American Elephant

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Sick. To. My. Stomach.

I can’t even see straight after reading this story.

When the shooting stopped, two dogs lay dead. A mayor sat in his boxers, hands bound behind his back. His handcuffed mother-in-law was sprawled on the kitchen floor, lying beside the body of one of the family pets that police had killed before her eyes.

After the raid, Prince George’s County police officials who burst into the home of Berwyn Heights’ mayor last week seized the same unopened package of marijuana that an undercover officer had delivered an hour earlier.

Was the mayor guilty of some crime and his dogs justifiably killed?  Apparently not.

What police left behind was a house stained with blood and a trail of questions about their conduct. No other evidence of illegal activity was found, and no one was arrested at Mayor Cheye Calvo’s home in this small bedroom community near College Park.

This week Prince George’s police arrested two men for orchestrating a plot to deliver marijuana to the addresses of unsuspecting recipients — among them, Calvo’s wife, Trinity Tomsic.

Yet neither county Police Chief Melvin C. High nor Sheriff Michael A. Jackson have apologized to him, his wife or her mother, Georgia Porter, for the raid that traumatized the family and killed their black Labrador retrievers, Payton and Chase.

It seems the mayor’s wife was a victim of identity theft and had nothing to do with the package of marijuana that was delivered by cops and remained unopened when the police raided their home and killed their labradors.

“Trinity was an innocent and random victim of identity theft. Apparently, so were four or five other county residents whose names and addresses were stolen and used as addresses on drug packages,” Calvo said at a news conference outside his house, near a garden of tomatoes and strawberries.

“However, Trinity and our family have not been treated as victims of a crime. Instead, our home was invaded. Our two beloved Labrador retrievers are dead. My mother-in-law and I were tied up for nearly two hours,” he said. “We were harmed by the very people who took an oath to protect us.”

I’m just sick over this.  Read the rest here.  There’s not a badge in the world that would keep me from protecting my two lab-mixes if people barged in my house with guns.  The non-uniformed and extremely heavy-handed cops could have knocked on the door, could have asked for the dogs to be put outside, could have done a number of things to prevent the violence.  But they didn’t.  And a mother-in-law was handcuffed on the kitchen floor, the mayor was forced to walk down the stairs backwards like a crook, and the family’s two dogs were shot (one of them as he ran away).

I’m a big supporter of police and the rule of law… but if the news reports are accurate, this went too far.  Way too far.  Poor dogs.

One Response to “ Sick. To. My. Stomach. ”

  1. This is the saddest story ever. How are they ever to feel safe in their home again? And it’s not like they were even robbed - the police barged in and made them feel unsafe. Poor dogs indeed - I can’t imagine not having my fury best friends in my life, let alone watching them die in my own house. If there was ever an appropriate lawsuit, suing the Prince George’s County police department is well justified in this case.

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