Warrant officers stormed a home overnight waking up a family and nearly hitting their dog with a gunshot.
Bienvenido Gutierrez said he and his fiancé, Nina Castro, heard noises coming from the back of their row home on Ashmead Street in the Germantown neighborhood of Philadelphia around 12:30 a.m.
Gutierrez told NBC10’s Jesse Gary that they then heard a knock on the front door and he let in about a half dozen First Judicial Warrant Unit officers who said they were looking for Gutierrez’s brother Joshua Gutierrez.
Gutierrez said he tried to explain to the officers that his brother moved out six years ago. He also said he warned the officers that there were two dogs in the home, including one pit bull sleeping in the same room as Gutierrez’s children -- ages 7, 2, and 10 months.
Despite the warnings, Gutierrez said that the officers climbed the stairs guns drawn.
"Their whole demeanor was that they were gonna shoot to kill," said Gutierrez. "They wanted to shoot something."
Gutierrez said his dog, named Suzzie, barked once prompting one of the officers to fire a single shot.
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Luckily, no one was shot.
"I think if they just would have let me grab my dog and grab my kids there would have been no shots fired," Gutierrez told NBC10 as his family stood outside their home around 3 in the morning.
It wasn’t clear why the officers were looking for Gutierrez’s brother.
Warrant Unit Commander Tom Press told NBC10 that an investigation into the incident was underway Monday morning. Press said that his unit had credible information that Joshua Gutierrez was living in the home.
A call to the the Philadelphia Court System wasn’t returned overnight.
