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Award-winning Miami Herald opinion columnist Leonard Pitts Jr. was awoken at his Maryland home early Sunday by a group of police officers responding to a hoax 911 tip that someone had been killed inside Pitts’ house.
The Bowie Police Department called Pitts shortly before 5 a.m. and told him they had received an anonymous report that his wife or someone else was “being murdered.”
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Authorities instructed Pitts to stay on the phone and go out the front door of his house. When he got outside, an officer with a loudspeaker ordered him to put the phone down immediately and slowly proceed toward a spotlight being held by another officer.
Leonard Pitts
(Tribune Media)
“I knew that if I remained calm, it would be fine because there was nothing to hide,” Pitts told the Miami Herald.
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Pitts was handcuffed and questioned behind a police car while other officers searched the house for a dead body — only to find Pitts’ wife, older daughter and her spouse, and 3-year-old granddaughter, all alive and well.
Bowie police chief John Nesky told the Miami Herald that the department is still investigating this incident, “but we do know there was false information given.” Nesky said he was not prepared to call the incident “swatting” yet, referring to an act in which callers report false crimes and send officers to the homes of innocent people.
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Pitts said he is unsure who made the call to the police, but he insisted law enforcement “did what they had to do”.
“It felt surreal, like I was in a movie”, he added.
Fox News’ Kira Grant and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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