Heavily armed US marshals raided the wrong apartment in search of a murder suspect and held a young mother and her baby at gunpoint.
Kada Staples, 22, said she was napping Friday at her Bradenton apartment with her 3-month-old child when armed US Marshals knocked at her door and ordered her to come out.
She shared the video in her TikTok account @yungkadaa and captioned it with: “Me and my newborn baby had guns pointed at us from every direction and they were at the wrong place I’m shaking they literally could’ve killed us.”
As seen in the doorbell camera footage, shared on her TikTok account, the officers tell her, “US Marshals. Come to the door!”
“When the US Marshals show up to your house and rush you and your newborn baby out, running all through your home telling you they know you are lying and you’re hiding someone in there just to find out they’re at the wrong apartment,” she wrote.
“We were taking a nap and my Ring doorbell kept alerting me that there was motion detected,” she added. “When I clicked on it (the doorbell app), there were two men standing there in bulletproof vests with guns pointing at my door.”
And even though she repeatedly says no one else is in the apartment, the other marshal says: “Tell him to come out with his hands up. We know he’s in there. The place is surrounded.”
Kada said she hurriedly put her dog away in its cage then she cracked open the door and the armed men pushed her and her baby out of the way.
“They are holding us at gunpoint, screaming, there is a gun about a foot away from her face,” she said.
“We know Shamar is in there,” the agents can be heard saying in the video.
The footage shows the terrified mom in tears outside her apartment as the US Marshals realize they made a mistake.
“And then all run-out, and they’re like, ‘that’s the wrong apartment, wrong apartment,” Kada told WFLA.
Apart from her dog, there was nobody else inside the apartment at the time. The officers left soon after, with the footage showing Kada visibly distressed as she went back inside.
The man being sought by the US Marshals was Shamar Johnson, who was wanted for a homicide in September in Manatee County, NBC News reported.
Bradenton Police say that the US Marshals were assisting them and after leaving Kada’s apartment, marshals rushed over to an entryway in the same building at The Preserve on 51st in Bradenton and found and arrested Johnson in a different apartment.
The Marshals confirmed to Fox 13 that Kada’s apartment was not their intended target, but they had seen a man matching the description of wanted fugitive Shamar Johnson near her unit.
The law enforcement agency claimed they were “engaged by a woman” at Staples’ apartment but never entered the unit.
“No sorry, no nothing,” the 22-year-old mom told WFLA. “They tell me, you’re good and another one said, you’re fine.”
“They did come back like an hour later and said, we just want to explain to you that we saw a black male run upstairs and we thought he came to your apartment but he didn’t go to your apartment and it turns out it wasn’t the black man we were looking,” Kada said.
A US Marshal supervisor tells ABC Action News that it all happened very quickly and marshals were able to help catch a murder suspect who has been on the loose for weeks.
Kada says she’s still very traumatized by the incident and is having trouble sleeping. She says she’s thankful for her Ring doorbell and knowing how to react, otherwise things may have gone much differently.
She says she wants more done by law enforcement to prevent mistakes like this from happening.
“I think it happens more than people know and it can happen to absolutely anybody,” she said.
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