Several police departments were fanning the area after the recent shooting of two police officers after a robbery. The woman grabbed a gun, thinking the cops were criminal intruders. Fortunately, they didn’t kill her.
They did, however, trigger a heart attack, requiring open heart surgery. We’ve seen this happen quite a few times in the past. When a cop goes down, other cops seem to think the Fourth Amendment, police procedures, and laws against excessive force no longer apply. They do.
Quote
Brenda Greenwell was awakened about midnight Thursday by two SWAT officers, dressed in camouflage, flipping on the lights in the bedroom of her Jeffersonville, Ind., home. Advertisement
Her husband, Ed, was next door at his brother's house, he said, and neither he nor his 57-year-old wife, who has heart problems, had heard that two police officers had been wounded earlier that night at a local motel, allegedly by someone who knew their granddaughter.
The two officers came in through the home's unlocked rear door, Ed Greenwell said, and found his wife in the bedroom.
"She asked who they were," Greenwell said yesterday, and the two officers -- armed with rifles, he said -- said they were police but didn't show badges or other identification.
Greenwell said his wife grabbed a .38-caliber revolver kept at the head of their bed and chased the men outside, where he heard her screaming at them from the rear deck, gun in hand.
"It could have been a death sentence for her," Greenwell said, saying he was thankful the officers allowed him to get through their cordon and calm his wife.
But Greenwell, himself a former police officer in Harrison County and North Carolina, said he's troubled because he was never shown a search warrant allowing police to enter his house.
Brenda Greenwell had a hard time catching her breath after the incident, so her husband took her to Floyd Memorial Hospital in New Albany, where she remained yesterday awaiting heart bypass surgery for two blocked arteries. The surgery is set for today at Norton Hospital in Louisville.
Greenwell said his wife has had heart trouble and previously had a stent inserted to open a blocked artery.
Larry Thomas, a spokesman for the city of Jeffersonville, said it could not be determined yesterday whether a warrant had been issued to search the Greenwells' house. Police still are gathering reports being written by scores of officers from Thursday night's manhunt for the gunman, and it will take days to assemble and analyze the police response, he said.
