City council moving toward final vote on $80,000 settlement for botched SWAT raid

Pittsburgh City Council has voted to pay $80,000 to a Brighton Heights resident whose family was mistakenly targeted by city SWAT officers five years ago.

City council tentatively approved the settlement Wednesday with an 8-0 vote with no public discussion among the members. Councilwoman Deb Gross was absent. A final vote could happen Tuesday.

In the early morning hours of Jan. 25, 2014, “a couple dozen officers” entered the home of Tabatha Werkmeister and Grinage Dion Wilson and their four children, who at the time ranged in age from 1 to 8, said Margaret S. Coleman, Ms. Werkmeister’s lawyer.

The officers “threw a flash bang device inside their door and then they barged in and started running up their steps with face masks on and assault rifles,” said Ms. Coleman, who works at the Law Offices of Timothy O’Brien, on Wednesday.

“My client wasn’t on the same floor with her kids, so by the time she had gotten downstairs, they had taken her older kids out of the house,” she said.

The family’s entrance to their home — the left door of a duplex — was misidentified. Their living area occupies the second and third floors of the house. The right door of the duplex led to a first-floor apartment and was the intended target of the SWAT raid, Ms. Coleman said.

The family was forced from the duplex and held in a police truck for roughly an hour, according to the suit filed by the family in August 2015. No one in the family had committed a crime, the police had no warrant and officers should have known they had the wrong address, the suit said.

“[Ms. Werkmeister’s] goal from the beginning [of the suit] was really just to bring attention to what had happened to her and her family and make sure the city is more careful in the future with using the SWAT team,” Ms. Coleman said. “It’s a paramilitary force.”

The family still lives in the Brighton Heights duplex. Ms. Coleman said the family still feels the effects of the incident.

“Right after it happened, and for a long time [the children] were extremely wary of police officers,” she said. “As far as Tabatha is concerned, her bedroom is on the third floor, and her kids sleep on the second floor. She won’t sleep in her own bedroom anymore because she wants to be close to her kids. The experience of coming down the stairs and not knowing where her children were was too traumatizing for her.”

The law firm has cited the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decision in Estate of Smith v. Marasco, which said that because SWAT raids employ a substantial amount of force, often warranted, police must be very careful when they employ that force, as not to expose innocent citizens to this traumatic use of force.

According to council records, members met in closed-door session to discuss the settlement on Jan. 30.

City solicitor Yvonne S. Hilton could not be reached for comment Wednesday.