The morning of June 29, 2010, began much like any other at FAR Computers in Ensley.

Frank Ranelli, who has owned the computer repair business for more than two decades, was doing some paperwork in his windowless office when he heard loud banging on the front door.

When he answered it, he was unaware that about 20 officers with the Homewood and Mountain Brook police departments were surrounding his store, some wearing flak jackets and carrying assault rifles.

Within moments, a Homewood police sergeant had declared a room full of customers' computers, merchandise and other items "stolen goods," Ranelli recalled. He ordered his officers to "arrest them all," according to Ranelli, who was cuffed and taken to the Homewood jail along with two of his shop employees.

The police proceeded to confiscate more than 130 computers - most of which were customers' units waiting to be repaired, though some were for sale - as well as the company's business servers and workstations and even receipts and checkbooks.

The officers were acting on a tip from an informant who claimed that FAR Computers was knowingly purchasing electronics that had been stolen from homes in Homewood, according to court documents.

Nothing ever came of the case. The single charge of receiving stolen goods was dismissed after Ranelli demonstrated that he had followed proper protocol in purchasing the sole laptop computer he was accused of receiving illegally.

Yet none of the property seized by police that summer morning more than seven years ago has been returned to him.

"Here I was, a man, owned this business, been coming to work every day like a good old guy for 23 years, and I show up at work that morning - I was in here doing my books from the day before - and the police just f***ed my life," he said.

Sgt. John Carr, a Homewood Police spokesman, said Wednesday that the department "really can't comment on any of that stuff in regards to the property because it's tied up in a civil lawsuit right now."

Ranelli has been trying since shortly after the raid to recover the items the officers took from his business and is currently in a protracted legal battle to force Homewood Police to return them. The latest in a years-long series of related court dates is scheduled for next summer.

'Really hard to fight'

The raid on Ranelli's business was not an isolated incident. It is one of many similar cases that have taken place in Alabama and across the U.S. in recent years, according to experts like Joseph Tully, a California criminal lawyer with relevant experience and knowledge.

Long used in major criminal busts as a means to confiscate money and possessions obtained by illegal means, civil asset forfeiture impacts thousands of Americans each year and has become the subject of intense national and local scrutiny over the past decade.

This article is the latest in a series by Reckon by Al.com For more from Reckon, follow us on Facebook.

But recovery of stolen property is a common police tool that has been used for generations without much in the way of widespread public outcry. Ranelli says that his case demonstrates the potential dangers of an overhanded approach to stolen property recovery.

The ability of law enforcement agencies to use such tactics to take people's assets and property almost at will "lends itself to abuse," Tully, who describes cases like Ranelli's as "theft," said.

"It's really hard to fight the system. If it was a private citizen who stole your things, you could go get your things, or in the olden days you could get your shotgun and pay the thief a visit and say, 'give me my stuff back.' But you can't do that in this case because it's the police."

In fiscal year 2016, law enforcement agencies in Alabama seized more than $2.2 million worth of "assets that represent the proceeds of, or were used to facilitate federal crimes," according to its annual report to Congress. In fiscal 2014, the total value of such assets seized by law enforcement in the state was more than $4.9 million.

That recent drop is the local manifestation of a nationwide reduction in the use of civil asset forfeiture as public awareness and outcry over its widespread use has grown in recent years, according to experts.

The tactic is still regularly deployed, impacting dozens of Alabamians each year. But the tide is turning. Fourteen states, from New Mexico to Connecticut, have passed laws in recent years to stop police from seizing property absent a criminal conviction.

"The pendulum is starting to swing but I wouldn't say that it has been swinging back the other way for too long," Tully said. "State and local governments are starting to act ... Law enforcement officers are coming around a bit and there's a little bit of a curb in police doing whatever they want."

And on Tuesday, U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions issued a memo directing a deputy to establish a unit aimed at ensuring there are no abuses of a federal policy reinstated by Sessions in July to help state and local law enforcement agencies seize accused criminals' property.

Alabama's laws, however, still provide the state's citizens with few protections from the practices, earning the state a "D- for its civil asset forfeiture laws" in a November 2015 report by the Institute for Justice, a Virginia nonprofit advocacy law firm.

Alabama laws stack the deck against victims of asset forfeiture by establishing a "low bar to forfeit" and not requiring a conviction to do so; offering "limited protections for innocent third-party property owners"; and letting "100% of forfeiture proceeds go to law enforcement," the report stated.

The report also found that Alabama law enforcement agencies seized more than $75 million worth of assets between 2000 and 2013.

"Civil asset forfeiture laws turn the notion of innocent until proven guilty on its head," Shay Farley, the Southern Poverty Law Center's Alabama policy counsel, said via email. "By alleging that property was involved in a certain crime, law enforcement can seize that property from an individual or business owner - even without making an arrest."

House arrest

Cherie Marceaux no longer lives in Alabama. She says she moved to Tennessee in part because she is too afraid of the law enforcement environment in Alabama after what happened to her 12 years ago.

On Aug. 17, 2005, a confidential informant for the Mobile County Sheriff's Office purchased about five pounds of marijuana from Marceaux's husband David Young and another man, according to court records. The transaction took them to multiple adjoining locations in a forested area of Mobile County a few miles west of the Mobile Regional Airport, including a house owned by Marceaux.

The following day, deputies with the sheriff's office searched the house, where they found about a half-pound of marijuana. Marceaux was arrested on Sept. 15, 2005, and charged with one count each of possessing and receiving a controlled substance; possessing drug paraphernalia; and possessing a controlled substance.

"They arrested me and tried to charge me with crap. They claimed to have found marijuana in my house and I know that was a lie," Marceaux said via telephone.

She ultimately pleaded guilty to the possession charge and the other two charges were dropped. She was sentenced to serve a year of probation and to pay a $250 fine. The disposition of her case demonstrated that she was not criminally liable for any drug dealing that took place in her house.

But the sheriff's office also seized her home and a number of her possessions in the course of their investigation, alleging that they were either purchased with ill-gotten funds or used in the commission of a crime.

"They broke into my house and took my horse trailer and didn't give it back," Marceaux said.

"They stole my daughter's - at the time she was just a little girl maybe six, seven years old - they stole her money that she had in the top drawer of her dresser in a piggy bank, $70 ... They took $4,000 I had been saving."

And they seized the house she owned and the more than 25 acres of land it sits on, none of which was ever returned, nor was her money or other items. Marceaux lost her home and thousands of dollars, all without being convicted of anything more serious than marijuana possession.

Lori Myles, a spokeswoman for the Mobile County Sheriff's Office, said Tuesday that though Marceaux was only convicted of the one crime, there were other factors at play in her case.

"We certainly aren't going to say whether we think it's fair or not," she said when asked whether Marceaux deserved to lose her house. "She may have only been convicted of that, but there were other things found in the house."

Myles added that because it ended up being a federal drug case, the sheriff's office was not in charge of what seizures were made.

"We have to follow whatever the federal guidelines are," Myles said Tuesday.

'An evil taint'

Though civil asset forfeiture has become a much more commonly used police tactic in the United States over the past two decades, its roots are centuries old.

"It goes back to old medieval law," Norman Pattis, a Connecticut criminal defense and civil rights attorney with experience representing victims of civil asset forfeiture, said. "These are what's known as 'in rem proceedings,' and in late medieval and early modern law, not only the person who struck you would be punished but also the stick they struck you with would be destroyed, as if it were cloaked in an evil taint."

The legal foundation on which asset forfeiture rests may date back to the days of lords and peasants, but the current law enforcement paradigm in the U.S. has created new incentives for police departments, sheriff's offices and drug task forces to seize and keep as many assets as possible.

In a time of increasingly tight budgets for many law enforcement agencies, seizing property offers an opportunity for them to increase revenue without politicians having to raise taxes or divert funding from other programs.

And the federal government often gets a cut of forfeited assets, as local law enforcement frequently partners with federal agencies on investigations that result in assets being seized. The proceeds are split via an arrangement with the Department of Justice known as "equitable sharing."

Between 2000 and 2013, the DOJ received more than $5.6 million - or $400,500 per year - from Alabama law enforcement agencies via the program, according to the 2015 Institute for Justice report.

"In a time when public finances are in trouble and states are having a hard time funding law enforcement, asset forfeiture will be looked at as an alternate form of law enforcement financing," Pattis said.

Farley called on legislators to take steps to reign in the controversial practice.

"[I]t's especially troubling that current law does not require law enforcement to account for the property they take or how they spend the proceeds," she said via email. "Our elected officials must take steps to adequately protect the property interests and due process rights of Alabamians."

The day the music died

Rick Hightower was a student at the University of Alabama at Birmingham when he had his experience with police seizures. It was an experience that he says destroyed the trust he once had in law enforcement.

More than that, it also resulted in his losing tens of thousands of dollars worth of personal property that he has never recovered.

Rick Hightower poses with his horn collection. Police seized the instruments from his home in 2008 and have yet to return any of them.

On April 13, 2008, he was arrested and initially charged with lewd behavior after police said he was caught exposing himself at Samford University in Birmingham, according to court filings. Hightower, who has a fairly extensive rap sheet, was ultimately convicted of indecent exposure and resisting arrest in connection with that incident.

Five days after his arrest, officers with the Homewood and UAB police departments raided Hightower's apartment, executing a warrant to search for files, cameras and any other evidence related to the incident at Samford.

They also decided to seize "a large amount of property believed to be stolen," including "musical instruments, electronics and other items," according to a UAB Police Department report on the search.

A Homewood Police Department filing details dozens of seized items, including wires, headphones, ten remote controls, a "box containing misc. items from kitchen," CD cases, a flat-screen TV, "collector post cards," knives, bicycles, "one book, 'Screw the Roses, Give Me the Thorns,'" drumsticks and shirts.

"The horns were the bulk of [the value] because some of them were extremely rare, museum-quality rare," Hightower estimated in an August interview with AL.com. "A conservative estimate with all the horns and the CDs and everything is probably in the neighborhood of $100,000 to $200,000."

One of the instruments seized from Hightower's apartment that day was an English horn estimated by police to be worth $5,000, and two cases for the horn. The words "USA Department of Music" were written on both cases.

UAB Police confirmed with the University of South Alabama's music department that the instrument had been stolen "several years" before it was seized from Hightower's home.

As such, Hightower was charged with receiving stolen property. He was never charged with stealing any of the other items that were seized from his apartment, and was not convicted of stealing the English horn, as he provided a receipt that showed that he had purchased the item from a thrift store.

And yet the Homewood Police Department - which stored and ostensibly continues to store the items seized in the raid - did not return the horn or any other items to Hightower. More than nine years later, he has yet to even lay eyes on any of the possessions that were taken from him.

"I had warrant sheets from when they took everything and all my stuff was well-documented, all the serial numbers were recorded on paper and everything. I was actually pleased with that," Hightower said. "So there was never a doubt in my mind that I would be getting all my stuff back once I was exonerated."

That has not been the case. Over the ensuing years, Hightower has filed complaints, repeatedly contacted the Homewood Police Department and pursued other avenues in hopes of eventually getting his possessions back, all to no avail.

Carr said that "the Hightower case [is] tied up in a civil lawsuit with us," so the department is unable to comment on it.

Hightower said the experience has had long-lasting negative impacts on him.

"It completely derailed my life and any momentum I had in life was erased. And every horn I had been collecting since junior high is now gone," he said.

"This experience has totally destroyed any trust I had in police ... I don't know what to think anymore. Now when I hear a horror story involving the police I assume that they're the ones at fault."

Updated on Oct. 18 at 2:17 pm with response from Homewood Police.

Updated on Oct. 24 at 5:25 pm with additional information from Homewood Police:

Six days after the Homewood Police Department responded with no comment, the department released a press statement. Homewood police say they returned 14 of the more than 100 computers seized from Ranelli's repair shop to the original owners during an unspecified period from 2010 to 2012.

In addition, the department also stated that its lawyers demanded in July 2013 that Ranelli collect the property its officers seized from his business in June 2010. Ranelli said the department only made the offer in response to a lawsuit he filed in April 2013 against the department asking that he be awarded damages to make up for the value of the computers because their value had fallen since their seizure in 2010. That lawsuit has yet to be resolved.