Johnson sued Gary Staab, the Denver police detective who obtained the warrant, and his supervisor, Gregory Buschi, the sergeant who reviewed and approved the warrant.
Staab’s attorney did not respond to a request for comment Tuesday. Reached by phone Tuesday, a Denver city attorney representing Buschy named David Murphy declined to comment. A Denver police spokesman 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 where she raised three children on her own as a United States postal worker.
She had just taken a shower and was sitting in her living room. Johnson was watching television in a bathrobe, hat and slippers when she heard a police officer over a megaphone telling her to come out with her hands up. Johnson opened the door to find an armored military vehicle on the front lawn, along with officers in tactical gear with rifles and a K-9 German shepherd.
Her lawyers wrote that the five-foot-tall 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, Johnson’s lead attorney, said the search should not have happened because there were plenty of signs Johnson’s home had nothing to do with the alleged crime.
On January 3rd, a man named Jeremy McDaniel reported his truck stolen from the Hyatt. Inside the vehicle were firearms, drones, $4,000 in cash and an iPhone 11, which McDaniel told police he found near Johnson’s home.
The blue circle showing where the phone might be encompasses at least six different properties, the lawyers wrote. But investigators zeroed in on Johnson’s home, using their Apple Find My app reading as the “sole basis” for the warrant.
Johnson’s attorneys wrote that Staab has filed fewer than 10 search warrants in the past five years and has never filed an affidavit involving SWAT or used Apple’s Find My app.
Staab’s statement also mentions that the owner rented a car and drove to the address shown on the tracking app, but did not see his truck.
Staab “drafted his hastily prepared, bare-bones, materially flawed affidavit,” Johnson’s lawyers wrote, and Buschy approved the affidavit without redactions around 11 a.m. that day.
Denver Deputy District Attorney Ashley Beck approved the affidavit at 11:42 a.m., according to court documents. And, just over an hour later, Denver District Court Judge Beth A. Faragher signed the order.
Less than an hour later, Denver SWAT officers burst into Johnson’s home and demanded that she leave the house through a megaphone.
Officers asked Johnson how to open her garage door, and she told them. Still, her lawyers wrote, officers used a battering ram to open the back garage door. The lawyers also wrote that the officers left the house in disarray and smashed items in the house, including a figurine head given to her by her youngest son.
Officers found nothing — including a phone — to connect her to the alleged crime, according to court documents.
“All of this could have been avoided with a 30-second Google search, let alone training and paying more attention,” Macdonald told The Post.
He added that this case sets an important precedent and was made possible by a wave of national laws holding officers accountable through lawsuits following the police killing of George Floyd in 2020. Also encouraged in the 2019 case when medics killed 23-year-old Aurora, Colo., man Elijah McClain, Colorado In 2021, it became the first state to repeal qualified immunity for police officers. That law opened up the possibility of lawsuits like Johnson’s against police officers.
Macdonald said the case is one of the first in Colorado to use the new law, and he hopes the seven-figure verdict will help hold officers accountable, adding that Johnson is still suffering from the consequences 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 bear the thought of going back there to live alone, so she stayed with her youngest son in Houston for months. She struggled to sleep and has developed ulcers ever since.
Johnson has not returned to the home for three months, her lawyers wrote: “After a lifetime of being a loyal, hard-working and law-abiding member of her community, she worries about what her neighbors thought of her that day and she thinks now at her.”
Macdonald said it was too much: Johnson had moved out of the property that had been her mansion for 43 years to another place in the Denver area.
“We hope this was the beginning of healing for her,” he said.
María Luisa Paúl contributed to this report.