Portland Family Files Lawsuit After SWAT Team Arrested Innocent 16-Year-Old at Gunpoint

What began as an ordinary school day in Portland, Maine, spiraled into a terrifying and traumatic ordeal after a teenager was mistakenly identified by police, leaving him shaken and changed forever.

May 13, 2025, started like any ordinary day for Amber and Nathan Miller’s sixteen-year-old son L.M., whose name is withheld because he is a minor. L.M. attends Deering High School, where it’s common for students to leave campus to get lunch. 

As he was walking down a sidewalk to join his friends to drive to McDonald’s for lunch, a team of police in SWAT tactical gear carrying rifles rounded the corner behind him.  

The officers were after a different person: a man named Miles Hibbard, who lived in the neighborhood and was suspected of a minor burglary. Although Hibbard had never been accused of any crime before, much less one involving weapons, violence, or hostility toward police, South Portland police decided to send an entire SWAT team to arrest him—they came prepared for a shootout next to a high school in the middle of its open lunch period.

Before the officers saw anything more than the back of L.M.’s head, they drew their rifles, ordered him to stop and put up his hands. Terrified, L.M. immediately complied. He continued to comply as officers ordered him to walk toward them in the street, lie down on his stomach, and put his hands behind his back.

At that point, the police chief would later confirm that the officers knew they had the wrong guy. The officers had been briefed that Hibbard had a large tattoo on his forearm, but L.M.’s arms are tattoo-free. As L.M. pleads, “What did I do?”, one officer tells another, “I don’t love this.” 

Despite this, the officers did not let L.M. go. They cuffed his hands behind his back, ordered him to his feet, walked him backwards toward the school, searched him, questioned him, moved him to the side of the road, and asked him more questions before releasing him.

Although the detention was not lengthy—it lasted little more than five minutes—its damaging effects were both long-lasting, and more fundamentally, unconstitutional. The Fourth Amendment requires that once officers realize they’ve detained the wrong person, they must let him go. Beyond that, officers should not use dangerous military tactics against nonviolent suspects of minor crimes. 

The Miller family has teamed up with IJ to file a lawsuit to hold the officers responsible in court and to guard against this nightmare happening to another family.