Maybe because it's just as dangerous to the Federal Agents as it is to the Home Owners?
Using SWAT officers to storm into homes to execute search warrants has led time and again to avoidable deaths, gruesome injuries and costly legal settlements.
www.nytimes.com
In December, a jury in Corpus Christi, Tex., acquitted a 48-year-old man who spent 664 days in jail after being charged with attempted capital murder for wounding three SWAT officers during a no-knock raid that targeted his nephew. The jury concluded that the man, Ray Rosas, did not know whom he was firing at through a blinded window.
The target was a single-story ranch-style house about 50 yards off Lakeview Heights Circle. Not even four hours earlier, three informants had bought $50 worth of methamphetamine in the front yard. That was enough to persuade the county’s chief magistrate to approve a no-knock search warrant authorizing the SWAT operators to storm the house without warning.
The point man on the entry team found the side door locked, and nodded to Deputy Jason Stribling, who took two swings with the metal battering ram. As the door splintered near the deadbolt, he yelled, “Sheriff’s department, search warrant!” Another deputy, Charles Long, had already pulled the pin on the flash-bang. He placed his left hand on Deputy Stribling’s back for stability, peered quickly into the dark and tossed the armed explosive about three feet inside the door.
It landed in a portable playpen.
When the flash-bang detonated with a concussive boom, a blinding white light filled the room. The entry team rumbled in, screaming for the occupants to get to the ground. Deputy Stribling peered into the playpen with a flashlight and found 19-month-old Bounkham Phonesavanh.
Bounkham Phonesavanh, who was known as Baby Bou Bou, in the hospital with injuries sustained from the flash-bang grenade. via Georgia Bureau of Investigation
Deputy Stribling waved off Deputy Long, who had lobbed the grenade. “Charlie, go away, you don’t need to see this,” he said.
The child, known affectionately as Bou Bou, had a long laceration and burns across his chest, exposing his ribs, and another gash between his upper lip and nose. His round, cherubic face was bloodied and blistered, spackled with shrapnel and soot. The heat had singed away much of his pillow and dissolved the mesh side of the playpen.
With battering rams and flash-bang grenades, SWAT teams fuel the risk of violence as they forcibly enter suspects’ homes. Five months and 85 miles apart, two cases took starkly divergent legal paths.
www.nytimes.com
When the first flash-bang detonated outside the wrong end of the trailer, it did not immediately awaken the couple.
Then came a crashing thud at the door. “Hank, what was that?” Ms. White asked.
“Who is it?” Mr. Magee shouted, according to Ms. White. “Who’s there?” No answer, then another thud at the door.
Mr. Magee scrambled into his bedroom and retrieved an AR-10 semiautomatic rifle from a closet. As he re-entered the living room, the front door burst open, followed by a deafening explosion. Ms. White screamed as a dark figure crossed the threshold.
“I thought we were being robbed,” she said. “It was my worst fear, that it was like on TV with people kicking in the door and coming in.”
Mr. Magee raised the rifle and fired several times toward the door, just above Ms. White on the couch. She jumped up and dashed toward him, brushing her neck against the steaming barrel, then dropped to the floor and crawled into the bedroom.
Only then, she said, did she hear the announcement: “Burleson County Sheriff’s Office! Come out with your hands in the air.”
Mr. Magee dropped the rifle and complied. Ms. White followed him out the door, stepping over a broad-shouldered body as blood pooled on the wooden flooring. Although wearing body armor, Adam Sowders had been struck in the head.
The couple were thrown to the ground, handcuffed behind their backs and placed in separate squad cars. While waiting for what seemed like hours, Ms. White felt her baby kick for the first time, as if to signal that she was O.K.
At the county jail, Mr. Magee spoke voluntarily to a Texas Ranger, insisting that he had not heard the deputies announce themselves and that he had fired in self-defense when he saw someone bursting through the door. It did not matter. At the end of Ms. White’s interview, an investigator explained that Mr. Magee would be charged with killing a peace officer, a capital crime carrying a possible death sentence.
