“Oops!” is a word you don’t want to hear from an airline pilot, a surgeon or, in this case, from law enforcement officers, as in “FBI Raids Wrong House in Florida.”
FBI agents barged into the wrong home in Delray Beach in their search for a teen who allegedly concocted a phony kidnapping plot to extort money from his parents, Allan Lengel reports on his Tickle the Wire blog.
Lengel cites an account on Station WPBF in West Palm Beach in which Naomi Palmer of Delray Beach told of being asleep on the sofa Tuesday morning when she heard commotion at the door and people yelling. “They started hollering FBI, FBI,” Palmer says. “They came in with high-powered rifles.” Palmer’s neighbor and mother-in-law, Jewel D. Jones, was similarly rousted.
Small wonder that the FBI and local police were acting with urgency. They were looking for a 17-year-old Orlando youth who called his father and claimed (falsely, it turned out) that he had been kidnapped, and that the price of his freedom was $50,000.
Sgt. Nicole Guerriero of the Delray Beach police said authorities were following leads.”Sometimes we get information we have to follow up on, especially in a case like this when someone is stating that their life is in danger and they’re being kidnapped,” she said. “Unfortunately, we don’t always get the right address.” (Emphasis added.)
Perhaps Guerriero should consider her remarks more carefully. And perhaps the 17-year-old should be grounded — for life.
