A senior citizen is suing the U.S. Marshals Service, claiming a group of armed officers in Arizona falsely arrested her without checking her identity, despite her repeated pleas they accept proof they had the wrong person.
“I’m very fearful all the time and very paranoid,” Penny McCarthy, 68, told ABC 15 this week.
“It’s so unbelievably wrong,” she added. “And I am not the only person this happens to.”
She has since moved out of state because she doesn’t feel “safe” in her previous home of Phoenix, where the arrest took place.
In body camera footage of the incident, officers with rifles can be seen jumping out of vans and ordering McCarthy to put her hands up.
As McCarthy asks questions about why the arrest was taking place and who it was officers were targeting, a voice can be heard ordering the woman to turn away or risk being “hit.”
As officers eventually load the handcuffed woman into a van, she asks, “Do you know who I am?”
They respond that McCarthy is a woman named Carole Rozak, who it was later revealed was wanted on a two-decade old probation violation after being released from prison in Texas.
“I’ve never been Carole Rozak,” McCarthy says in the clip. “I can prove who I am.”
During the encounter, officers claimed to have a warrant for her arrest but actually lacked one, according to the civil rights suit, which was filed in June. They also failed to check her driver’s license or run basic steps to confirm they had the right suspect.
After her arrest, McCarthy was repeatedly strip searched and spent the night in jail before being released. The Marshals later admitted they had mistakenly arrested her.
McCarthy’s suit names the Marshals, the U.S. government, and the unnamed officers involved in the arrest, claiming the 68-year-old’s Fourth and Fifth Amendment rights were violated.
It also alleges none of the officers involved faced discipline and no policies were changed after the arrest.
The Marshals Service has said it is aware of the suit but does not comment on pending litigation.
In August, the government moved to dismiss itself from the suit, arguing McCarthy failed to properly state a claim. It also claimed the Marshals employees might be exempt from prosecution, describing the officers as “federal employees acting in the scope of their employment.”
The Department of Justice began a review of the arrest late last year, though results are not expected for months.
Members of Congress have also spoken out about the arrest, calling it an example of “excessive force.”
“We are very concerned at both the [Marshals Service] carelessness and the excessive force during this encounter,” a group of House members wrote in a letter to the DOJ last year. “The USMS’s lack of regard for Ms. McCarthy’s due process rights is very troubling and oversight is necessary to ensure similar abuses do not happen in the future.”
The Marshals have said a fingerprinting “glitch” matched McCarthy to Rozak, admitting they had the wrong person after local media attention into the arrest surged.
