A Denver police SWAT team raided the wrong home nearly two years ago, held family members at gunpoint, locked two elementary-aged girls in a police car and then tried to cover up the mistake in official paperwork, the family alleged in a lawsuit filed Tuesday.

Kirsty Shelton and other members of her family brought the state lawsuit against 10 Denver police officers Tuesday over the June 6, 2023, raid at their apartment in the 2300 block of Cleveland Place.

The officers went into the apartment building intending to search Apartment 307 in an effort to arrest a violent crime suspect, Danny Garcia, who lived in that unit. But when officers arrived, they instead banged on the door of Apartment 306 where the Shelton family lived, which was directly across the hall from Apartment 307, according to the lawsuit.

The officers demanded that the Sheltons open up and shouted that they knew Garcia was inside, according to the lawsuit. Sharon Shelton-Knight, Shelton’s mother, told officers through a closed door that they were at the wrong unit and that Garcia lived in Apartment 307.

The officers ignored her, the lawsuit alleges, and continued to demand the family open the door until Shelton-Knight finally did so. Denver police officers then ordered the adults out at gunpoint, entered the apartment and encountered Shelton’s 5- and 6-year-old daughters, who screamed, cried and begged police not to hurt them as the heavily-armed officers came into their bedroom, the lawsuit alleges.

Officers then locked the entire family in a police vehicle for at least an hour before letting them go free, according to the lawsuit. Garcia was arrested hours later in Apartment 307, the lawsuit alleges.

After the raid on the Sheltons’ apartment, officers framed the intrusion as an “evacuation” in official paperwork, the lawsuit alleges. The operation’s commander wrote in an after-action report that, due to the layout of the apartment building, the family was “contacted, advised of the situation and evacuated for their own safety,” the lawsuit says.

“What kind of alternate universe is this?” John Holland, one of the family’s attorneys, said in an interview Tuesday.

He called the official framing of the incident as an evacuation a “failed cover-up.”

“(It is) a robust attempt to rewrite the history and falsify it,” he said. “Pugnacious, aggressive falsification.”

Holland and another of the family’s attorneys, Dan Weiss, said some reports by individual officers failed to mention that they even went into the family’s apartment.

The Denver Police Department declined to comment on the allegations in the lawsuit.

Shelton said the police officers’ actions traumatized her family and required them to get extensive counseling. The two girls are still afraid of loud noises, and worry that the SWAT team will come back, according to the lawsuit. They have nightmares, will not sleep in their own room and now sleep in Shelton’s bedroom, according to the lawsuit.

“The police promised an investigation but instead covered up the raid, failing to produce their report to this day, over a year-and-a-half after the incident. They continue to pretend that this terrifying raid never happened,” Shelton said in a statement.

Holland and Weiss filed the lawsuit in state court under Colorado’s 2020 police reform law, which does not allow officers to try to block lawsuits under the claim of qualified immunity, as they can in federal court. It alleges that at least 10 officers violated the family’s constitutional right to be free of unlawful searches and seizures, and that the family was subjected to excessive force.

It’s rare for SWAT teams to enter the wrong location, said Thor Eells, a former SWAT member and commander for the Colorado Springs Police Department and the executive director of the National Tactical Officers Association. Nationally, instances of tactical teams going into wrong locations has significantly decreased in the last decade mainly because of better training and a move away from hasty drug-related operations, he said.

But when police do make a mistake and suspect they’ve entered the wrong location, they can’t immediately just back away because the location needs to be searched to make sure there are no threats, he said.

“Once they start the entry, they’re not going to stop until they secure the apartment for the safety of everyone involved,” said Eells, who declined to comment on the Denver case.

Experts in tactical operations say sending a SWAT team to arrest someone in an apartment building is challenging because people move in and out frequently, unit numbers can be unclear and gunshots can pass into another unit.

When time allows, officers can do surveillance, get the target location’s floor plans and send someone to check it out before an operation, said Mark Lomax, former executive director of the National Tactical Officers Association and a retired major for the Pennsylvania State Police.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.