Jury awarded damages to Johnson after wrong warrant.
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A Denver district judge on Monday increased the amount due to 78-year-old Ruby Johnson, a week after a jury ruled her constitutional right against unreasonable search and seizure was violated by the January 2022 raid.
Johnson sued Gary Staab, the Denver Police Department detective who obtained the warrant, and his supervisor Gregory Buschy, the sergeant who reviewed and approved the warrant.
Staab's attorney did not respond to a request for comment Tuesday. Reached by phone Tuesday, the Denver city attorney representing Buschy named David Murphy declined to comment. A spokesperson for Denver Police also declined to comment Tuesday but confirmed that Staab and Buschy were still on the force.
Jan. 4, 2022, was an ordinary Tuesday for Johnson in her home, where she has lived for 43 years. It's the place where she raised three children by herself as a United States postal worker.
She had just taken a shower and was sitting in her living room. Johnson was watching television wearing a bathrobe, bonnet and slippers when she heard a police officer over a bullhorn telling her to come out with her hands up. Johnson opened her door to find an armored military-style vehicle on her front lawn along with officers in tactical gear toting rifles and a K-9 German shepherd.
Her attorneys wrote that the 5-foot Johnson was placed in a marked car for hours without knowing why. They added that no one asked the grandmother if she needed the bathroom, medicine, food or a glass of water.
ACLU of Colorado legal director Timothy Macdonald, the lead attorney for Johnson, said the raid never should have happened because there were plenty of signs that Johnson's house had nothing to do with the alleged crime.
On Jan. 3, a man named Jeremy McDaniel reported that his truck had been stolen from a Hyatt. Inside the vehicle was firearms, drones, $4,000 in cash and an iPhone 11, which McDaniel told police he had traced near Johnson's home.
The blue circle indicating where the phone might be spanned at least six different properties, attorneys wrote. But investigators zeroed in on Johnson's house, using their reading of the Apple Find My app as the "sole basis" for the warrant.
Johnson's attorneys wrote that Staab had filed fewer than 10 search warrant affidavits in the last five years and had never submitted an affidavit that involved SWAT or used Apple's Find My app.
Staab's affidavit also mentioned that the owner had rented a car and driven by the address seen on the tracker app but didn't see his truck. Staab "drafted his hastily prepared, bare-bones, materially misleading affidavit," Johnson's attorneys wrote, and Buschy approved the affidavit with no revisions about 11 a.m. that day.
Denver Deputy District Attorney Ashley Beck approved the affidavit at 11:42 a.m., according to court documents. And, a bit over an hour later, Denver County Court Judge Beth A. Faragher signed the warrant.
Less than an hour after that, Denver SWAT members swarmed Johnson's home and demanded by bullhorn that she leave her house.
Officers asked Johnson how to open her garage door, and she told them. Still, her attorneys wrote, officers used a battering ram to open the back garage door. The attorneys also wrote that officers left the home in disarray and broke items in the house, including the head off a figurine gifted to her by her youngest son.
Officers found nothing - including the phone - linking her to the alleged crime, according to court documents.
"This all could have been avoided with a 30-second Google search, let alone training and greater care taken," Macdonald told The Post.
He added that the case sets an important precedent and was made possible by a national wave of legislation to hold officers accountable via lawsuit after the police killing of George Floyd in 2020. Also spurred by the 2019 case of medics killing 23-year-old Aurora, Colo., man Elijah McClain, Colorado in 2021 became the first state to eliminate qualified immunity protections for police officers. That law opened officers up to lawsuits like Johnson's.
Macdonald said this case is one of the first in Colorado to use the new law, and he hopes the seven-digit verdict will help keep officers accountable, adding that Johnson is still suffering from the effects of that day.
With her illusion of safety shattered, she stayed with her daughter for a week after the raid, Macdonald said. But she couldn't stand the thought of going back to live there alone, so she stayed with her youngest son in Houston for months. She struggled to sleep and has since developed ulcers.
Johnson didn't return to the house for three months, her attorneys wrote: "After a lifetime of being a law-abiding, hard-working, churchgoing member of her community, she nurses anxiety about what her neighbors thought of her that day and think of her now."
Macdonald said it was too much: Johnson moved out of the property that had been her castle for 43 years to elsewhere in the Denver area.
"We hope this has been the start of the healing for her," he said.
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