MOM SAYS RAID A MISTAKE

Police Broke Down Her Door Seeking Drugs

The same police department that terrorized a Hallandale Beach couple in a
wrong-house drug raid last February is accused of making a similar blunder.

The alleged victim this time: a nine-months pregnant mother of three with
no criminal history and a steady job as a shift manager at McDonald's.

Tracey Bell, 28, was quietly chatting on the phone with her mother on the
evening of Feb. 2 when, she says, heavily armed Hallandale Beach police
officers broke through her door, chased after her frightened 10-year-old
daughter who fled screaming and threw Bell on the floor before handcuffing
her.

After police searched the apartment for about an hour, Bell said they told
her they had the "right house but the wrong people."

Bell lives in one of two unmarked, side-by-side units in a peach stucco
duplex on Southwest Ninth Street -- a street the City Commission has
pressured police to clean up following recent complaints of drug
trafficking. Bell said she believes police confused her with her next-door
neighbor: Bell, other residents on the block and even the neighbor's
roommate say that woman has opened her home to several alleged drug dealers
in the area.

"The police's excuse is that they have seen traffic in and out of [Bell's]
house. If they've seen any traffic, it's coming out of here," said the
25-year-old roommate, who asked not to be named for fear of losing her
municipal job.

Police maintain they made no mistake. Their search warrant, which does not
name Bell, states that a confidential informant purchased crack cocaine
from the duplex unit where Bell lives, between Jan. 17 and Jan. 24.

Police say they made the raid based on the drug buy, and several verbal
complaints of which police have no record.

Bell believes that her own complaints, made anonymously, resulted in the
raid on her unit.

"We went to the correct house," Hallandale Beach Police Chief Lawrence
Faragher said. "It was the right door in the right building."

No one except Bell and her daughters, ages 6, 10 and 11, lives there. The
unit is protected by an alarm and only Bell's mother and sister have
visited since Bell went home on maternity leave Dec. 31, she said.

Neighbors say Bell, who has lived in the unit for six years, is the
neighborhood watchdog, and phones police to complain about noise and
suspicious activity.

Bell's neighbor, who is new to the neighborhood, has a prison record for
aggravated assault and has twice been sued by landlords seeking to evict
her.

She was arrested less than a month before the raid for drinking beer on the
curb side with suspected drug dealers.

Although the neighbor denies selling drugs from her house, she acknowledges
she was friendly with the suspected dealers and cannot understand why
police raided Bell's house.

LANDLORD'S SUPPORT

While the landlord of the duplex, Ralph Perez, knows less about his newer
tenant, he jumped to Bell's defense, accompanying her to the police
department the day after the raid to complain.

"They have the wrong person," Perez said. "She is a good tenant. She's been
in my apartment for six years and I have never had a problem with that
young lady. I've never heard a whisper."

He spent $500 fixing damage caused by the raid. Early this week, Bell moved
back into the house from her mother's Hollywood home, where Bell and her
daughters had taken refuge after the raid.

"When they hear something bump, they're scared," Bell said of her
daughters. "They peep out of the windows. All of them sleep with me. They
don't want to be here."

In February 1999, Hallandale Beach Police mistakenly raided the house of
race-horse exercise rider Edwin J. Bernhardt and his wife, rousting
Bernhardt out of bed and hauling him to jail for resisting.

In that instance, authorities later acknowledged that the address on their
search warrant was incorrect.

The Bernhardts have filed suit against the city.

Bell and other neighbors say the young men who were dealing drugs along
Southwest Ninth Street, and who converged on the concrete stoop that Bell
shares with her neighbor, have disappeared since the raid and several
arrests made in the month of January.

CALLS TO POLICE

Bell takes credit for their disappearance. She says that since going home
on maternity leave Dec. 31, she had repeatedly called the police to
complain that men congregated in front of her house were dealing drugs.

Bell and the police disagree on many of the details concerning the events
of Feb. 2.

Bell says she told officers twice that she was pregnant while they pushed
her down; police say she was never on the floor.

Police did, however, call an ambulance after Bell complained of stomach
discomfort. She later signed a medical waiver.

Bell says lead investigator Miguel Martinez emerged from the house at 7:30
p.m., half an hour after the search with a drug-detecting dog began, and
told Bell, "Apparently, this is not a drug house and you don't look like a
drug person."

Police Chief Faragher, speaking on behalf of Martinez, denies this was
said.

After officers searched about 20 minutes more, Bell says Martinez summoned
her inside the house and told her that officers had found traces of cocaine
on her kitchen table, but the amount was "too small to recover."

Bell said Martinez told her someone else was selling drugs from her house.

Faragher denies this also.

`NO ITEMS SEIZED'

On an inventory sheet presented to Bell that night, officers wrote "no
items seized." The incident report filed the next day reaffirmed that a
pale white substance was noted on the kitchen table but was too small to be
recovered.

Bell believes officers made that up to justify the search.

Initially, Hallandale Beach police spokesman Andrew Casper told The Herald
that police discovered a "trace of cocaine" during the raid. Later, in a
"clarification," he said no cocaine was found, only a "trace of a white
substance."

"It could have been sugar, flour . . . it could have been any number of
things," Casper said.

When Bell and her landlord questioned a police official about why she was
raided, she and Perez say the man held up his hand to silence them and
reminded Bell that she could lose her publicly subsidized housing if linked
to drug trafficking.

Faragher said that conversation was only meant to inform Bell.

"It's certainly not a form of intimidation," he said.