is suing both agencies, saying their mistake violated their Fourth Amendment rights, caused them undue suffering, and highlights significant deficiencies in how officers are trained to carry out these search warrants.
“This is something that simply should not happen, and when you think about, what’s preventing this from happening to any of us?,” said Brian Fitz, who filed the suit on behalf of the family.
“For all of us, it’s rattling to hear this story of the McLaughlins,” he said. “How can a local pizza guy do better [at finding an address] than Lower Makefield and the DEA, with a combined budget of over a million dollars?”
Lower Makefield solicitor Maureen Burke Carlton declined to comment Friday on the pending litigation. A spokesperson for the DEA did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The raid was targeting Jose Correa, who lived next door to the McLaughlins at the time, according to court filings.
Days after the officers knocked down the wrong door, Correa was arrested and charged with conspiracy to distribute methamphetamine, heroin, fentanyl and cocaine. Federal prosecutors say Correa was a member of a New Jersey-based drug ring that spread the drugs under the orders of the Latin Kings street gang.
Correa’s trial is pending in federal court in Newark.
In the lawsuit, Fitz wrote that McLaughlin, his wife, Christine, their son, John, and their daughter, a minor, were handcuffed on their front lawn, still wearing their pajamas as officers searched their home.
The family repeatedly identified themselves, and told the officers that they had targeted the wrong house, the lawsuit said. But it wasn’t until a supervisor arrived at the scene and acknowledged the mistake that the family was released.
Fitz said a Lower Makefield official later offered to cover the expense of repairing their shattered front door. Other than that, he said, neither agency has apologized for an incident that Fitz described as “absolutely unimaginable.”
“This should not happen, and there should be policies and procedures in place so you don’t execute a warrant where you’re not intruding in someone’s home and placing them under sheer fright,” Fritz said. “And you’re also placing law enforcement officers’ lives in risk if people in the home had decided to defend themselves, which they would’ve been in their right to do.”
