Tennessee grandmother was arrested at gunpoint while babysitting 4 children. Now she says an AI match led police to the wrong woman

A normal afternoon of babysitting turned into a nightmare for a Tennessee grandmother after she was arrested at gunpoint over a bank theft she says she had nothing to do with. The case has now turned into a federal lawsuit over how police used facial recognition technology during the investigation.

According to Fox News, 50-year-old Angela Lipps was watching her neighbor’s four young children at a home in Elizabethton, Tennessee, when U.S. Marshals suddenly surrounded the property. Lipps was detained at gunpoint after investigators allegedly connected her to a bank theft investigation in North Dakota, even though she had never been to the state.

The legal fight picked up on Sept. 15, when Lipps filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against the City of Fargo and several law enforcement officers. The complaint says the original investigation began between April and May 2025, after an unknown person allegedly used stolen identities and fake identification cards to commit bank fraud in Fargo and West Fargo.

The lawsuit says police never verified the AI match

Investigators eventually took a photograph from one of the fraudulent IDs and ran it through Clearview AI, a facial recognition platform used by law enforcement.

The technology was supposed to provide an investigative lead, but according to Lipps’ lawsuit, authorities treated the match as if it had identified the suspect.

The complaint alleges that Fargo Police Detective Lucas Heck did not independently verify the facial recognition match before seeking an arrest warrant. It also claims there were obvious physical differences between Lipps and the woman investigators were looking for.

According to the lawsuit, those differences included the suspect’s build, and Lipps has a distinctive neck tattoo that the suspect reportedly did not have.

None of that stopped the arrest.

In July 2025, U.S. Marshals arrested Lipps at the Tennessee home where she was babysitting. She spent 108 days in a Tennessee county jail while waiting to be extradited to North Dakota.

Once she arrived there, Lipps spent another two months in a maximum-security facility under a $100,000 bond.

She was facing four felony counts of grand theft and four counts of unauthorized use of personal identifying information. The charges were eventually dismissed in December 2025 after Lipps’ attorney provided bank records showing that she was in Tennessee when the alleged thefts took place.

By then, Lipps says the arrest had already turned her life upside down.

The lawsuit states that she lost her home, vehicle and most of her personal belongings during the roughly six months she was incarcerated and away from her normal life.

Her attorney, Eric Rice, said the family is seeking $10 million in damages. The lawsuit accuses the defendants of false arrest, malicious prosecution and violations of Lipps’ constitutional rights.

Fargo officials have responded

The case has also drawn attention from civil liberties advocates concerned about the use of facial recognition in criminal investigations. Nate Freed-Wessler, deputy director of the American Civil Liberties Union, warned about the consequences of relying on flawed facial recognition systems.

Fargo Mayor Tim Mahoney has also apologized for what he called an “investigative mistake.”

Now, Lipps’ lawsuit is putting the investigation under another kind of scrutiny: how much trust should police place in an AI-generated facial recognition match before taking away someone’s freedom?