‘TRAUMATIZING’

Texas Police Chief on Leave After Ordering SWAT Raid on Wrong House

The man police were really looking for, 17-year-old Cameron Vargas, was later found, arrested, and promptly exonerated.

The police chief in Galveston, Texas, has been placed on administrative leave after he ordered a SWAT raid on the wrong house this month—a fiasco that sent an innocent family into “panic” as rubber bullets reportedly ricocheted through their windows in the middle of the night. The botched raid was carried out last January, with officers detaining an entire family—and putting a girl in the back of a cruiser—while searching for a 17-year-old boy who didn’t live there. “I needed to throw up,” Chelsea Peralez, who says she was put in the cruiser, told Fox 26. “They let me step out, and they then told me they were only looking for Cameron, nothing else.” The suspect cops were looking for, Cameron Vargas, was tracked down and arrested that same week, but was quickly exonerated of first-degree murder. His mother, Terry Borrell, said in a statement the ordeal was a “traumatizing experience” that wrongfully “slandered” her son. Chief Doug Balli’s leave will last at least 10 days as an internal investigation is completed.