Seven years after the FBI broke down their door and held them at gunpoint, a family waits for justice.
Seven years after the FBI broke down their door and held them at gunpoint, a family waits for justice.
A tlanta mom Curtrina Martin bolted awake before dawn on October 18, 2017. Armed intruders had busted open the front door of her house, which she shared with her seven-year-old son as well as her then-boyfriend Hilliard “Toi” Cliatt. Martin heard the sound of a flash-bang grenade exploding, mixed with pounding and shouting.
“I thought it was in my dream, so I was asleep,” Martin says. “And then it just became too clear, and I thought somebody was breaking in some cars outside. But then I was like, ‘No, this is my house.’”
Martin’s then-boyfriend, a truck driver who had returned in the middle of the night from a North Carolina delivery, was already on his feet. Martin’s instinct was to protect her son, Gabe, who was sleeping in his bed in another room. But the situation escalated too quickly for her to reach him.
“It was like Fourth of July in the house,” Martin says.
Believing they were being robbed, Cliatt pulled Martin into the master-bedroom closet, where he kept a legally owned shotgun. As he reached for it, a masked man in body armor yanked him out, threw him to the ground, and handcuffed him.
Martin remained cowering in a corner, blinded by a flashlight attached to the barrel of a rifle and screaming for her son. Meanwhile, additional gunmen entered Gabe’s room and pointed guns at him while he hid under a blanket. “I felt like if I move, I was going to get killed,” says Gabe, who is now 14.
At some point during the chaos, the intruders identified themselves as FBI agents with a warrant. But as the smoke cleared, they realized they had gone to the wrong address. Rather than apprehending a suspected criminal, the SWAT team had terrorized an innocent family.
Wrong people. Wrong house. Wrong street.
The agents regrouped in the front yard and prepared for a second raid at the correct location nearby. Cliatt sat on his porch and watched in stunned disbelief, thinking about what might have happened if he had reached his shotgun.
“With me being behind the door, even just cocking it, I would assume they would have just started shooting,” he says. “We definitely would have died that night or been seriously injured.”
The FBI agent leading the raid eventually returned, apologized, and left a calling card for his supervisor. But when Cliatt called to ask about the damage, the FBI told him to take it to his insurance company.
Insurance paid for the property damage, minus a deductible. But the family got nothing to help with the trauma.
After the raid, Cliatt struggled with insomnia and drowsiness at work — a potentially deadly condition for a driver — and had to quit. And Martin had to resign from her position as a track coach; every time the starting gun fired, her mind returned to the raid.
Gabe’s trauma was particularly intense. Years of therapy have helped him cope with the stress the agents caused, but some days are harder than others. “I still have thoughts about the FBI,” Gabe says.
With no other way to recover damages for their injuries, Martin and Cliatt sued for damages under the Federal Tort Claims Act, a 1946 law that allows people to seek compensation when federal employees injure them.
Years have passed, but the case still has not reached a trial. The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia dismissed the lawsuit on technicalities raised by the federal government, and the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the decision on April 22, 2024.
Martin and Cliatt now feel as if they have been wronged twice — once on the night of the raid and again in the legal system.
They are now turning to the Supreme Court. Martin and Cliatt filed a petition for review on September 27, 2024. Our public-interest law firm, the Institute for Justice, represents them. Through our Project on Immunity and Accountability, we know how difficult it can be to hold the government accountable when its agents cause harm.
Martin and Cliatt’s case would be shocking even if the Atlanta raid were an isolated incident. But mistakes like this one keep happening. Right now, our firm is litigating raids in Georgia, Texas, and Indiana. In each case, police raided the wrong house based on sloppy mistakes and refused to take responsibility. And in each case, courts sided with the government, citing different technicalities.
Even when police get the right address, raids put innocent people and officers at risk. But when police raid the wrong house, the problem is much worse.
“The most important thing that sticks out to me,” Martin says, “is my child being alone by himself in a room underneath the blanket, shaking, shivering from fear because someone was standing over him with a gun.”
No one should have the peace of their home shattered by no fault of their own. At the very least, when public employees make such grave mistakes, the government should bear the costs.
Patrick Jaicomo and Dylan Moore are attorneys at the Institute for Justice in Arlington, Va., and represent Martin, Gabe, and Cliatt before the U.S. Supreme Court.