ELYRIA, Ohio — Before Elyria police ever executed their controversial raid at a home on Parmely Avenue, they made a surprise visit to the address last January, about a month before new tenants Reida and Marlon Jennings moved in.
Shivani Tiwari, the owner of the property, confirmed this exclusively to 3News on Wednesday. She tells us she was there doing renovations when detectives showed up and asked her questions.
“‘Are you sure this property is empty?'” she remembers being asked. “[I told them,] ‘Why don’t you go look around? My property is empty, and the last renter actually left more than 15 days ago.'”
Tiwari says she did an extensive background check on the Jenningses, which came back clean. So after seeing SWAT officers raid the home using a battering ram and flash-bang grenades last week, she was questioning why police did what they did.
In body camera video of the operation submitted by the city, you can see everything inside the house still appears very much in order. However, Tiwari couldn’t believe how it really looked after their search: The place was ransacked, the front door was rammed, windows were broken, and broken glass littered the area where Courtney Price sat with her sickly baby boy Waylon.
“When they raided the house, there was no need to break the things inside the house,” she said.
Waylon is still in the hospital after his family says fumes from two flash-bangs affected the 17-month-old’s fragile lungs. Tiwari is also perplexed by the original search warrant, knowing her new tenants weren’t even in the home when the investigation began.
“It was issued merely on the words of the criminal who they arrested,” she contended. “I mean, he’s a criminal, right? He’s going to tell you where he is hiding his gun? He was much smarter than [the police]. He gave [them] the wrong address.”
WKYC reached out to Elyria Mayor Kevin Brubaker about this new information, but we were told there would be no comment until after an ongoing external investigation. Meanwhile, Tiwari says the Jenningses want out of their lease and no one else wants to rent the home, and she herself is left with a hefty bill for repairs.
“Why should I pay that deductible when it is not my fault, or nobody’s fault?” she asked. “It is just a pure negligence from [the] Elyria Police Department.”
As for baby Waylon, he remains in stable condition at UH Rainbow Babies and Children’s Hospital, but his mother tells us next week he’ll have a procedure to see if his hearing was affected by the noise from the incident.
