Steve Tuppeny was in the garage of his Middletown home having a smoke at 6:15 a.m., his wife and daughter asleep inside, when the Wilmington SWAT officers made their move.

Dressed in black, several officers rushed Tuppeny, ordered him to lie face down on the ground and handcuffed him. Other SWAT officers smashed the storm door in the front of the Tuppenys’ two-story colonial-style home, then used a battering ram to break through the red front door.

Jennifer Tuppeny, a teacher at Marbrook Elementary School near Prices Corner, said she was asleep upstairs when officers threw open the door to her darkened bedroom and ordered her at gunpoint to get up.

The couple’s 8-year-old daughter was awakened out of a “dead sleep” by “men dressed in black with guns shining flashlights in her face,” Jennifer Tuppeny said.

Police carried out the early morning raid in search of a man whom they called a “person of interest” in a homicide. The man, in a Sept. 19 court appearance, had said he lived at the Tuppenys’ address in the 100 block of Willow Grove Mill Drive. Police had a search warrant authorizing them to obtain a DNA sample.

The man was located later Thursday in Smyrna, was given a DNA swab and released, said Wilmington police spokesman Officer Mark Ivey. Police did not release his name, and Ivey said late Thursday afternoon that the man is neither a defendant nor a suspect....