4.08.2004
NIGHTMARE RAID
By Marianne Garvey and Zach Haberman
April 2, 2004 -- An 84-year-old Brooklyn man says he and his wife - who uses a walker - were terrorized by cops who invaded the wrong apartment looking for a drug dealer.
As a result of their terrifying two-hour ordeal, Martin Goldberg said he has facial bruises and his 82-year-old wife, Leona, is in the hospital with an irregular heartbeat.
NYPD spokesman Paul Browne said the cops went to the right apartment in the wrong building of the Sheepshead Nostrand Houses in Sheepshead Bay.
"The Internal Affairs Bureau is investigating this regrettable mistake to determine why required safeguards were neglected," he said.
Goldberg, a World War II vet, said he and his wife were alone in their apartment Wednesday when six cops knocked on the door and yelled, "Police, open up! This is a drug bust."
Goldberg said that when he opened the door, they shoved him out of the way and rushed inside, bruising his cheeks with their shields.
"It was a very threatening experience," he said. "They charged in like an army. They knocked pictures off the wall."
Goldberg said they told him and his wife of 59 years, who was lying in bed, to get on the floor, but dropped the demand once they realized how old the couple was.
Instead they ordered Goldberg to sit in a chair and tossed a search warrant on the coffee table.
They told him they were looking for a 24-year-old black man who is 6 feet tall.
"They showed me his picture and they kept shouting, 'Do you know him?' " the elderly man said.
Goldberg, who has lived in the housing project for over 40 years, said he had no idea who the man was.
The cops, who said they were acting on a tip about a dealer who was selling marijuana and cocaine, stayed at the apartment for two hours, he said.
"They looked in all the drawers, they looked in all the rooms. I kept asking them, 'What are you doing here?' They said, 'We'll let you know.' "
After the cops finished their search, Leona told her husband she was frightened and needed the paramedics.
The cops called an ambulance, and Leona was taken to Beth Israel Hospital of Brooklyn, where she is in stable condition with an irregular heartbeat.
"I'm just happy they didn't have a heart attack," said the couple's daughter, Shelley McConney, 46.
"I don't know how this happened. This is an old couple."
Browne said the mix-up began on March 11 when an informant pointed to one of the housing project buildings and said a drug dealer lived there.
The building was next to the one that the Goldbergs live in, but because of a paperwork foul-up, their building was mistakenly targeted.
Browne said a deputy inspector was present during the raid. After a Harlem woman, Alberta Spruill, died of a heart attack on May 16, 2003, after cops burst into her apartment and exploded a flash grenade, the NYPD decided to assign a ranking officer to all drug raids.
In Spruill's case, they also had the wrong apartment.
http://www.nypost.com/news/regionalnews/18022.htm
