Radley Balko has a long post on the 2008 death of Gonzalo Guizan, who was shot dad during a SWAT (technically, a "SWERT") raid in 2008 while visiting a friend. It's worth a read. Here's a snippet:
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On the morning of May 18, 2008, the Easton Police Department got a telephone call from “Chandra Parker.”
It turns out that wasn’t her real name, but that didn’t matter. Solomon now had a reason to take action against Terebesi.
He called in members of the Southwest Regional Emergency Response Team, a SWAT force made up of police officers from Easton and four surrounding towns. Nine heavily armed officers charged into the home based on a search warrant that a miniscule amount of drugs had been seen there by Parker.
When the operation was over, Guizan, who was visiting Terebesi, had been shot dead . . .
Two officers expressed misgivings about the operation prior to its launch. The team’s commander urged it be delayed; another officer suggested the SWAT-style raid wasn’t even necessary. But Solomon insisted the raid had to be conducted that day.
A member of the team with the most critical role in the May 18 raid had received most of his training for a far different role in such an operation. He arrived an hour late to the pre-raid briefing.
And the woman whose complaint led to the search warrant and the raid had a criminal record and gave a false name to officers preparing the warrant — all of which was never conveyed to the judge who authorized the search.
The lawsuit charges that the raid by the Southwest Regional Emergency Response Team should never have been ordered.
“The decision to call out SWERT to execute the warrant was unjustified, unreasonable, an arbitrary abuse of police power and not based on a legitimate law enforcement objective,” the suit states. “It was intended to frighten, intimidate, harass and/or punish Terebisi and Guizan and, on information and belief, to further Solomon’s interests.”
Solomon, who had been chief since 1995, recently retired from the police department. His lawyer did not return calls and emails for comment. In his deposition testimony he states that based on the information he has now he would not have done anything differently in ordering the SWAT team to raid Terebesi’s home. He claimed he wanted the raid done as soon as possible to ensure that evidence of criminal activity was not destroyed before they could seize it. He continued the raid was necessary to “obtain the evidence that the crime — obviously a crime was occurring, and to obtain that evidence.”
As Mr. Balko says, Guizan's friend Ronald Terebise is not the sort of person you would want as a neighbor. To say that he is "unsavory" would be putting it very mildly. But even the information from the informant stated that Terebesi had been "using" cocaine, not selling it. And the small amount of cocaine seized in the raid would seem to back that up.
Why was Gonzalo Guizan killed? Because one of the officers shouted "I'm hit!" during the raid.
He had, indeed, been hit. By one of the flashbang grenades the SWERT officers used. For that, Guizan was shot six times.
