For many veterans, the sounds of fireworks on the Fourth of July or any sudden bang resembling a gunshot can be triggering. For one Black veteran in Miami, her trigger was a sudden ambush from police for allegedly no good reason at all.
Naomi Simmons tells NBC Miami she was in her home on June 14 with her 7-year-old daughter when their peace was disrupted by a loud bang on her daughter’s window. When she went to open the front door, Simmons told reporters all she saw was two men standing with guns drawn, pointing in her face.
“They didn’t say anything, so I just thought it was random people,” she said.
When she asked why the men were there, she said they finally identified themselves as Miami-Dade police officers. Simmons said they told her they were looking for Marquise Wiley, who had an active warrant for a felony gun charge.
To her surprise, officers told her the address on his ID was the address of her home where she’d been living for over a year, the report says. Miami-Dade authorities told NBC Miami they were ordered by a judge to transfer Wiley to Miami-Dade County jail for the charge.
They also said that at the time officers responded to Simmons’ home, Wiley did not appear to be in custody according to their databases.
After failing to locate him at the home, the officers left. However, Simmons told reporters she decided to do her own research via her cellphone and found where Wiley was: Broward County Jail. According to the Broward County Sheriff’s Office, Wiley was there for the past few months on a robbery charge and immediately transferred to prison after his guilty verdict came down in May.
So, why were the cops even at Simmons’ house...? The Air Force vet asked the same question but also told NBC Miami she was left shaken by the encounter, reflecting on her PTSD from serving in Afghanistan. Her neighbor, who served in Vietnam, echoed the notion, telling the outlet many soldiers died innocently opening a door only to experience gunfire.
Simmons refuses to chalk up the incident as an honest mishap.
“Frustrating and scary because you see all these things on the news about people that look like me, men and women, who are getting killed because police showed up at the wrong house,” she told NBC Miami.
The incident draws eerie comparisons to the evening Breonna Taylor was killed back in 2020 during a botched drug raid. Her boyfriend, Kenneth Williams, who survived the incident, recalled his door being bussed down by shadowy figures with guns who never once announced themselves as SWAT officers with the Louisville Police Department.
After firing a warning shot and striking one of the cops in the leg, a hail of bullets came flying into the apartment, many of which struck and killed Taylor as she stood behind Williams in the hallway.