Posted on 10/30/2019 12:11:07 PM PDT by Hojczyk
When they were finished, it looked as though the Greenwood Village, Colo., police had blasted rockets through the house.
Projectiles were still lodged in the walls. Glass and wooden paneling crumbled on the ground below the gaping holes, and inside, the family’s belongings and furniture appeared thrashed in a heap of insulation and drywall. Leo Lech, who rented the home to his son, thought it looked like al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden’s compound after the raid that killed him.
But now it was just a neighborhood crime scene, the suburban home where an armed Walmart shoplifting suspect randomly barricaded himself after fleeing the store on a June afternoon in 2015. For 19 hours, the suspect holed up in a bathroom as a SWAT team fired gas munition and 40-millimeter rounds through the windows, drove an armored vehicle through the doors, tossed flash-bang grenades inside and used explosives to blow out the walls.
The suspect was captured alive, but the home was utterly destroyed, eventually condemned to be demolished by the City of Greenwood Village.
The suspect, Robert Jonathan Seacat, had stolen a shirt and a couple of belts from a Walmart in neighboring Aurora, Colo., and then fled in a Lexus, according to a police affidavit.
(Excerpt) Read more at msn.com ...
All for a shirt and a couple of belts. Wonder what they would have done if he’d killed someone? Blown up the entire neighborhood??
We will hunt you down if you shoplift.
Well.....shesh!
I hope they found the 30 kids kidnapped from the local daycare. I can only assume THAT was needed for something that excessive?
I dont even think the Marines this much noise getting that ISIS dude!
I’m not sure what would be fair under this scenario. All I know is I would probably lose it if it happened to me and the courts gave me the middle finger.
That is total BS. They destroyed hundreds of thousands of dollars in property for what? $20 shop lifted...
The crime should warrant the destruction.
The King’s Men are exempt from property damage compensation.
I’m against high speed pursuit for much the same reasons. The risk to pedestrians to satisfy the hormone rush of a cop, isnt worth it. Especially now with all the tech available to just get the perp later when emotions have calmed.
Well, we know this wont happen in lefty CA. The cops here might even give the shoplifter an Amazon gift card and a house, with a full pardon by our leftard gvernor.
Wasn’t Philadelphia responsible for burning a lot of houses in the process of their official duties? I seem to recall something about that.
They wanted to play with their “toys” and destroyed a man’s property in the process, hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage.
Just posting a few officers by the house to capture the shoplifter(!) when he eventually came out would have sufficed.
The homeowner needs to be made whole. His property was destroyed under color of governmental authority for no good reason. The constitution itself says he needs restitution.
So, how does anyone “rule” otherwise?
It’s the insurance company that will suffer loss.
BTW, nothing prevents the state, county or municipality from making the insurance company whole.
Imagine if the shoplifter had stolen a dozen donuts from Krispy Kreme , the cops would have have nuked the place.
“... fired gas munition and 40-millimeter rounds through the windows, drove an armored vehicle through the doors, tossed flash-bang grenades inside and used explosives to blow out the walls ...”
It’s shoplifting. This is a prime example of why the militarization of cops needs to be dialed back to 1950s levels.
That’ll buff out.
> Wasn’t Philadelphia responsible for burning a lot of houses
> in the process of their official duties? I seem to recall
> something about that.
Here ya go.
https://www.nytimes.com/1985/05/14/us/police-drop-bomb-on-radicals-home-in-philadelphia.html
That’s a nine point five on my outrage scale.
You know, you don’t have to destroy the entire building to get a dude hiding in a bathroom.
Are there any professionals in law enforcement anymore?
Hard to tell with this “Burn the house down to kill a single spider” response from this Colorado PD.
this is the washington post- what’s the real story here?
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