How a mom ended up in a Broward jail after a cruise. It’s a case of mistaken identity

A military mom from Texas who had traveled to South Florida for the winter holidays was forced to spend Christmas Eve and Christmas Day in a Broward County jail and miss seeing her son before he left for a three-year deployment with the Marines.

Now, she’s suing Florida’s second largest county in a case of mistaken identity.

Jennifer Heath Box and her legal representative, the Institute for Justice, filed a civil lawsuit filed in Fort Lauderdale federal court on Sept. 19 against Broward County and deputies with the Broward Sheriff’s Office.

She is suing for unspecified damages and claiming law enforcement mistakes and the violation of her Fourth and Fourteenth Amendment rights, which include unreasonable seizure and arbitrary deprivation of liberty.

What the suit says happened at Port Everglades

The defendants in the case are Broward County, sheriff’s deputies Peter Peraza and Monica Jean, and others including a corrections specialist, booking officer and corrections officer. Once the county is served, it will have about 21 days to respond, said Jared McClain, the Institute’s lead attorney in the case.

When Broward deputies arrested Jennifer Heath Box on Dec. 24, 2022, while she came off a Caribbean cruise, they had the wrong person, according to the suit. The person they thought they had detained was Jennifer Delcarmen Heath, also a Texas woman, but one with an arrest warrant for child endangerment in Harris County, Texas.

“There were over a dozen reasons why BSO officers should have realized that Jennifer [Heath Box] wasn’t wanted for child endangerment in Harris County, Texas,” the Institute of Justice says in the suit. “But they ignored each one. ... They overlooked overwhelming evidence that they had the wrong person.”

The Broward Sheriff’s Office said in a statement that it “sympathizes with the difficult situation Ms. Jennifer Heath Box was in.”

BSO’s Internal Affairs Division reviewed the deputy’s actions and determined that “no employee misconduct was found,” and the sheriff’s office considers the matter “now closed.”

Her attorneys say they will also argue this case was a misuse of an arrest warrant. And that in out-of-state cases, “you can’t just rely on their name alone,” to handcuff somebody, McClain said in an interview with the Miami Herald.

After 75 hours in detention, Heath Box was freed after her family persisted that deputies had the wrong woman.

Finding joy in a tough year

The year 2022 had gotten off to a rough start for Heath Box, now a 50-year-old mother of three adult children who lives in Richmond, Texas, with her husband, Kyle Box.

In January, her brother Mark was diagnosed with testicular cancer for the second time. But he got treatment and improved, so she invited him, his wife and their kids to join her and her husband for a December cruise.

They met in Fort Lauderdale on December 18, 2022, and their ship, Royal Caribbean’s Harmony of the Seas, departed Port Everglades the same day. It would return on Dec. 24.

Heath Box planned to quickly return to Texas to spend time with her children for Christmas. Her son, Joshua, had recently completed training with the Marines and was scheduled for deployment to Japan for three years and had to fly to Seattle right after Christmas.

End of the cruise and the start of trouble

Around 6 a.m. Christmas Eve, Heath Box and her family were preparing to get off the ship. When she scanned her identification to disembark just before 6:30, a security alert went off. She was immediately taken out of the line by ship security. Eight deputies surrounded her and her husband, according to the federal lawsuit.

When she asked what was going on, she was told, it’s “for a warrant,” according to the suit. After she pressed for more information, Deputy Peraza told her it was for “endangering a child” and was from Harris County, Texas.

None of her children were minors. According to the suit, her husband, Kyle, told the deputies: “I think you have the wrong person.” Deputy Jean responded: “That’s why we verify.”

She was asked her age. She promptly provided her driver’s license and passport, her lawyers say.

By this point and even long before the ship returned, law enforcement should have known they were targeting the wrong person, the lawsuit contends.

The warrant had another name, birth date, home address, height and eye color.

“It should have been obvious that Jennifer Heath Box was not subject to the warrant,” her lawyers wrote in the suit. “Everything BSO officers needed to tell the two women apart was readily available to them before they decided to board a cruise ship on Christmas Eve.”

She said she was handcuffed and taken to jail as her husband and other cruise passengers watched.

On Christmas Day, she faced a judge and was denied bond. She wasn’t given the chance to consult with an attorney, to review the arrest warrant or to speak to the judge, according to the suit.

That evening, she was transferred to Broward County’s Paul Rein Detention Center. There, guards blared death-metal music throughout the cells at all times of the day and night, the lawsuit says.

Previous mistaken identity cases

In 2010, BSO arrested Paola Londono on a different person’s warrant as she disembarked from a cruise ship with her 9-month-old son in her arms. In January 2022, BSO arrested the wrong Leonardo Silva Oliverio.

The complaint says all of these cases could have been avoided if “BSO had used their fingerprints to confirm their identity as part of the booking process.”

It also says the work to free Heath Box shouldn’t have fallen to her family members.

A strong family

Her husband, Kyle, and brother Mark, a cop, hired an attorney in Texas. And on Dec. 26, they figured out who Jennifer Delcarmen Heath was and learned she was on the run. They also consulted with law enforcement officials in Harris County and got help.

A Texas deputy discovered that an official with the Houston Police Department mistakenly attached Heath Box’s driver’s license photo to the arrest warrant for Delcarmen Heath, the lawsuit claims.

The Broward Sheriff’s Office then acknowledged to Heath Box that they had the wrong Jennifer.

She was finally freed on the morning of Dec. 27.

By that time her son was already in Seattle, about to depart to Japan for his three-year assignment with the Marines.