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A Royal Caribbean cruise passenger is suing a Florida sheriff's office, claiming she was humiliated after being wrongfully arrested and detained for three days over mistaken identity.
Jennifer Heath Box, 50, filed a civil rights lawsuit against the Broward County Sheriff's Office Thursday (September 19), claiming she was "degraded" by the ordeal nearly two years prior.
“I have nothing but anger and frustration. You feel completely broken when you’re arrested, because you’re humiliated, you’re degraded,” Heath Box said during a press conference via the New York Post. “So it breaks you.”
Heath Box was a passenger on the Harmony of the seas, which made stops in the Bahamas, Jamaica and Haiti, as part of a family trip celebrating her brother, a Georgia police officer, who had just completed his cancer treatment and returned to port in Fort Lauderdale on December 24, 2022. The plaintiff said she had two hours between their arrival and her flight back to Houston, Texas, where she planned to spend Christmas with her oldest son who was scheduled to leave for a three-year deployment to Japan with the Marines, but her ID triggered an alert at the gate as she disembarked the ship.
“It automatically came up with a warning,” Heath Box said via WPLG. “At that point, security surrounded me along with the police, asked me if I was Jennifer Heath and asked me to remove my jewelry.”
“I said, ‘What am I being arrested for?’” she said. “That’s whenever they said ‘child endangerment.’ They escorted me off the ship in front of everyone.”
Police mistakenly matched Heath Box with Jennifer del Carmin Heath, who was wanted in a felony case involving a 1-year-old and a 3-year-old out of Harris County, Texas. The wanted suspect was 23 years younger than Heath Box, five inches shorter and had a different skin tone, hair color and eyes, which the plaintiff acknowledged, despite her photo being attached to the warrant by the arresting officer, deputy Peter Peraza.
Peraza was acquitted of manslaughter charges in the 2013 shooting death of a man with an air rifle, at which point he was reinstated to the sheriff's office and stationed to work at the port. Heath Box said she was humiliated upon arrival at Broward County Jail, at which point she claims she was stripped and cavity searched, despite a detention deputy running her driver's license and finding nothing in the system.
“She came out and she handed the DL to Peter and she said, ‘We ran her DL and we don’t have anything in the system for her,’” Heath Box said via the New York Post. “Peter came back and said, ‘No. It is her. Let me show you. I can prove to you it is her. I will show you the picture.’ Again, that was all he was focused on.’”
Heath Box said she was kept in jail for three days, which included deputies blasting her cell with death metal music and freezing air as she wore a thin uniform, claiming she slept back-to-back with her cellmate to keep warm. The 50-year-old was released when Broward learned of Harris County's mistake, however, said she never received an apology and was instead told that "stuff happens."
“What I went through shouldn’t happen, and the fact that I’ve spent so long just trying to get my life back together,” Heath Box said via the New York Post.