SWAT Team Raids Innocent Family Over Stolen AirPods, Inaccurate 'FindMy' App Tracking

A SWAT team in St. Louis County mistakenly raided the home of Brittany Shamily and her family, based on the inaccurate tracking of stolen AirPods by the 'FindMy' app. The family is suing for damages stemming from embarrassment, unreasonable use of force, loss of liberty, and other factors. The Riverfront Times reports: Around 6:30 p.m. on May 26, Brittany Shamily was at home with her children, including an infant, when police used a battering ram to bust in her front door. 'What the hell is going on?' she screamed, terrified for herself and her family. 'I got a three-month-old baby!' Body camera footage from the scene shows Shamily come to the front door, her hands up, her face a mix of fright and utter confusion at the heavily armed folly making its way from her front porch into her foyer. 'Oh my god,' she says. The SWAT team was looking for guns and other material related to a carjacking that had occurred that morning. Their search didn't turn up any of that -- though it has led to a lawsuit, filed Friday, that may lead to a better public understanding of how county police decide whether to deploy a SWAT team or serve a search warrant in a less menacing manner. Because in this case, the police clearly made the wrong call.

The carjacking that led to the raid happened about 12 hours prior, 16 miles away, in south county. Around 6 a.m., two brothers were leaving the Waffle House on Telegraph Road near Jefferson Barracks when a group of six people pulled up outside the restaurant and carjacked them. Two of the carjackers took off in the brothers' Dodge Charger while the other four fled the scene in their own vehicles. St. Louis County Police were summoned to the scene. As part of their investigation, a friend of the carjacked brothers told police that his AirPods were in the stolen car and that he could track them using the 'FindMy' application, a feature that lets users locate one Apple device using another. Police did just that and, according to the lawsuit, the app showed the AirPods to be at Shamily's house.

There was just one problem. 'FindMy is not that accurate,' says the family's lawyer, Bevis Schock. 'I actually went to my house with my co-counsel and played around with it for an hour. It's just not that good.' Yet based on the 'FindMy' result, an officer signed an application for a search warrant saying he had reason to believe that 'firearms, ammunition, holsters' and other 'firearm-related material' were inside. That evening, police showed up in full combat gear carrying a battering ram. While the family was detained outside, the SWAT team 'ransacked' their house, the lawsuit says. One SWAT team member punched a basketball-sized hole in the drywall. Another broke through a drop ceiling. They turned over drawers and left what had been an orderly house in disarray. After this had gone on for more than half an hour, the AirPods were located -- on the street outside the family's home. Unfortunately, this isn't the first time something like this has happened. In January 2022, SWAT teams in Denver raided an elderly woman's home after the 'FindMy' app falsely pinged her home as the location of a stolen iPhone. The woman was recently awarded $3.76 million in compensation and damages.

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