A posh cruise ship passenger says her life was destroyed after authorities made a terrible mistake when she disembarked in Florida.
Jennifer Heath Box, now 50, had just returned to Port Everglades from a week-long voyage aboard Royal Caribbean’s Harmony of the Seas on Christmas Eve 2022 when the ship was raided by Broward County security officers and sheriff’s deputies.
They told her she had been arrested in Harris County, Texas, for child abuse. Box was handcuffed and taken off the ship.
She then spent three days behind bars, where she endured appalling conditions including a male inmate routinely trying to enter her cell while she was alone, officers blasting death metal music from the speakers and freezing temperatures forcing her to sleep back-to-back with another inmate to stay warm, the mother of three alleged at a news conference on Thursday. according to NBC Miami.
But police in Texas were actually looking for another woman with a similar name: Jennifer Del Carmen Heath.
Jennifer Heath Box, now 50, says her life was destroyed after authorities made a huge mistake when she got off a cruise ship in Florida two years ago
She is now suing Broward County and Deputy Sheriff Peter Peraza (pictured)
Box is now suing Broward County and Deputy Sheriff Peter Peraza, alleging that her attorneys have violated her constitutional rights to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures, as well as her right to due process.
They said Box repeatedly tried to tell Peraza that he had approached the wrong person. And when a booking officer ran Box’s driver’s license number, he also told the officer that there were no outstanding warrants.
The attorneys also said that several other details in the warrant should have alerted Peraza and the other officers that Box was not the suspect Harris County authorities were looking for, including the difference in name and the age difference between Box and Heath, who is 23.
Heath was also five inches shorter than Box, had different eye, hair and skin color, and had a different home address, driver’s license number, Social Security number and Harris County System Person Number.
Heath also had five young children, while Box had three adult children and no grandchildren.
“They had at least 10 to 12 different pieces of information attached to the warrant that screamed to them, this was not their suspect,” attorney Jared McClain argued, according to the Tampa Bay Times.
Still, he said Peraza, who was reinstated after being acquitted of manslaughter in the 2013 pellet gun shooting of a man, continued to insist she was the suspect based on the photo attached to the Texas arrest warrant and forced Box to strip-search her before she was jailed.
Box had just returned to Port Everglades on the cruise ship Harmony of the Seas when she was swarmed by Broward County guards and sheriff’s deputies on Christmas Eve 2022
She continued to insist that the officers had the wrong person, but was still strip-searched and taken to jail
She says she subsequently missed Christmas with her adult children and was unable to say goodbye to her son, a U.S. Marine who was just three days away from a three-year deployment to Japan.
“If I have to call my kids and tell them I won’t be there for Christmas and they tell me I hurt them because I wasn’t there, that’s the first thing that hits me,” Box said.
Conditions in the Broward County Jail only made matters worse.
“You feel completely broken when you get arrested, because you’re humiliated and degraded. It breaks you as a person,” Box said.
“I’m angry about it. I’ve never been in trouble with the law before,” she added.
Box said she spent three days behind bars and missed Christmas with her children and the chance to say goodbye to her son before he was sent to Japan.
Ultimately, Box’s brother, a police officer himself, urged both Broward County and Harris County authorities to compare her fingerprints to Del Carmen Heath’s.
The Broward County Sheriff’s Office said it asked Harris County authorities for fingerprints on Dec. 26 to confirm they had the right person, but received a response several hours later that the county had no fingerprints on file because Box had never been arrested before. Local 10 News reported on this last year.
But Box’s brother was later able to determine that a Harris County employee had accidentally added Box’s driver’s license photo to the warrant instead of Del Carmen Heath’s.
Broward County officials said they received a message from their partners in Texas on December 27 stating, “Please release our custody regarding the above subject as soon as possible,” without further explanation. Box was subsequently released.
When she was released, an officer simply told her, “It happens.”
Box’s attorneys argue that Broward County and Peraza violated her constitutional rights to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures, as well as her right to due process.
“Broward County should have systems in place to ensure that the person they put in jail is the person they intend to put in jail, especially when they are executing warrants that are outside of their jurisdiction, which they do regularly in Port Everglades,” McClain argued when he announced the lawsuit Thursday.
“They know this problem exists, but they have done nothing to fix it.”
The Broward County Sheriff’s Office now says it “sympathizes with the difficult situation that Ms. Jennifer Heath Box found herself in.”
However, officials said they investigated Peraza’s actions and found “no employee misconduct.”
“On December 24, 2022, U.S. Customs and Border Patrol alerted a BSO agent that a passenger disembarking from a cruise ship in Port Everglades had an outstanding warrant for the arrest of a passenger on suspicion of child abuse,” a department spokesperson said.
“The BSO Deputy followed proper protocols in handling this case and upon receiving confirmation of the Harris County arrest warrant, he arrested Ms. Box.
“If it weren’t for the Harris County Sheriff’s Office arrest warrant, Customs and Border Patrol would not have been notified and she would not have been arrested.”
No lawsuit has yet been filed against Harris County, and the case against Del Carmen Heath was dismissed two days after Box was released from jail, the Tampa Bay Times reports.
