Couple says police hit the wrong side of a duplex over a neighbor’s warrant — then kept their iPad for months anyway
A Minnesota couple on Reddit said a search warrant aimed at their downstairs neighbors turned into a raid on their own life because they happened to live in the upstairs unit of the same duplex. In the post later collected by r/BestofRedditorUpdates, the writer said Minneapolis police and a SWAT unit showed up at 7 a.m., broke through the shared entry door, forced entry elsewhere in the building, pointed rifles at them, handcuffed them, and kept them in a squad car for about two hours while both units were searched. The poster said officers first acknowledged the warrant was for the downstairs unit, then later claimed it covered the whole building and only produced paperwork for the upstairs address after the searches were over.
The part that seemed to confuse the couple most was what police actually took. According to the post, officers seized the wife’s iPad, which the writer said was used only for her artwork and one of their income streams, while leaving other electronics in the upstairs unit alone. The writer said the wife signed a document allowing police to search the iPad with its passcode because they were told refusing could leave them without it for a month or more, but they still felt the whole situation was off, especially since they had no connection to the downstairs neighbors beyond living in the same building.
The original thread quickly turned into a scramble for answers. The poster said they contacted a city council member, requested documents, called multiple offices, and tried to trace what authority police actually had to search their separate unit. They also said an officer told them that because they were “causing an issue,” police were going to keep the iPad longer, which only made the seizure feel more retaliatory. By then, the couple had also connected with an anti-police-brutality group, hired a lawyer, and filed a case with the Office of Police Conduct Review.
Then the update, posted more than nine months later, made the whole thing sound even more chaotic. The writer said the downstairs neighbors blamed them for the fallout from the raid and started an online smear campaign, while the iPad itself remained tied up for months. The update also described a bureaucratic maze of courthouse visits, document requests, phone calls, and rejections, with no quick or clean path to getting the device back. Even the writer’s attempt to make sense of the warrant process seemed to end in more confusion than clarity.
What makes the story hit is not just the raid itself, but how ordinary the couple’s position was before it happened. They said they had lived there less than six months, had separate doors, separate mailboxes, separate electric meters, and no real connection to the downstairs unit. But once police treated the whole building as part of the same event, they were suddenly dealing with guns, cuffs, property damage, a missing work device, and a long fight to get basic answers.
Original Reddit post: r/BestofRedditorUpdates thread
