Cops Search Wrong House, Kill Innocent Man

By Andrew Lu on July 26, 2012 | Last updated on March 21, 2019

Imagine you're sitting at home and you hear a thunderous knock on the door.

If you're not expecting any visitors and own a gun, you may reach for it. In fact, that's what Florida man Andrew Lee Scott did when police came a knocking.

The police were searching for an attempted murder suspect. So you can bet they were expecting the worst. So when Scott opened the door with his weapon in hand, a police deputy shot him dead. But instead of shooting the attempted murder suspect, the police shot an innocent man. They knocked on the wrong door.

Police say that when they knocked on the door, the occupant opened the door and had a gun trained on the deputies, reports the Huffington Post. Police admit to shooting the man and admit that they did not identify themselves as cops. They also insist they did nothing wrong.

But if police didn't identify themselves as cops, how was Scott to know that it was law enforcement and not someone else looking to cause trouble? After all, you hear of a lot of strange stories in Florida like a man who ate someone's face.

According to a law professor, it doesn't really matter. Cops don't have to identify themselves as cops if they do a "knock search." Only with a no-knock search, do they have to identify themselves, reports the Huffington Post. It's a shame that Andrew Lee Scott did not know such fine distinctions with police search procedures.

On their second attempt, police got the address right and arrested the attempted murder suspect in a different apartment building.

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