A North Carolina man says he was humiliated and thought he was going to be killed when police dragged him out of his house wearing only his boxers after his home security alarm was tripped accidentally.
“This was one of the most humiliating experiences of my life,” Kazeem Oyeneyin of Raleigh, N.C., told WTVD.
Oyeneyin, a club and party promoter known as “Tim Boss,” told the station he had just deactivated the alarm and was trying to return to sleep about noon Aug. 17, when cops arrived, demanding that whoever was inside show himself.
Oyeneyin went downstairs to investigate all the ruckus—armed with the gun he is licensed to carry—and was confronted by police who demanded to know what he was doing in his own the home.
His front door was unlocked—presumably due to a friend of Oyeneyin, whom he says accidentally tripped the alarm while leaving—and a police officer was entering his home.
“All I heard was somebody screaming downstairs,” Oyeneyin told the station. “So I grab my firearm because I don’t know what’s going on. And I run down the stairs and it’s a cop.”
Typically, as WTVD notes, when a home alarm goes off accidentally and police arrive, officers ask the homeowner for ID and then leave. Maybe there’s a fine for wasting cops’ time.
But that wasn’t what appears to have happened in Oyeneyin’s case. According to surveillance footage from inside his house aired by WTVD, officers don’t ask for ID:
Instead, more officers arrive, and Oyeneyin gets pushed up against a wall in his entryway and handcuffed before police force the barely dressed man outside. All this despite his protests that the home is his and that he had just spoken with the alarm company.
Now, Raleigh PD says it is investigating the incident.
But the whole thing has left a bad #AtHomeWhileBlack taste in Oyeneyin’s mouth.
“I was counting the seconds, because I thought he was going to kill me,” Oyeneyin said, according to the Washington Post, citing ABC News. “He was shaking the gun. All he has to do is slip and hit that trigger and I’m dead.”
“Being black could definitely be one the issues, the problem,” he told WTVD. “I hope it’s not. But if that’s what it is, it needs to be resolved.”