A Brooklyn family says they're afraid to live in their own home because cops keep barging in and tossing the place in search of a dead man. Plaintiff Karen Jordan is the widow of James Jordan Sr., a deceased security guard with a minor criminal history that includes turnstile-jumping. Jordan Sr. succumbed to diabetes in 1996, but police continue to raid his former home in an attempt to arrest him on an outstanding warrant, according to a federal lawsuit filed last week (see below).
The lawsuit alleges that police have raided Jordan's Bushwick home, where she lives with her son James Jordan Jr., four times this year. It's gotten so bad that she taped a copy of her dead husband's death certificate to the apartment door in a futile attempt to prove to police that the man they seek can no longer be imprisoned.
"They tell me to be quiet or they’ll lock me up,” Jordan tells the Post. “So they go through my entire house, turning out drawers, looking in closets, harassing my children and asking them terrible questions. I’m at my wit’s end."
According to the lawsuit, during one raid in June 2013, officers arrested James Jr., 31, after he told them his name, as well as his friend Anthony Solis, who was in the home at the time. Both men were interrogated by police at the precinct, and although officers "did not recover any contraband from their warrantless search of the plaintiffs’ home," Jordan Jr. was charged with weapons possession.
During the interrogation, investigators "kept asking James to provide them with information concerning drugs and guns in his neighborhood and concerning certain individuals who James doesn’t even know," the lawsuit alleges. The weapons charge was eventually dropped.
The lawsuit, which seeks unspecified damages, alleges that the warrantless searches have violated the family's constitutional rights and caused "emotional distress, fear, embarrassment, humiliation, shock, discomfort, loss of liberty, loss of rights to familial association, wages and financial losses, pain and damage, and damage to reputation."
"My dad’s spirit is here," Jordan Jr. tells the Post. "But you can’t arrest his spirit. I just want my dad to rest in peace. Even when you’re dead, you still get harassed."
