A “degraded” Royal Caribbean cruise passenger alleges she was subjected to humiliating treatment across three days inside a Florida jail when she was mistakenly arrested after a family vacation in 2022.
Jennifer Heath Box, 50, filed a civil rights lawsuit against the Broward County Sheriff’s Office on Thursday claiming she was wrongfully arrested and detained for 3 days because deputies failed to realize their mistake.
“I have nothing but anger and frustration. You feel completely broken when you’re arrested, because you’re humiliated, you’re degraded,” Heath Box said at a press conference on Thursday. “So it breaks you.”
Heath Box had returned to port in Fort Lauderdale aboard the Harmony of the Seas on Dec. 24, 2022, after a family vacation that made stops in the Bahamas, Jamaica and Haiti.
The trip served as a celebration for her brother, a Georgia police officer who had just completed his cancer treatment.
Heath Box had two hours before her flight back to Houston, Texas where she would celebrate Christmas with her oldest son who was leaving for a three-year deployment to Japan with the Marines.
As she disembarked from the ship, Heath Box scanned her ID triggering an alert at the gate.
“It automatically came up with a warning,” Heath Box said, according to WPLG. “At that point, security surrounded me along with the police, asked me if I was Jennifer Heath and asked me to remove my jewelry.”
“I said, ‘What am I being arrested for?’” Heath Box said. “That’s whenever they said ‘child endangerment.’ They escorted me off the ship in front of everyone.”
The warrant was issued by officials in Harris County, Texas for Jennifer del Carmin Heath, wanted in a felony case involving a 1-year-old and a 3-year-old child.
Besides the same first and middle names, there was little more the two women had in common.
The wanted suspect was 23 years younger than Heath Box, was five inches shorter and had different colored hair, eyes and skin tone.
Heath Box pointed out the multiple discrepancies between her and the warrant, but her photo was attached to the warrant — the reason Sheriff’s Deputy Peter Peraza made the arrest.
Peraza had previously been reinstated to the sheriff’s office after he was acquitted of manslaughter charges in the 2013 shooting death of a man with an air rifle, according to the outlet.
Following his reinstatement, Peraza was stationed to work at the port.
Heath Box said she was humiliated when she arrived at Broward County Jail and was strip-searched, shackled, given prison clothes and issued blankets.
During her intake, a detention deputy had ran her driver’s license but found nothing in the system for the then 49-year-old.
“She came out and she handed the DL to Peter and she said, ‘We ran her DL and we don’t have anything in the system for her,’” Heath Box said. “Peter came back and said, ‘No. It is her. Let me show you. I can prove to you it is her. I will show you the picture.’ Again, that was all he was focused on.’”
Heath Box spent three days in the jail, where she claims she was given a full body cavity search and deputies blasted her cell with death metal music and freezing air.
Heath Box says even though the jail was extremely cold, she was given a thin jail uniform while the guards wore stocking caps, heavy jackets and gloves. She said she and her cellmate slept together back-to-back to keep warm.
She was released from jail when Broward learned of Harris County’s mistake but did not receive an apology and was told that “stuff happens.”
“What I went through shouldn’t happen, and the fact that I’ve spent so long just trying to get my life back together,” Heath Box said.
Heath Box and her attorney, Jared McClain say they aren’t suing Harris County because only one employee made a mistake.
They are going after the sheriff’s office because multiple deputies and later their supervisors refused to acknowledge several obvious discrepancies.
“There were at least 10 differences between the woman on the warrant, Jennifer del Carmen Heath, and the woman standing with me today, Jennifer Heath Box, all of which should have been glaringly obvious to Broward County’s deputies,” said Bobbi Taylor, an attorney from the Institute for Justice.
The Broward County Sheriff’s Office said Peraza had followed the appropriate protocols and an internal review was conducted but no employee misconduct was found.
With Post wires
