Police Raid Home, Mistaking Tomatoes for Marijuana

Scottish police burst into a 79-year-old widow’s home and staged a full-scale raid because they couldn’t tell that what she was growing in her windows were tomato plants, not marijuana.

Uniformed officers invaded the house where Lulu Matheson had lived for 53 years, imprisoning her son in a bedroom for two hours, handcuffing her grandson and searching everything in the home. The raid involved three squad cars, seven officers and a team of drug-sniffing dogs.

Finally, officers conceded that the plants in the window were tomato plants. However, they insisted on taking a plant (which was bearing fruit) to the lab for analysis, just in case.

Matheson’s said Gus said that “it was a terrible carry-on” and complained that “the police didn’t even apologize.”

But a spokesman for Northern Constabulary denied any improper behavior and insisted that the raid was conducted on “an intelligence-led basis.”

Source: The Herald.

Image: Spisharam-away via Flickr.