"I think there's been a mistake." Destructive raid searches for a criminal arrested months earlier

By: Conner Drigotas

At five in the morning on October 24, 2023, Cathy George was safely asleep in her quiet Atlanta suburb home. She had never been arrested and never been in trouble. She was, by every measure, an ordinary person living a peaceful life when she was startled awake by a pounding on her door. 

"I was immediately staring down the nozzles of machine-style weapons," Cathy later recalled, "Their infrared lasers covered me from head to toe. Lighting up like a Christmas tree, paralyzed with fear, I knew I was going to die. Wearing only my T-shirt and underwear, I was immediately pulled out of my unit and into the hallway."

Cathy’s peaceful night was being interrupted by more than a dozen officers from the U.S. Marshals Service and the DeKalb County Sheriff's Office. The masked, armored, and assault ready team had descended on her building, pre-dawn. To gain access, they coordinated with Cathy’s condominium managers, who let them in through the locked front entrance and so they could make their way through secured corridors to her home. They had not arrived by accident. This was a planned operation. They were looking for a man named Joshua Smiley.

Cathy had never heard the name in her life.

Nothing to smile(y) about

Joshua Smiley was, in June of 2023, one of America’s most wanted men. U.S. Marshals Service officials had placed him on their "15 Most Wanted" list, a roster of the nation's most dangerous fugitives, wanted for a homicide investigation in Alabama and a federal bond violation in Indiana.

About a week after Smiley made the list, however, law enforcement found him. He was located at a residence in Indiana, and he was taken into custody without incident. The next day, U.S. Marshals Service officials put out a press release: Joshua Smiley had been caught. He has remained behind bars ever since.

That meant nothing to the raid team showing up at Cathy George's door four months later.

The officers had planned everything about their operation, except the most basic work of checking whether the man they were hunting was still free. A single database search. A glance at their own agency's public announcement. A double check of internal records. Almost any effort could have prevented the error. Instead, they held at gunpoint a woman with no connection to Smiley who had done nothing wrong.

When Cathy opened the door that morning in response to their pounding, she was faced with armed and masked strangers. "I wasn't shown any ID, I wasn't shown any warrant, I wasn't shown a search warrant, an arrest warrant, a badge," she said. "I had no clue who they were."

Officers held Cathy in the hallway for 15-20 minutes. Inside her home, officers tore through her belongings in search of Smiley. As they did, Cathy recalls, they kept asking the same questions:

"Where is he? Where are you hiding him? Where is he?" Cathy remembered them saying. "You know if you're lying to us, you're going to be going to jail."

"I have no idea what they're talking about," Cathy said, "and I finally just say, 'Who?' And they say, 'Joshua Smiley.'"

The name meant nothing to her. She had never met the man. She said so, but the officers didn't stop. At one point, they demanded to see photos of her sons. Cathy was escorted back inside her own home so officers could scroll through her phone. They compared her sons' faces against a photo of Smiley. Cathy’s lawsuit, filed in April 2026, notes that her sons share no physical or demographic traits with Smiley beyond race and gender.

Then one of them looked at Cathy and said, "I think there's been a mistake."

With that, he handed her a business card, and the entire law enforcement team walked out.

They left behind a ransacked apartment and a woman who had just been held at gunpoint, dragged from her home in her underwear, accused of harboring a wanted killer, and told with a business card that it was all just an error. No warrant was shown to her. No explanation was, or has since been, given for how they ended up at her door. 

When force is initiated, there are inevitable downstream results. No matter how officers tried to frame it in the moment, they had done something deeply wrong and left their victim to suffer.

For months, Cathy could not sleep. She was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and began taking multiple medications. Eventually, she moved out of the apartment she had called home because, with safety merely a façade, staying felt impossible. The people she would have previously called for help, from building management to police, had ganged up on her and lost her trust. 

Government officials offered nothing to alleviate her suffering. When Cathy filed an administrative claim with the U.S. Marshals Service, seeking some form of accountability or explanation, her claims were not resolved in the required six-month timeframe. The message was clear: though it was government officials who had made a catastrophic error, Cathy George was on her own to deal with the consequences.

That's when she decided to fight back. 

A pervasive problem

With the help of the Institute for Justice, a nonprofit law firm, Cathy has filed suit in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia against Special Deputy Ja’Rad L. Hunt, the officer who gave her the business card, and the “fourteen unknown law enforcement officers” involved in the raid. The suit alleges violations of the Fourth, Fifth, and Fourteenth Amendments as well as claims of assault, battery, trespass, false imprisonment, false arrest, negligence and more.

The Fourth Amendment exists precisely for moments like this one. It promises Americans the right to be secure in their homes against unreasonable searches. Though the law supposedly requires that any warrant be backed by probable cause, it’s just a piece of paper that has to be called upon after the fact. Here, the officers had no probable cause because the man they were seeking was not a fugitive. He was an inmate. The warrant they relied upon, if it was ever valid, had already been executed months earlier when Smiley was peacefully taken into custody. Every armed step toward Cathy's door was constitutionally unjustifiable, a claim Cathy’s legal team is pursuing in court.

"The Constitution promises security in your own home," said Institute for Justice attorney John Korevec, "but for Cathy, that promise was shattered in minutes. This lawsuit is about accountability for Cathy, but it's about much more than that, too. At stake is a basic principle: In America, the government does not get to march through your door without reason, only to walk away without consequence."

His colleague, attorney Marie Miller, puts it plainly: "This was no ordinary law enforcement mistake. There's no excuse for the officers' failure to verify whether the fugitive they sought was still at large. When government officers trample individuals' rights like they did Cathy's, there must be some path to vindication."

Cathy agrees. "Innocent people should not have to pay the price for this kind of government error," she said. "I deserve answers for how something like this could have happened. If no one is held accountable, it will happen again. Are you next?"

That question hangs in the air, solemnly, for a reason. Cathy George's case is part of a pattern that the Institute for Justice has documented and is litigating across the country as part of their Project on the Fourth Amendment. Separately, Respect America has also published the testimonials of Douglass Harless and Bryan Malinowski, both of whom were summarily executed in their homes when officers chose violence instead of simple communication.

In all of these cases, government agents made a terrible mistake. And in all of these cases, government officials’ first instinct has been to protect themselves by not resolving claims, invoking legal shields, and stonewalling on transparency, making the path to justice as difficult as possible for the people who had been harmed.

There is something deeply wrong with this so-called justice system. It is time-consuming, expensive, and arduous to hold those who initiate violence or diminish wealth by force or fraud accountable, especially when they hold an office or brandish a badge. Ms. George, alone in her house but for her six pound dog, got lucky that October morning. She is alive, determined,  and working to fight back despite the deck being stacked against her.

Cathy had to navigate an administrative claims process, battle mental health struggles, and then file a federal lawsuit because of officers’ errant actions. The officers, meanwhile, enjoy legal protections that ordinary citizens don't have. We don’t know the names of the officers who wrongly stormed Cathy’s house, and so they are free from consequences. For now. That, more than anything, is what Cathy wants to change:

"I hope that they are held accountable,” Cathy said, “and my biggest hope is that this never happens to another person."