Federal Agents Raid St. Charles Home
By Mistake

Informer Told ATF That House Was
Center Of Illegal Guns Ring

Thursday, May 2, 1996

By Michael D. Sorkin
Of the Post-Dispatch Staff

The police informer seemed to know all about it: A large cache of machine guns and other firearms hidden in a suburban home in St. Charles County that was a major distribution point for illegal weapons. In a sworn affidavit to federal Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agents, the informer described how he had bought and sold weapons with people living in the house.

The result: more than a dozen heavily armed law officers in black, SWAT uniforms burst into the home Tuesday night and held the couple at gunpoint, turning the house upside down in a search for illegal weapons.

There was one problem: The informer had made it up. There were no guns in the home and never had been. The family who lives there was innocent. ATF admits raiding the wrong house but blames the informer. "It's amazing to me that he didn't think we'd ever find out," Daniel Hoggatt, special agent in charge of the St. Louis field office of the ATF, said
Wednesday.

Even more amazing to the couple who own the home was that ATF and the police didn't find out sooner. "For the first 30 seconds, I thought they were burglars and I was going to die," said Patty Mueller. "If they could do this to us, they could do this to anybody," she said.

Here's the Muellers' story:
Patty, 35, and Paul Mueller, 38, live with their sons, 6 and 2, at the end of a quiet cul-de-sac on Country Lane Court in unincorporated St. Charles County. For two years, they've owned their two-story home, on a half-acre lot in the Timberwood Trails subdivision. Paul is a self-employed painting contractor; Patty is a human resources director for an electronics chain. Their contacts with the law consist of traffic tickets. They don't have so much as a BB gun in the house.
"We're your basic dorky family who goes to soccer games and hangs out with their kids," Patty says.

At about 9:30 p.m. Tuesday, the Muellers had finished putting their boys to bed. Patty was writing birthday party invitations for the couple's youngest son. That's when more than a dozen men in black garb kicked open a door and pointed guns at the couple. They had entered through an unlocked outside garage door. Once inside, instead of turning a handle to open the door to the kitchen, they kicked in the door, breaking the frame, the couple said.

Kelly, the family dog, became frantic, and agents threatened to shoot her, the couple said. Agents ordered Patty to lock the dog in a bathroom. Then they told Patty to sit on a couch. What she saw next was men in the foyer pointing guns at her husband; he lay on the floor, his hands restrained by a plastic wrap. "There was a gun three inches from his head," Patty said. She protested. "Shut up and sit down, ma'am," agents said.

The agents were yelling "ATF," but the couple weren't sure what that meant. "Was this something like Waco?" Patty wondered. The agents went through the house, emptying shelves and boxes filled with Christmas ornaments and old magazines. They tracked mud throughout the house.

It was an hour before agents showed the Muellers a search warrant and explained why they were there, the couple said. Another half hour went by. Without finding any illegal weapons, the agents left. They offered no apology and did nothing to put the house back in order, the couple said.

Special Agent Hoggatt says he will apologize. An ATF agent for 24 years, Hoggatt says this is the first time he has seen such a mistake. "No one should have to worry about having a search warrant served on them in their own home when they haven't done anything wrong," he said. But he emphasized that, in his opinion, agents had reason to believe the
informer.

Hoggatt said the information from the informer fit with other information the agents had gathered. The informer clearly had been in the house and knew it well. The informer named the suspect he said was living in the house on Country Lane Court. But when agents checked, they found that the Muellers were living there. The informer had an answer for that: He said the suspect was staying with the Muellers.

Based on information from ATF and O'Fallon police, a St. Charles County judge signed a search warrant. The raid consisted of 14 law officers: eight members of the St. Charles Sheriff's office SWAT team, two sheriff's detectives, three O'Fallon detectives and one ATF agent.

As for the informer, instead of leniency, he faces more trouble. He will be charged with lying, Hoggatt said. After the raid, the informer confessed he had lied, hoping for an easier sentence on previous convictions.

In hindsight, the ATF chief says investigators should have gone slower. "We could have verified some of the information . . . there were other avenues we could have taken."

Patty Mueller wonders why agents didn't think of that sooner."Why did they have to kick in the door and point a gun at my husband?" she ask. "I want our place fixed, the rug cleaned and I think they should lose their jobs."

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