Couple says police stormed their duplex over a neighbor’s warrant — then kept their artist iPad for 10 months without ever even searching it
A Minnesota couple says they were swept into a narcotics-and-firearms raid aimed at the downstairs unit of their duplex, only to end up handcuffed in a squad car while police searched both homes and seized an iPad that had nothing to do with the case. In a Reddit post later collected by Best of Redditor Updates, the poster said Minneapolis police and a SWAT unit arrived around 7 a.m., broke down the shared entry door, forced entry into the downstairs unit and the garage, and then ordered the upstairs couple out at gunpoint. The poster wrote that officers cuffed both of them, kept them in the back of a squad car for about two hours, and searched their apartment too, even though the two units had separate house numbers, separate front doors, separate mailboxes, and separate electric meters.
The part that sent the story ricocheting across Reddit was what police chose to take. According to the poster, officers left behind the couple’s laptops and one of their iPads, but seized his wife’s iPad — the one she used for art. He wrote that nobody but his wife used it, that her art was one of their income streams, and that officers told them it could take a month or more to get the device back if she did not sign paperwork allowing them to search it. The couple said they felt pressured to cooperate because they could not afford to lose access to the device for long, so she signed. The poster later said they were given only a receipt and poorly documented paperwork, with no clear case number and no readable officer name.
What followed, he said, was a months-long bureaucratic maze. In the later update, posted March 26, 2026, the Reddit user said that within the first week he spent more than 12 hours at the courthouse, met with a city council member, requested police records multiple times, contacted the officer, reached out to advocacy group Communities United Against Police Brutality, and hired a lawyer. He also alleged that one officer told him that because he was “causing an issue,” police were going to keep the iPad longer. Meanwhile, the loss of the device reportedly hurt the couple financially because the wife had to fall back on an older, half-broken iPad and Apple Pencil, which the poster said caused a drop in quality and dried up a big part of that revenue stream.
Then came the twist that pushed the story from ugly to absurd. The poster said that after the downstairs neighbors got their electronics back in March, his wife called the officer who had taken the iPad. Five days later, he says, the officer called back and revealed that the device had actually been released from evidence in October — months earlier — without the couple being told. When they finally retrieved it, the poster wrote, the custom-engraved Apple Pencil was still there, the screen was undamaged, and officers finally gave them the case number. Back at home, though, he says they checked the device and discovered police had never even looked through it. After 10 months of fighting, the iPad had allegedly sat untouched.
The public version of the story ends there, with the device back in their hands and no public indication in the Reddit roundup that the couple was compensated for the damage to the property, the lost work time, or the disruption caused by the raid. But online, that ending is part of what made the story blow up: it was not just about being caught in the wrong place during a warrant service. It was about how a couple says they were treated like suspects, lost access to a key work tool for nearly a year, and then learned the seized device had apparently never mattered to the investigation at all.
What do you think — if police seize the wrong person’s work device and never even search it, should there be automatic compensation?
