A woman tried to prove her innocence, while not even sure she was dealing with the proper authorities, in a frightening incident of mistaken identity just outside Phoenix, Arixona.
In shocking bodycam footage obtained by ABC15 after six months via a Freedom of Information Act request, 66-year-old Penny McCarthy is seen as she’s suddenly confronted at her home by six U.S. Marshals pointing rifles at her and telling her she’s under arrest.
McCarthy immediately knew something was wrong on March 5, 2024, but she wasn’t sure what it was. In fact, she told ABC15, “I truly felt like I was being kidnapped.”
Even taking it at face value, the innocent grandmother gave federal agents multiple opportunities to verify they were at the right home and confronting the right person. All of this with guns pointed at her and a lot of aggressive U.S. Marshals.
“We have an arrest warrant,” one of them tells her on the video.
“For me?” she replies, to which the officer responds, “Yes. For you.”
“Who am I?” she then asks, attempting to have them confirm her identity.
At that point, though, multiple agents can be heard shouting at her things like. “Turn away.” “Turn around.” “We’ll discuss it later.” “You’re gonna get hit.”
She again attempts to clarify their mistake on the video, asking, “You don’t want to confirm who I am?”
The agent attempting to apprehend her responds, “Put your hand behind your back. We’ll discuss that later.”
At another point, an agent tells her, “If you turn around again, you’re getting tased. You understand me.”
Speaking with ABC15 about the terrifying incident, McCarthy said, “I am so disappointed in my government, It’s not funny.”
After watching the video for the first time, she said, “It just makes me more angry than before.” She called what she witnessed on the video an “abuse of power. Period.”
She also told ABC15 that despite what’s heard on the video, federal agents never did “discuss it later” with her regarding her identity. “They did nothing but treat me like crap and lie to me.”
Federal agents did tell her who they thought she was after they had her in handcuffs.
At the time she was arrested and detained, federal agents were insisting she was Carole Anne Rozak, a 70-year-old fugitive from Oklahoma. Rozek had served prison time for non-violent crimes, but failed to report to her probation officers after her release.
One month after her arrest, on April 4, 2024, ABC15 spoke with McCarthy, who provided extensive evidence of her identity — insisting that she is not and has never been Carole Anne Rozak — to the news outlet. At the time, federal authorities were still convinced she was.
Among that evidence was her California birth certificate and driver’s license. Rozek, meanwhile, was reportedly born in Canada and has a Canadian social security number.
“I’m a senior citizen that got picked up at gunpoint in her front yard. And taken to prison,” McCarthy told the outlet at the time. “Nobody believes it.”
She further said that agents apparently IDed her by her Facebook picture.
She detailed at the time that officers “proceeded to chain my ankles, chained my wrists, put me in the back of a car and when I asked for why I was under arrest they said a parole violation.” She was released the following day pending an identity hearing.
McCarthy said her daughter and sister both attempted to verify her identity with authorities, showing agents family photographs going back years. “It almost makes my brain stop working to think about the level of injustice involved here,” her daughter Patricia Huffman told ABC15.
The mother of five, and grandmother of 11, detailed that first night in federal custody, which included being “strip searched three times in front of all these people… It’s just humiliating and degrading.”
ABC15 began to dig into her case of mistaken identity, as her daughter noted that her mother’s fixed income meant hiring a lawyer to fight this was out of the question. The outlet compared a 1999 mugshot of Rozek to the Facebook picture agents used to arrest McCarthy.
“I don’t look like this lady,” she said.
A judge had previously set up an identity hearing for April 9 in federal court for McCarthy (above left) to attempt to prove she was not Rozak.
One day before her scheduled identity hearing, an Arizona federal judge dismissed the case against her and canceled the hearing after admitting that they’d made a mistake in arresting McCarthy.
They revealed that her fingerprints don’t match those on file for Rozak. ABC15 notes that federal agents fingerprinted McCarthy when she was first taken into custody in March. McCarthy said investigators initially told her the prints were a match for Rozak, but prosecutors told the judge the next day they didn’t have anyone available to analyze her prints.
“The U.S. Marshals Service has received confirmation from fingerprint analysis that Ms. Penny McCarthy is not the fugitive Carole Anne Rozak, wanted for an outstanding parole violation warrant in Oklahoma,” the agency said in a statement received by the news station at the time.
When asked how this could have happened, ABC15 reports that the U.S. Marshals Service said a preliminary review determined that agents followed proper procedures in “good-faith reliance on the outstanding warrant” and “regrets any inconvenience caused by the mistaken identification of Ms. McCarthy.”
“We’re sorry that happened. Have a nice day. Really? It’s not right,” McCarthy said in response. “It’s a hell of a system.”
