Drug Raiders Broke in Wrong Home, Police Say

A San Diego police officer’s mistake caused six narcotics officers to raid the wrong house Saturday, kicking in the door, breaking a lamp and wrestling two innocent men to the floor, a police spokesman confirmed Monday.

Cmdr. Larry Gore said Monday that during a routine briefing before the raid Saturday morning, an officer “inadvertently wrote down the wrong number.” Minutes later, Gore said, officers began pounding on the wrong door and, fearing that evidence was being destroyed, they immediately forced their way in.

“There was a delay in the response to answering the door, and the officers formed an erroneous impression as to what was going on. As the result, a mistake was made,” Gore said. “They went to this location with the best of intentions. . . .They were armed with all the correct information, and they had a legitimate reason to do what they did. They just had the wrong address.”

That, said Ken Fortner, is exactly what he tried to tell the officers who burst through his door Saturday, guns drawn, and threw him face first into his carpeted stairway. But the officers weren’t listening, he said. As one handcuffed Fortner, two others stormed past him and threw his friend, Kelly McAloon, onto a concrete patio, bruising McAloon’s ribs and scraping his shins.

“I can’t get it out of my mind,” Fortner said Monday as he showed a reporter his splintered door and the $100 temporary lock he had installed Saturday at his own expense. Still shaken, the 33-year-old county employee said he got an apologetic call from Police Chief Bob Burgreen on Monday. But Fortner says he is still angry.

“I’m real mad at these guys,” he said. “They didn’t care when they knocked my door down. Now, it’s Monday, and they’re back at work. But they should have done something when they broke the door.”

Fortner contends that the police, who were dressed in plain clothes and yellow vests with the word POLICE on the back, did not identify themselves when they entered his University Heights condominium. And, once they realized they’d made a mistake, Fortner said, they were unapologetic.

“I don’t ever recall the word sorry coming up,” he said. “I asked, ‘What am I supposed to do about my door right now? He said, ‘File a claim on Monday.’ ”

Gore said Fortner will be reimbursed for damages to the door and lamp and for the medical bills McAloon incurred when he went to UCSD Medical Center for X-rays Saturday.

“We’ll do what’s necessary to make it right,” said Gore, who said the incident will be investigated fully. “We will look at who was responsible and the circumstances that allowed that error to be made, and we will take whatever corrective action is appropriate. It was a very unfortunate incident, and we hope that it doesn’t happen again.”

Gore said the police carry out about 500 similar raids each year and “this is the first time in three years they’ve gotten the wrong address.”

It is not the first time, however, that questions have been raised about the conduct of narcotics officers during drug raids.

Last summer, narcotics officers raided Adelita Pina’s four-room house in Southeast San Diego expecting to find “kilos of marijuana,” a search warrant affidavit said. They found no evidence of drug or criminal activity, and Pina, a mother of three daughters, said the police had made a mistake.

“I didn’t know that the police could enter your home, handcuff your children, put them on the floor and search your house,” Pina said at the time, adding that there may have been drug-dealing at a nearby house. “They made a mistake, but they don’t want to admit it.”

Then and now, the police deny that they were in error.

“It was not an incorrect address,” Gore said.

Two years ago, in March, 1988, a narcotics officer burst into the living room of Tommie C. Dubose’s Southeast San Diego home with his gun drawn. Dubose, 56, turned and charged the officer, tossing a glass of wine in his face and struggling for the officer’s gun, police said. A second officer shot Dubose once in the face and four times in the back, killing him.

Police had been acting on information that there was drug activity at the house when Dubose was away at work. One day before the raid, Dubose’s 36-year-old son had been arrested after a transaction in which drugs were sold to an undercover officer. When police served a search warrant on Dubose’s home, however, they found only a small quantity of drug paraphernalia.

The San Diego County district attorney later deemed the shooting justifiable but criticized the manner in which the undercover police served the search warrant, the number of times they knocked on the front door, how they announced themselves and how soon they burst through the door.

“There was no error in address there,” Gore said on Monday, when asked whether the Dubose case could be described as similar to Saturday’s raid. “The only criticism was the tactics that were used. You’re talking apples and oranges.”

Still aching from the pounding he received Saturday, McAloon said he disagreed. When told of the Dubose case, he said he understood Dubose’s attempt to protect himself.

“I would have had a gun if I was a gun-toting person,” said the 30-year-old model, who said he was frightened to the point of tears by the officers. “But, if I had had a spatula or something that looked like a gun, I’d be dead right now.”

“I don’t know what I want done,” he added. “I just know I don’t ever want this to happen to anybody else.”