Posted on 08/08/2008 9:20:58 AM PDT by DCBryan1
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 10 or 20 seconds to get my mind woken up,” McCuien, 42, said, “to realize that the real FBI didn’t wear a red bandanna over their face and a white T-shirt. These weren’t the FBI. They were self-employed.” And this was a robbery, one the Pulaski County sheriff’s office is investigating.
The gunmen ransacked the house and searched room to room to gather all the occupants in one place, pulling some out of bed at gunpoint. One of the men was heavyset, McCuien said. The other three were skinny. “They sounded young,” Mc-Cuien said. A bear of a man — he looks uncannily like The Green Mile actor Michael Clarke Duncan — McCuien tried to steal an occasional peek to see if he could see a face. “Look down,” one gunman said. A few minutes later, he tried again. “I said look down!” the gunman said, following his remark with a smack on the back of Mc-Cuien’s head with a handgun. McCuien said he heard someone say pull out the duct tape. “Either they couldn’t get the tape to work or something because they decided not to tie us up,” he said.
About then, a neighbor returned home, McCuien said, and the gunmen — organized to the point of choreography until then — started bickering. “One of them said it was time to go, time to go,” McCuien said. “But another one said no, he wasn’t leaving without taking something.” The gunmen grabbed an Xbox video-game console, baseball caps and clothes, a .45-caliber handgun and McCuien’s wallet. “They took my TV off the wall like they put it there,” he said. “Just real quick, smooth and easy.”
A vehicle with a hatchback pulled up outside, and the men left in it. According to a sheriff’s office report, the robbers left behind the duct tape, a black leather bag and a glove. “They took my nephew’s clothes, man,” McCuien said. “The TV I understand. Plasma, 42-inch. But his clothes? What are they going to do with those? Wear them?” McCuien said he believes his house was targeted specifically, though he doesn’t know the reason. “I don’t know exactly why or by who, but somebody who knows somebody or somebody who’s somebody’s cousin thought we had something in here they wanted,” he said. “This kind of thing doesn’t really happen around here.”
Sheriff ’s office spokesman John Rehrauer concurred, saying violent acts are unusual in that area. The sheriff’s office does not keep track of home-invasion robberies, Rehrauer said, but crime statistics kept by the agency showed 15 robberies of people in Pulaski County in 2008 through June, a decrease of seven from the same period a year earlier.
FBI special agent Steve Frazier, spokesman for the agency’s Little Rock field office, said he had not been notified of any possible impersonations of bureau personnel.
After the gunmen left, McCuien said, he called 911. The respondents “were real law enforcement this time — uniforms, patrol cars, everything,” he said. Deputies had made no arrests by late Thursday. McCuien said his house on Ingram Road was recently remodeled, but he didn’t suspect any of the white and Hispanic crew that worked on it.
“No, man, these were all brothers who came up in here this morning,” he said. “Sorry to say.” And, he said, he tends not to keep large amounts of cash in his house. “Where would I get it?” he asked. “I’m out of work right now, just like almost everybody else, it seems. I have no idea why somebody thought I was rich.”
McCuien said he grew up in the same neighborhood of calm and winding, sidewalkless roads, old and moldering mobile homes, and clean, newer brick houses on large lots. He lived in Phoenix for 11 years, he said, owning a dumptruck firm. He moved back about six years ago, he said, after his father had a stroke. He stayed after a sister got sick, and when she died, he moved into her house.
“This is the first I’ve heard of something like this happening around here,” he said. “I wasn’t really thinking I’d make history in this neighborhood.”
I think that you came up with a suggestion that would make no-knock warrants as rare as you would like. Make them valid only if the signing judge is on the scene. Quite aside from the danger of getting in the line of fire, how willing would a judge be to get up at Oh dark hundred to attend the raid?
Not necessarily, but no-knock raids are Constitutionally illegal.
That’s without giving a legal warrant until AFTER the fact.
Come knock on my door, be polite and I’ll be polite.
Kick in my door scream and you will die. I might die too, but I WILL take people with me.
Help me understand your argument here. We need to ban no-knock raids because the criminals in this case shouted “FBI!” when they kicked in the victim’s door?
I’m shocked this doesn’t happen more often. If I were a thug, I would certainly use this tactic to support myself.
Liz Michael is not going to like that one bit.
“Help me understand your argument here. We need to ban no-knock raids because the criminals in this case shouted “FBI!” when they kicked in the victim’s door?”
No. We should ban no-knock raids because they are unconstitutional and because there have been numerous examples of “real” police raiding innocent homeowners, destroying their property, and even killing their dogs
So what does that have to do with the incident mentioned in the story?
We should for saftey reasons and just plain common sense ban unmarked cars from doing routine traffic stops. Those stops need to be done with a marked car with light bar visable. That much I am for. We need to also ban speed cameras and light cameras.
she'll find me. might sleep with my weapon under my pillow from now on.
i cannot wait to retire, move down south, and adopt more of a survivalist, isolationist mentality.
it's impossible to do up here in NYC.
No argument just a thought!
I’m not going to get into a drawn out discourse with you either but I see no reason why no knocks ahould be allowed. This crap about cops shooting any dog that is not attacking them is getting old. The cops who got medals for hitting the wrong adress is total BS too. Sorry, but you will never convince me that we need militarized cops on our streets.
The job sucks but nobody is forced into being a cop.
That “one bad raid in PGC” is just a drop in the bucket!
Sounds like you sleep with an arsenal at your side. Most likely if anyone, good or bad, kicks in your door at 3 A.M. you won’t have much of a chance to do anything. You will go out in a blaze of glory.
Once banned, I can rest assured it is only criminals I'm shooting coming through my door.
Umm..... hello. Earth calling sheriff. Maybe you SHOULD!
I will consider all no-knock entries as armed home invasions.
The FBI has no reason to invade an innocent person's home (the law is no threat to those who do right, according to Roman's 13). Wrong address...anonymous tip...these are all fatal mistakes. "No knock" is a stupid, stupid idea. The innocent must not be sacrificed for expendiency.
Especially now that the real perps are adopting the mis-delivery scheme to avoid the raids = they have drugs delivered to innocent households for retrieval = which puts the innocent people in double jeopardy: one from the perps coming to get their stuff and two, from the mid-nite raids from the Swat teams, which are even more dangerous.
I agree. People with an agenda will take isolated incidents where LE makes a mistake (as well as an incident like this)and ignore the many many times that they get it right in their attempt to hamstring good law enforcement practices.
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