POLICE RAID GONE AWRY: A MUDDLED PATH TO THE WRONG DOOR

Early on a Wednesday morning in May, officials from two law
enforcement agencies broke down the door to an apartment of a frail
man, Timothy Brockman, threw a stun grenade inside -- setting a carpet
on fire -- then ordered him out of bed and handcuffed him as he lay
face down. His two cats, Rocky and Tito, vanished for hours. His
next-door neighbors, afraid that the building had been bombed by
terrorists, fled with their pajama-clad children.

The authorities, from the Police Department and the federal Bureau of
Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, were searching for
criminals or criminality, but they had gone to the wrong place. They
found only Mr. Brockman, a 68-year-old former marine and retired
factory worker who uses a walker to make his way around his
neighborhood in the northeast Bronx.

By all accounts, he is a law-abiding citizen. His door is decorated
with an American flag decal, and a yellow ribbon dangles from his
window for the American troops overseas.

What led the police to his apartment was, of course, a desire to fight
crime -- specifically, to find illegal guns and drugs and the people
who deal in them around the Edenwald Houses, the public housing
complex where Mr. Brockman lives.

Yet the seriousness of their purpose and the gravity of their tactics
were not matched in the preparations for the raid. In a series of
interviews, the police and federal officials described the path they
followed to Mr. Brockman's home as muddled by erroneous information,
the belief in a phantom informant, and most significantly, the failure
to resolve a glaring discrepancy at the core of their mission: which
apartment the criminals were supposed to be using.

Even the involvement of the United States attorney for the Southern
District of New York, whose office prepared the search warrant
application, did little to protect Mr. Brockman from the weak,
contradictory, and as it turned out, utterly wrong information that
led to the assault on his home.

The raid that resulted highlights not only the ways that aggressive
police work can go wrong, but also the willingness -- or hesitance --
of the authorities to take responsibility for preventing such errors.
At the time, the incident received no publicity and no serious
attention from the police leadership.

Two days after the authorities entered Mr. Brockman's apartment, the
matter of erroneous raids became inescapably public: Alberta Spruill,
a 57-year-old city worker, died of a heart attack after the police
burst into her apartment in Harlem on May 16 with a stun grenade, in
search of a person who did not live there and who was actually in custody.

Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly issued a 24-page report detailing
the police mistakes in the Spruill case and ordering changes in
procedure. It was an effort, he said, to reduce the chances of making
the same mistakes again.

The Brockman raid tests that principle of accountability against a
wider field, because unlike the Spruill raid, the search of Mr.
Brockman's home involved federal law enforcement as well as the police.

Mr. Kelly's spokesman, who provided a detailed account of the police
involvement in the Brockman raid, said the department had started an
internal affairs investigation into what went wrong.

The federal agents from the Justice Department said that the mistake
was entirely the product of police information, although the police
say it was the federal agents who came up with Mr. Brockman's
apartment number at the last minute.

A spokesman for prosecutors in the office of United States Attorney
James B. Comey said they were not allowed to discuss what, if
anything, they knew about major discrepancies in the evidence when
they asked a federal magistrate for permission to knock down the door
to Mr. Brockman's home.

For his part, Mr. Brockman said that while he is still rattled by the
episode, he was not physically hurt during the foray, just frightened
for himself and for his cats. He said the authorities should have been
better prepared.

"The police -- they're all right with me," Mr. Brockman said. "I
suffer from seizure. A lot of times I have fell out on the street, and
they picked me up. You have people who say, 'The police are dirty,
this and that.' I can't find any fault with them that I know of. They
got a job to do. But I don't know why they came and broke into my
house. I don't see any right in that. If they have me under
surveillance, they would watch me, and see who's coming in and out.
Not to come in like storm troopers."

The events leading to the search of Mr. Brockman's apartment began
with a "rash of shootings" in the early spring, according to Inspector
John Cutter of the police Intelligence Division. In response,
detectives sent out an informer who they believed had proven her
reliability in other cases when she bought a gun and crack cocaine
under police supervision, officials said. On May 5, undercover
detectives shadowed the informer as she headed into the Edenwald
complex, but they were not able to track which building she entered,
Inspector Cutter said.

This is where the first mistake was made, officials now say. When the
informer returned, she was confused not about the apartment number,
but which building she had been in.

"She comes back an hour or so later, and says, 'I was in this
apartment, 1159 East 229, Apartment 5D like David, a bunch of guys
sitting around wearing colors, gang colors,' " Inspector Cutter said.
"She said, 'They had guns and it looked like a crack mill.' "

The people in the apartment ordered the informer to leave and not come
back, Inspector Cutter said, but she returned five days later, on May
10, to secretly mark the apartment door with two pieces of white tape.

The police believed she had gone back to 1159 East 229th Street, but
in fact, she had returned to the same building that she had mistaken
for 1159 on her first visit, according to Michael O'Looney, the deputy
police commissioner for public information.

More serious mistakes followed.

Because the informer had been inside the apartment only once,
Inspector Cutter said, the police did not have enough evidence under
state law to obtain a search warrant. But under federal law, he said,
a single visit would suffice. So the police contacted federal
prosecutors and arranged a meeting for May 13. At the meeting was an
agent from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives,
which is part of the United States Justice Department.

During that meeting, a critical misunderstanding developed: the police
believed that the federal agent told them he was sending his own
informer into Edenwald to verify the report from the first informant,
according to Inspector Cutter.

In fact, there was no second informer, said Joseph Green, a special
agent who is a spokesman for the Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and
Explosives agency. He explained that the federal agent had an interest
in the Edenwald neighborhood because he had been working on a separate
investigation with other police officers. Those officers were part of
the housing bureau. They were not involved in the case for which the
search warrant was being prepared.

Rather than send out an informer, Agent Green said, agents called the
housing bureau to double-check the address and the apartment. "They
came back and said, "Change the apartment,' " he said.

Instead of Apartment 5D, the housing police were telling the federal
agents that it was Apartment 5F -- Mr. Brockman's home. Both
apartments were wrong, since the drugs and guns were in an entirely
different building, the police now say.

At the time, though, the police were convinced that their target was
in 1159 East 229th Street, and they were startled to hear that the
apartment number supplied by their original informant, 5D, was
incorrect, Inspector Cutter said. "That night, my detective gets a
call from the ATF: 'Right building, right floor, wrong apartment.' Our
detective says, 'I don't know how the informant could make that
mistake.' The ATF agent said: 'My guy is good, and he says it's 5F.
We're writing the warrant for 5F.' "

The reference to "my guy" was a reference to a housing police officer,
but the detectives had assumed the federal agent was talking about a
second informer, not another police officer, according to Commissioner
O'Looney.

Mr. Green, speaking for the federal agents, said, "All the information
put into the search warrant affidavit came from the N.Y.P.D."

So less than a day before Mr. Brockman's apartment was invaded, the
police believed that the federal agents had a second informer,
steering them away from Apartment 5D and toward Apartment 5F. In fact,
they did not. The federal agents believed they had a correct address
- - given to them by a member of the housing police - but they did
not.

Most critically, two different apartment numbers -- both in the wrong
building -- had been offered as the targets.

Did the federal prosecutors who prepared the application for the
search warrant know that, and if so, how did they resolve the
discrepancy?

Michael J. Kulstad, a spokesman for Mr. Comey, the United States
attorney for the Southern District of New York, declined to address
that question directly, but said, "Any discrepancies, if there are
any, are worked out when the agent swears to an affidavit."

When the Emergency Service Unit arrived around 7 the next morning to
break down Mr. Brockman's door, the white tape used by the informant
to mark the right apartment was not there, the police said. (They
later found the tape on the door of an apartment in another building.)

Mr. Brockman described what happened next. "They threw some kind of
bomb in here," he said. "I see these guys coming in with shields and
gas masks. They told me, 'Get on the floor and on your stomach.' "

Because of his medical problems, he said: "It's not easy to just roll
on the floor. They handcuffed me behind my back."

As waves of officers moved through the apartment, Mr. Brockman said,
they asked him about guns and drugs. When Mr. Brockman was freed, one
officer remarked that he had been assigned to watch the window during
the raid. "He saw the yellow ribbon in my window, so the guys come
back safe from Iraq," Mr. Brockman, the former marine, recalled. "He
told me, 'That's when I got a funny feeling about this.' "