some examples
Thursday September 14 10:50 PM ET
SWAT Team Kills 11-Year-Old Boy
By CHRISTINE HANLEY, Associated Press Writer
MODESTO, Calif. (AP) - Authorities said a veteran SWAT team member with a
``star record'' accidentally shot and killed an 11-year-old boy during a
drug raid at his parents' home.
Alberto Sepulveda, a seventh-grader, was shot in the back Wednesday when an
officer accidentally fired his shotgun, Police Chief Roy Wasden said.
Alberto died on the floor of his bedroom.
``From the preliminary investigation, all indications so far is that the
shooting was accidental,'' Wasden said Thursday.
David Hawn, a 21-year department veteran and a SWAT team member for more
than 18 years, was placed on paid leave pending an investigation.
The boy's father, Moises Sepulveda, was arrested and booked on charges of
methamphetamine trafficking. The boy's mother and two young siblings were
also home during the raid.
The Drug Enforcement Agency said the raid had been part of a nine-month
investigation into methamphetamine trafficking and that 14 people had been
arrested Wednesday during separate raids.
Mike Van Winkle, a spokesman for the state Department of Justice, which has
500 drug agents and investigators, said no veterans he spoke with could
recall any other accidental shooting of children
during previous drug raids.
Last year, Hawn was cleared of wrongdoing for misfiring his gun into a
suspect who had already killed himself during a SWAT raid. An internal
investigation concluded an attacking pitbull brushed the
muzzle of Hawn's gun as he and other officers were checking the suspect.
``He has a star record,'' his chief said.
Moises Sepulveda Jr., 14, was on the top bunk bed above his brother when
the SWAT team banged on the door. He said he does not know if his brother
was awake when he left the room.
``My father said to stay calm. Then the front door blew open and they threw
out one of those smoke bombs,'' the teen-ager said, pointing to the brown
scorch mark left on the living room floor by the
canister
``My dad was cuffed and I was cuffed and one of them was stepping on my
neck, pointing a gun down at me and told me not to move,'' he said. ``I
heard another blast and thought it was another smoke
bomb.
``But it turns out they shot my brother.''
Sepulveda Jr., echoing the feelings of neighbors, relatives and other
community members, said he didn't understand why investigators did not try
to enter peacefully.
``We would have opened the door,'' he said. ``My dad isn't the kind of man
who would put his family in jeopardy.''
On March 25, of this year, 13 heavily armed Boston police wearing fatigue outfits smashed into the apartment of a 75-year-old retired minister, the Reverend Accelynne Williams. Williams ran into his bedroom when the raid began, but police smashed down the bedroom door, shoved Williams to the floor and handcuffed him. Williams may have had up to a dozen guns pointed at his head during the scuffle. Minutes later, Williams died of a heart attack. No drugs or guns were found in Williams' apartment. The police had carried out the raid based on a tip from an unidentified informant who said that there were guns and drugs in the building but did not give a specific apartment number. A policewoman simply took the informant's word, did a quick drive-by of the building, got a search warrant and then gave the go-ahead to her fellow officers to charge. An editorial in The Boston Globe later observed: "The Williams tragedy resulted, in part, from the `big score' mentality of the centralized Boston Police Drug Control Unit. Officers were pumped up to seize machine guns in addition to large quantities of cocaine and a `crazy amount of weed', in the words of the informant."
The Boston police commissioner apologized.
The press coverage made the event look like an isolated tragedy in the war on drugs. It was not.
No-knock police raids destroy Americans' right to privacy and safety. People's lives are being ruined or ended as a result of unsubstantiated assertions by anonymous government informants.
As early as 1603, English courts recognized that law officers were obliged to knock and announce their purpose before entering a citizen's home. Early American courts, such as the New York Supreme Court in 1813, adopted similar requirements.
Unfortunately, contemporary law enforcement practice does not reflect the patience or respect for individual rights that the founding fathers had.
Police do not keep statistics on warrants served at the wrong address or of the innocent bystanders killed or maimed in the war on drugs. But a search of newspaper files turns up a litany of law enforcement agencies gone berserk.
At two A.M. on January 25, 1993, police smashed down the door and rushed into the home of Manuel Ramirez, a retired golf course groundskeeper living in Stockton, California. Ramirez awoke, grabbed a pistol and shot and killed one policeman before other officers killed him. The police were raiding the house based on a tip that drugs were on the premises, but they found no drugs.
County Sheriff's Lieutenant Dan Lewis later tried to justify the raid's methods: "Our problem is that a lot of times we're dealing with drug dealers, and their thought processes are not always right from the start. That's when things get real dangerous for us."
Police told reporters the next day that, though the drug raid was a complete failure, they did find $8,500 in cash much of it in $50 and $100 bills, which the police asserted was consistent with drug dealers' cash-handling methods. Maria Ramirez, Manuel's daughter, said that the money was from the family business of selling jewlery at the flea markets. She has receipts to prove it.
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On August 25, 1992, officials from the U.S. Customs Service and the DEA, along with local police, raided the San Diego home of businessman Donald Carlson, setting off a bomb in his backyard (to disorient Carlson), smashing through his front door and shooting him three times after he tried to defend himself with a gun. Police even shot Carlson in the back after he had given up his gun and was lying wounded on his bedroom floor. Amazingly, Carlson survived the raid.
The Customs Service mistakenly believed that there were four machine guns and a cache of narcotics in Carlson's home. Carlson related in congressional testimony in 1993 that even after agents failed to find any drugs, "No one offered me medical assistance while I lay on the floor of my bedroom. Event- ually, paramedics arrived and took me to the hospital. I was shackled and kept in custory under armed guard for several days at the hospital. During that time, I was aware of the hospital personnel referring to me as a criminal and of police officers and agents coming into my room."
The raid was based on a tip from a paid informant named Ron, who later told the Los Angeles Times, that he had never formally identified a specific house to be searched.
Customs officials had Carlson's house under surveillance for many hours before they launched the raid. The agents could easily have arrested Carlson when he arrived home at ten P.M. but instead watched and waited to attack until after midnight, when Carlson was asleep, in order to maximize the surprise. Although they had a search warrant based on the house being a drug storehouse, agents carried out the raid even after it became obvious that Carlson was living a normal life there.
The government finally admitted limited liability for Carlson's medical costs in March 1994, but the chief federal prosecutor, Alan Bersin, simultan- eously hailed the "courageous law enforcement efforts in the area of drug interdiction" involved in the case. "The tragedy for everyone involved is that no one acted other than in good faith," Bersin asserted. "We were deceived by our informant and must accept responsibility for that."
Bersin's statement implies that when federal agents launch a raid on some- one's home based solely on an allegation by a government informant, a "tragedy" occurs only when the informant deceives the agents. The Justice Department has indicated that no federal agents will be prosecuted for their actions before, during or after the raid.
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In March 1992 a police SWAT team in Everett, Washington killed Robin Pratt in a no-knock raid while carrying out an arrest warrant for her husband. (Her husband was later released after the allegations on which the arrest warrant was based turned out to be false.) The Seattle Times summarized the raid:
"Instead of using an apartment key given to them, SWAT members threw a 50- pound battering ram through a sliding glass door that landed near the heads of Pratt's six-year-old daughter and five-year-old niece. As deputy Anthony Aston rounded the corner to the Pratt's bedroom, he encountered Robin Pratt. SWAT members were yelling, `GET DOWN,' and she started to crouch to her knees. She looked up at Aston and said, `Please don't hurt my children'. Aston had his gun pointed at her and fired, shooting her in the neck. According to attorney John Muenster, she was alive another one to two minutes but could not speak because her throat had been destroyed by the bullet. She was then handcuffed, lying facedown."
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In 1991 Garland, Texas police dressed in black and wearing ski masks burst into a mobile home, waving guns. They kicked down the door of a bedroom that Kennety Baulch shared with his 17-month-old son. The police found Baulch holding an object in his hand. A policeman shot and killed Baulch. The object turned out to be an ashtray. The police say Baulch was advancing on them. The subsequent lawsuit contends he was shot in the BACK.
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In 1989 Titusville, Florida policemen conducted a nighttime no-knock drug raid on the home of a 58-year-old painter, Charles DiGristine. The raid began as the police set off a concussion grenade and smashed through DiGristine's front door. When DiGristine's wife screamed, he hurried to his bedroom to get a pistol. A policeman dressed in dark clothing and a black mask crashed into his bedroom, gunfire was exchanged and the officer was killed. The local government prosecuted DiGristine for first-degree murder, but a jury acquitted him. (The police believed -- based on bogus information from an anonymous informant -- that the DiGristine home was a center for heavily armed drug dealers. The only drug they found in the raid was a small amount of marijuana owned by DiGristine's 16-year-old son.)
During the early afternoon of September 29, 1999, 13 SWAT team members stormed the upstairs apartment at 3738 high Street in Denver, Colorado, looking for drugs. They were executing a so-called "no-knock" raid, one of about 200 such warrants issued by the Denver PD last year. In such raids, the SWAT team simply breaks down the suspect's door, unannounced. Ismael Mena, 45, the occupant of the apartment, worked the night shift at the local Coca-Cola bottling plant and normally slept during the day.
After breaking open the front door and entering the apartment, the SWAT team officers found the door to Mena's room latched, and kicked it in. According to the officers, they found Mena, armed with an 8-shot .22 revolver, standing on his bed. Officers screamed "police!" and "drop the gun!" repeatedly, at which point, they attest, Mena started to put the gun down, asking, "policia?" At that moment, Sgt. Anthony Iacovetta emerged from behind a wall and moved to disarm Mena, at which point Mena once again raised the gun at police.
Colorado law allows police to use deadly force if they believe there is imminent danger to their lives; officer Kenneth Overman, standing at the top of the stairs facing Mena's bedroom door, opened fire, followed by officer Mark Haney. Mena allegedly fell back into a sitting position and, bleeding from head and chest wounds, lifted his gun again and fired at the police, precipitating more gunfire. Mena was hit by eight bullets in all.
No drugs were found on Mena's person or in his apartment. But the primary controversy in this case is not the conduct of the police during the raid, although protesters and commentators have certainly challenged that conduct. The issue, according to Denver officials, is that the day following the raid, SWAT team officers learned they had raided the wrong residence -- they should have gone next door, to 3742 High Street.
Officer Joseph Bini, the five-year veteran of the Denver police department who wrote and applied for the warrant to raid Mena's apartment, is currently facing a felonious charge of first-degree perjury for his alleged fabrication of evidence to obtain the no-knock warrant. He faces a sentence of two to six years.
Jefferson County District Attorney Dave Thomas, was appointed as special prosecutor on December 2nd, and spent two months investigating the Mena incident before officially charging Bini on February 5th. Thomas exculpated the SWAT officers, saying they were justified in killing Mena during the raid because he brandished a gun at them, but his investigation revealed that the warrant to raid Mena's house was fraudulently obtained. "At the heart of the whole incident is the search warrant," Thomas said. "It relates to an individual officer, Joseph Bini, making what we allege are false statements under oath, knowing they were false."
Thomas charges that Bini lied about the following things: That he received information that Mena's apartment was a crack house; that he saw (in person) his informant go to the house; that the informant went into the apartment with a suspect; and that drugs were bought at the apartment. Because Bini had not personally observed what he attested to in the warrant, Bini used the wrong address on the search warrant, apparently because he didn't know any better. His court date is Feb. 18.
"They felt extraordinarily threatened and felt very afraid of being shot," Thomas said in exonerating the SWAT officers. Denver Mayor Wellington Webb insisted that the SWAT team acted properly, and commented that, "if Mena did not have a gun or point it at police officers, he'd be alive today." Nonetheless, Mayor Webb ordered a review of the process by which search warrants are granted. He requested that Police Chief Tom Sanchez and Denver DA Bill Ritter study the criteria for issuing search warrants, the process by which requests for no-knock warrants are reviewed, and the frequency and effectiveness of no-knock warrants. The report is due in two months.
, Art
