When Gary Adams heard a series of "booms" early Thursday, he figured one of the kids had left the TV on overnight. He had no idea, he said Friday, that law enforcement agents were about to flood his Bellevue house, looking for an accused member of the Manchester OGs gang who once lived there.
A few clock ticks later, agents broke open all three doors into his Orchard Avenue home, shattering glass. Then some 15 Federal Bureau of Investigation agents and state and local police entered his home.
"When I hit that bend and turned," he said, pointing toward the staircase that lands near his front door, "there was a laser sight on my head."
An hour later the agents left, without their suspect, Sondra Hunter, who remained at large. An FBI agent apologized and promised the bureau would pay for the damaged doors, he said....
And for bonus points, there apparently was no warrant:
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The entry to Mr. Adams' house, though, raises the question: Absent a search warrant, when can law enforcement knock in a door?
"If they have an arrest warrant for John Doe ... that is not authority to go into [Doe's] friend's house," said David Harris, a professor of law at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, and a specialist in search and seizure. "Otherwise, a warrant for anyone could allow you to go anywhere that person could be."
"In this day and age, police are given quite a bit of leeway," said Alexander H. Lindsay Jr., a defense attorney and former federal prosecutor. "Whenever law enforcement is executing a warrant, the safety of the officers in question is always a primary consideration." (...)
