Jennifer Heath Box did not understand why she was being handcuffed and arrested when she was coming off a seven-night Royal Caribbean cruise at Port Everglades on Christmas Eve 2022. Law enforcement officials tried to explain that they had a warrant for her arrest on charges of child endangerment.

The photo attached to the warrant was taken from Heath Box’s driver’s license. But the rest of the information on the warrant pointed to a different woman with a similar name: Jennifer Delcarmen Heath.

“I was feeling everything from confusion to frustration, anger, because I knew was this was impossible,” said Heath Box, whose daughters at the time were 30 and 18 and whose son was 20, a U.S. Marine three days from being deployed to Japan. Christmas day was supposed to be spent in Texas with family, a last chance to say goodbye to her son. Instead, she spent the holiday in a Broward jail cell, cold, tormented by loud music she could not control, angry that she was paying for what was obviously someone else’s mistake.

Heath Box filed a federal lawsuit late Wednesday accusing Broward County and the deputy who arrested her of locking her up when they should have known she was not the right suspect.

“They had at least 10 to 12 different pieces of information attached to the warrant that screamed to them, this was not their suspect,” said Jared McClain, a lawyer for the Virginia-based Institute for Justice, a nonprofit, public interest legal firm representing Heath Box. “They had different heights, different hair color, different ethnicity, different driver license numbers, different social security numbers.”

Delcarmen Heath is 23 years younger than Heath Box, who is now 50. The children who were allegedly endangered were 3 and 5 — Heath Box has no children that age and no grandchildren.

In fact, McClain said, when Heath Box was booked into the Broward jail, the intake officer ran her driver’s license and was surprised to see it came up with no outstanding warrants.

Still, the picture was a match, and Heath Box was handcuffed, taken to a cell, strip-searched and left to wait for someone, somewhere to clear it up.

In jail, she said, she was terrified. “When you’re accused of any crime against a child, you are the lowest of the low,” she said. “I have never been in trouble with the law in my life.”

The deputy who arrested Heath Box, Peter Peraza, is a named defendant in the lawsuit. Peraza is the deputy who was accused of manslaughter in the 2013 shooting death of Jermaine McBean in Oakland Park. That case established law enforcement officers were entitled to the protections of the state’s “stand your ground” self-defense law.

It was Peraza, according to the lawsuit, who insisted Heath Box was the right person, based on the photo.

The Broward Sheriff’s Office defended Peraza, saying he was acting on information provided by U.S. Customs and Border Patrol, confirmed by Harris County, Texas, where the arrest warrant originated.

“Had it not been for the arrest warrant filed by the Harris County Sheriff’s Office, Customs and Border Patrol would not have flagged Ms. Box, BSO would not have been notified and she would not have been arrested,” Broward Sheriff’s spokeswoman Veda Coleman-Wright said in an e-mailed statement. Peraza’s actions were reviewed by Internal Affairs and no misconduct was found.

McClain acknowledged Harris County’s blame for attaching the wrong photo to the warrant, but insisted the Broward Sheriff’s Office should have been more assertive about confirming his client was the woman named in the warrant, especially after the driver’s license check.

No lawsuit has been filed against Harris County.

Heath Box was released Dec. 27, 2022, having missed the chance to reunite with her children before her son’s deployment. She doesn’t remember exactly who said it, but one of the last deputies she talked to tried to offer some minimal amount of comfort.

“I’m sorry. It happens.”

According to Harris County court records, the case against Delcarmen Heath was dismissed two days after Heath Box was released from jail.

Rafael Olmeda can be reached at rolmeda@sunsentinel.com or 954-356-4457. Follow him on Threads.net/@rafael.olmeda.

---------

©2024 South Florida Sun Sentinel. Visit at sun-sentinel.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.