A Tennessee grandmother spent five months behind bars after police used a facial recognition hit that turned out to be wrong.
Angela Lipps, 50, says the mistake wrecked her life. She lost her home, her car and even her dog after she was arrested and hauled into a case she says had nothing to do with her.
Now she is living with neighbors and weighing legal action against the department that put her there.
The case started with a bank fraud investigation in North Dakota. Investigators were trying to identify a suspect linked to a fake ID, so they ran an image through a facial recognition program that uses artificial intelligence. The software kicked back Lipps as a possible match, and that tip made its way to Fargo police.
That is where the case started to go off the rails. Former Fargo Police Chief Dave Zibolski later admitted detectives wrongly assumed the photo from the fake ID had been matched up with surveillance images from the crimes. It had not.
“They forwarded that information to our detectives, who then assumed wrongly that they had also sent in the surveillance photos with that photo ID,” Zibolski said. “As you can imagine, the photo on the fake ID that I use doesn’t necessarily mean that I am the person that’s in the fake ID.”
Police also skipped a basic step that might have blown up the case before it ever got to a warrant. Fargo detectives did not send the surveillance images through the approved state-run facial recognition hub, even though that system existed for exactly that reason.
“We should have done that,” Zibolski admitted.
Instead, the case kept moving. Lipps was arrested at gunpoint in Tennessee in July 2025 while she was babysitting four children.
She was then locked up in a county jail for 108 days without bail before she was extradited to Cass County, North Dakota, on felony charges that included theft and unauthorized use of personal identifying information.
Lipps spent a total of five months in jail before she finally got out. She was released only after she found an attorney who pulled bank records showing she was in Tennessee at the times police claimed she was committing crimes in Fargo. Those records showed she was at a local gas station, ordering a pizza and using CashApp.
That evidence punched a hole right through the case. The charges were dismissed on Christmas Eve, with Fargo detectives, the state’s attorney and a local judge agreeing to dismiss them without prejudice while the investigation continued.
Even then, the public apology never really came. Zibolski admitted there were mistakes, but he stopped short of fully clearing Lipps or simply saying police got it wrong.
He also seemed to leave the door open to the idea that she could somehow still be tied to the fraud network.
“We do not know definitively who’s involved and who’s not at this juncture,” he said. “We’re going to have to whittle through all of this kind of vast network of people and who’s involved.”
That line did not do much for a woman who had already spent months in jail.
Zibolski also shifted some of the blame to the West Fargo Police Department. He said West Fargo bought and used the facial recognition program without notifying Fargo police’s top brass.
West Fargo, for its part, said it shared information with Fargo but did not send charges against Lipps to the Cass County State’s Attorney’s Office.
“The facial recognition software identified a potential suspect with similar features to Angela Lipps,” West Fargo Chief Pete Nielsen said.
“That intelligence information was then shared with the Fargo Police Department, at their request, in relation to their open cases.”
A spokesperson for the department added that detectives did not have enough evidence to charge any person of interest in the West Fargo incident. That only made the Fargo arrest look worse.
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The timeline around Lipps’ arrest has created another mess. Zibolski claimed Fargo police did not learn she was in custody until December 5. But Cass County Sheriff Jesse Jahner said Fargo police may have known much earlier, and emails later obtained by local news outlets suggested Fargo police could have known about the arrest back in July.
That matters because Lipps sat behind bars for months before Fargo police finally interviewed her in December.
When Zibolski was asked how that could happen, he blamed process. He said there was no easy system to notify Fargo investigators if someone arrested on one of their felony warrants was already in custody. He said the department is now looking at ways to improve that, including a daily review of jail booking rosters.
Police also said they are now making changes to how facial recognition gets used. Zibolski said the West Fargo program involved in the case has been prohibited from use and that officers will receive training on how to understand facial recognition returns and submissions.
He said the department has also put temporary restrictions in place, including a ban on facial recognition information coming from other departments.
“What I can tell you, from what I know right now, is that the persons involved are also very upset by this, because they pride themselves on their thoroughness,” he said.
“No one wants to see someone detained, arrested unnecessarily,” Zibolski said. “We’re happy to acknowledge when we make errors, and we’ve made a few in this case for sure, but also that we are willing to address those.”
He went on to say the department certainly apologized for any damage done to trust in the community. Fargo Mayor Tim Mahoney tried to strike a similar tone.
“Once our department knew about her arrest, they immediately addressed it,” Mahoney said. “We will continue to look at our process.”
Lipps’ lawyers were not buying the cleanup language. In a statement, they said the news conference only confirmed what they had already found.
“It appears that the Fargo Police Department did not undertake basic investigative efforts before causing a warrant and charges to issue for Angela Lipps,” the attorneys said.
“Officers knew that Angela was a Tennessee resident and we have seen no investigation by officers to determine whether she traveled to or was in North Dakota at the time of the bank thefts.”
“Instead, an officer used AI facial recognition as a shortcut for basic investigation, resulting in an innocent woman being detained and transported halfway across the country to answer for charges that she has nothing to do with.”
Lipps has since become the face of a case that blew up far beyond North Dakota. Her story drew national headlines and led to a GoFundMe page that has raised tens of thousands of dollars as she tries to piece her life back together.
“I have no car, no money and no way to start over on my own,” she wrote. “I have always been an independent woman. I cannot start life again with nothing.”
I really hope she ends up owning Fargo when this is over. There is no excuse for that kind of shoddy police work. Period.