Free Republic

DALLAS — The search for suspects who raped an SMU student last weekend led police to a southeast Dallas neighborhood off Jim Miller Road and Red Bud Drive. Ruben Moontiel also saw SWAT officers near his home on Red Bud Saturday afternoon while he landscaped his front yard. No sooner had he gone inside to tell his wife police were suiting up outside when SWAT kicked in his front door. "I felt humiliated," Moontiel said. His wife, Agueda, said Dallas SWAT officers rushing into her home trampled over her foot and fractured it. DPD detained the entire family for four...

Andrew Leonard was watching television with his wife not long after returning from Ash Wednesday services when police burst through the front door of his North Baltimore home. He was handcuffed, plunked in a chair and told to keep quiet as officers rifled through the house and interrogated him for 15 minutes about drugs and a dealer he knew nothing about. As it turned out, police had the wrong house. The man they were looking for lived two doors down. Leonard, a 33-year-old chemist who has no criminal record, said he and his wife, a 29-year-old credit analyst, were frightened...

WEST MICHIGAN -- The family of injured shooting victim Derek Copp has hired a lawyer who is questioning why the Grand Valley State University student was shot by police and the basis of a search warrant to look for marijuana in his off-campus apartment. "We have some very important questions about what appears to be some shocking police activity," Grand Rapids attorney Fred Dilley said Monday. Dilley questioned the safety and necessity of raiding a student's apartment, entering through a rear slider, and the "manner in which it was served and executed." "The question is, is that a sufficient basis...

WASHINGTON (Map, News) - The violent assault on Berwyn Heights Mayor Cheye Calvo’s home late last month was certainly not the first bungled raid by a government SWAT team, but the bad publicity it generated should make it the last time these trigger-happy squads target innocent civilians. Tracking a 32-pound package of marijuana that had been addressed to Calvo’s wife, Trinity Tomsic, Prince George’s sheriff’s deputies forcibly entered the mayor’s home on July 29 and killed his two dogs before handcuffing him and his mother-in-law. But like so many other SWAT team raids across the country, this one turned out...

4 gunmen bust doors, yell ‘FBI,’ loot home BY JACOB QUINN SANDERS ARKANSAS DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE Two men kicked in the front door, splintering it near the bolt-lock. Two more kicked in a side door. All four had guns. It was 3 a.m. “FBI! FBI!” the men shouted, one pulling what looked like a badge out of his shirt before stuffing it back in. “Where’s your money?” Lloyd McCuien lay facedown on the living-room floor of his Pulaski County house — off Arkansas 365 outside Maumelle and within sight of Interstate 40 — surrounded by seven family members. “It took me about...

The FBI has launched a review of the violent law enforcement raid of the home of Berwyn Heights Mayor Cheye Calvo in Prince George's County last week that resulted in the deaths of the family's two dogs. The agency has begun "reviewing the events that occurred at Mr. Calvo's residence," said Richard J. Wolf, spokesman for the FBI in Baltimore, which has jurisdiction over federal civil rights investigations in Maryland. (snip) Courts across the country in recent years have ruled that it is almost always unacceptable for police to kill pets in the course of searching a home. Cases in...

Feds detail woman's death, officers' plea Published on: 04/27/07 According to federal documents released Thursday, these are the events that led to Kathryn Johnston's death and the steps the officers took to cover their tracks. Three narcotics agents were trolling the streets near the Bluffs in northwest Atlanta, a known market for drugs, midday on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving. Eventually they set their sights on some apartments on Lanier Street, usually fertile when narcotics agents are looking for arrests and seizures. Gregg Junnier and another narcotics officer went inside the apartments around 2 p.m. while Jason Smith checked the woods....

The confidential informant on whose word Atlanta police raided the house of an 88-year-old woman is now saying he never purchased drugs from her house and was told by police to lie and say he did. Chief Richard Pennington, in a press conference Monday evening, said his department learned two days ago that the informant — who has been used reliably in the past by the narcotics unit -- denied providing information to officers about a drug deal at 933 Neal Street in northwest Atlanta. "The informant said he had no knowledge of going into that house and purchasing drugs,"...