‘Can you imagine being taken away at gunpoint?’ Grandmother sues for $10M after AI mistake left her jailed for months

A facial recognition match pulled from a fake ID put a Tennessee grandmother in a North Dakota jail cell for nearly six months. Angela Lipps is now suing the City of Fargo and Detective Lucas Heck for $10 million, according to ABC. Prosecutors dismissed every charge against her.

Lipps, 50, was arrested at gunpoint by a U.S. Marshals task force in July 2025 while she was babysitting her neighbor’s children in Elizabethton, Tennessee. She faced eight felony counts tied to a run of bank frauds in a state she says she has never visited. The most serious carried up to 10 years.

“Can you imagine being taken away at gunpoint, held in detention, taken from your family?” her attorney, Eric Rice, told ABC while discussing the $10 million lawsuit.

Nobody ever ran the actual bank footage through the system

The chain started with West Fargo police, who ran a photograph from the suspect’s fake ID through Clearview AI, a facial recognition system built on images scraped from the internet. The software returned Lipps as a possible match. West Fargo passed that lead along to Fargo detectives.

Fargo detectives assumed West Fargo had also submitted the bank surveillance photos to North Dakota’s state intelligence center, the certified hub Fargo is authorized to use. The department never sent its own images, as the detectives believed that step was already covered. The photos showing the real perpetrator went unchecked.

The complaint alleges Heck pressed ahead with charges as he knew Lipps lived in Tennessee, had never been to North Dakota, and did not match the physical description of the woman on surveillance video. However, West Fargo police did not consider the facial recognition match strong enough to charge anyone.

Facial recognition results are meant to work as investigative leads that require independent corroboration before an arrest, according to the complaint. Police forces have leaned harder on the technology in recent years, including AI systems that flagged an online threat within minutes.

Lipps was held at the Cass County Jail on a $100,000 bond she could not pay, and she remained in custody through Thanksgiving and her 50th birthday. The lawsuit says jail staff denied her access to her dentures and medication for extended periods.

Prosecutors dismissed the charges on Christmas Eve, as her attorney had produced bank records placing her in Tennessee when the thefts occurred. She walked out that night with four cents and no winter coat in temperatures near 10 degrees.

Then-chief Dave Zibolski acknowledged investigative errors at a press conference in March and prohibited the department from using West Fargo’s facial recognition system. Fargo now requires supervisory approval for submissions and tracks every inquiry for monthly review. However, the department stopped short of a direct apology.

Wrongful arrests traced to facial recognition have surfaced in Detroit and Louisiana, where detectives treated a computer generated candidate as proof of identity. A Florida man filed his own federal suit this year after a database flagged him for a crime committed 300 miles from his home. Those charges were dropped as well.

Lipps has requested a jury trial and is seeking punitive damages against Heck on top of the $10 million, and the city has not filed a response to the complaint.