FARGO, N.D. – Fargo Police will hold a press conference on the Angela Lipps case at noon on Tuesday, March 24.
It will be carried live on WDAY Radio.
The grandmother from Elizabethton, Tennessee says U.S. Marshals arrested her at gunpoint on July 14, 2025, while she was babysitting four children. She said investigators used facial recognition software to match her to surveillance footage from a Fargo bank fraud case.
Lipps said she was held in a Tennessee county jail for 108 days with no bail before being transported to North Dakota. After her attorney pulled bank records showing she was in Tennessee at the time of the alleged crimes.
Despite charges being dropped by the Cass County State’s Attorney’s Office, Fargo Police Chief David Zibolski said in an exclusive interview with Flag Family Media he doesn’t know definitively what, if any, involvement Angela Lipps had in a the bank fraud investigation.
Zibolski said he doesn’t believe mistakes were made by his department in the case.
“That information requires additional investigative steps. That’s really best practice. I can’t just rely on that solely and that wasn’t the sole reason in which this case was put together,” Zibolski said in regards to his department using artificial intelligence.
The Fargo City Commission met in executive session on March 16 to receive advice from the city attorney on possible civil or criminal litigation involving Lipps. They discussed guidance on the legal risks, strengths, and weaknesses of an action of a public entity which, if held in public, would have an adverse fiscal effect on the entity in regards to a legal case involving Lipps.
