Posted on 05/23/2011 4:37:47 AM PDT by marktwain
A Tucson, Ariz., SWAT team defends shooting an Iraq War veteran 60 times during a drug raid, although it declines to say whether it found any drugs in the house and has had to retract its claim that the veteran shot first.
And the Pima County sheriff scolded the media for "questioning the legality" of the shooting.
Jose Guerena, 26, died the morning of May 5. He was asleep in his Tucson home after working a night shift at the Asarco copper mine when his wife, Vanessa, saw the armed SWAT team outside her youngest son's bedroom window.
"She saw a man pointing at her with a gun," said Reyna Ortiz, 29, a relative who is caring for Vanessa and her children. Ortiz said Vanessa Guerena yelled, "Don't shoot! I have a baby!"
Vanessa Guerena thought the gunman might be part of a home invasion -- especially because two members of her sister-in-law's family, Cynthia and Manny Orozco, were killed last year in their Tucson home, her lawyer, Chris Scileppi, said. She shouted for her husband in the next room, and he woke up and told his wife to hide in the closet with the child, Joel, 4.
SWAT officers fired at least 71 shots at suspect Jose Guerena, a former U.S. Marine, and a family struggles to put the pieces together.
Guerena grabbed his assault rifle and was pointing it at the SWAT team, which was trying to serve a narcotics search warrant as part of a multi-house drug crackdown, when the team broke down the door. At first the Pima County Sheriff's Office said that Guerena fired first, but on Wednesday officials backtracked and said he had not. "The safety was on and he could not fire," according to the sheriff's statement.
(Excerpt) Read more at abcnews.go.com ...
I was thinking the same thing.....if I had some, I’d have’em just inside all my doors to the home facing out - all them linked to one activator...by the bedstand
“I actually have a very good idea as far as how to manage druggies.
Take a few bombed-out cities like, say, Detroit. Put 3 or 4 of these zones into the US. These are 100% legal drug zones.
If you want to use, you go in there. The entire zone is surrounded by barbed wire and armed guards. You can only enter or leave via several entrances. Near the entrance are a few houses for people who want to leave. If you leave, you stay in the house until you can pee-test clean.
No services are provided whatsoever in the drug zone. You die, your body will lie there and rot. if there’s a fire, it burns until there is no more fuel. No food except what you backpack in. No cigarettes, no water, except what you backpack in.”
Sounds completely unrealistic. Druggies will voluntarily choose to live in a place with no food or water, or services? What legal argument will you use to prevent the druggies that want to leave from leaving? Is it constitutional to forcibly imprison people who have not been convicted? The ACLU sleazebags will have a field day with that.
“If you use and you have NOT checked into a Drug Zone, your life becomes MUCH worse than if you are caught using now, with normal prosecutorial efforts.”
Please elaborate on how their lives will be MUCH worse than the current system. Do you mean worse than going to prison? Hard labor? What?
If you test dirty for a drug and you are not in a Drug Zone, you have the option to have the test done at an accredited lab. If even the Mass Spec test shows you are dirty, you are given the choice between execution, or permanent exile (as a person stripped of all Citizenship) in one of the Drug Zones.
“Murder. Plain and simple. I am considering bringing this case up at the next neighborhood get together and seeing if there are other folks thinking like me that perhaps we might need to band together for protection not just against the normal crooks and whatnot but also against the armed gangs with badges.”
Think about what you are advocating. Probably 99% of the warrants are served on the correct address. On very rare occasions they invade the wrong house and kill an innocent homeowner. The way to deal with that is to SUE THE FREAKING HELL OUT OF THEM AND PROSECUTE THE RAID LEADERS. The answer is not to have neighbors automatically shooting at the cops when they arrive. Thats the recipe for anarchy and a blood bath on every police raid.
“...Guerena grabbed his assault rifle...”
No, actually, the ONLY people who had fully-automatic “assault rifles” were the SWAThugs; the murdered victim had only a simple home defense rifle.
71 times, huh? Thug b*stards.
No better than the Gestapo.
“...WTF?!...”
Why? Makes perfecet sense. Because then only THEIR word of what happened will be available.
And it becomes the truth eventually.
Because after all, they wouldn’t lie - they’re the Blue Hero Brotherhood, “to Protect, and Serve”, with “Honor, Service, and Integrity”...
...except when they bust into the wrong house and hose the place down with automatic weapons fire and then lie and spin to cover up their eff-up...
Look at you. You’re willing to exile people and strip them of their liberties for crimes that didn’t exist 100 years ago.
Concur
Because lawsuits worked out so well in the 1700's with our British occupiers.
Consider the words of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn:
"And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt!
“Nice straw man you set up to argue against.”
Not at all. All of those things are excesses committed in the name of the “War on Drugs”, in particular. None stand alone, including “no-knock searches”.
“I am not for any of the things you mentioned, however I understand the rationale for the no-knock warrant. Warrants involve judges and probable cause.”
Which are as fallible as any other human endeavor. There is no justification for even one incident like this...and there have been several. Even worse is the tangible lack of effect the “War on Drugs” has had despite all the expense and effort.
“As far as drugs are concerned, they ARE evil, destroy countless lives and are a major motive for crime and violence. Sorry you dont understand that.”
They are no more evil than any other inanimate object. It should be up to the individual what risks and experiences that individual chooses, not the state. Are you an alcohol user? Tobacco? Do you advocate prohibition in those cases as well?
“Nonsense. There is nothing wrong with “the war on drugs” that can’t be fixed by stripping out the unconstituional BS put in by scum*** politicians.”
LOL! Nothing wrong with it except that it’s been an abject failure by ANY objective measure, at the cost of countless billions of dollars and ruined lives. All of the “unconstitutional BS” has been added in a vain effort to make it more effective. Meanwhile, we have generated a civil war in Mexico, sent billions of dollars to unfriendly countries, boosted organized crime immeasurably here in the States, and reduced drug use by not one iota.
“BTW, what’s your alternative? Letting drug dealers run wild?”
Return all of the drugs to legal status, as they had before the ‘20s or so. No more drug dealers at that point, ‘cause there are no more profits at that point. Losing the taboo appeal will result in fewer users, not more. Maybe we can even talk parents into effectively educating their children about drugs, reducing demand even further.
The “cure” we’ve been trying for forty years against mind altering drugs is FAR worse than the disease.
Yes, but this time there were deadly consequences. The court case that will follow should be interesting. What happened is total insanity.
Not quite fixed. Drop the “former” from Marine. He was STILL a Marine, and to us, is yet one of ours!
Oath Keepers to Rally in Tucson on Memorial Day Over Death of Young Marine Veteran
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/2723486/posts
http://ocoathkeepers.wordpress.com/
The “war on some drugs” IS THE MAIN factor in the current shredding of the Constitution. It’s what start this parade.
Do you think it is constitutional for fedgov to impose national drug prohibition via the Commerce Clause? Or, do you think that authority should be left to the states under the Tenth Amendment?
” I am considering bringing this case up at the next neighborhood get together”
“Think about what you are advocating.”
The only thing that I am advocating is a conversation about defense of self and nearby like minded neighbors. Why does communication frighten you?
If a search warrant can be sealed, then the 4th Amendment is of no effect.
IMO, they are trying to hide the CI (confidential informant). Either the warrant IDs him, or the CI is non-existent, and the complaining officer is tied up with the cartel.
If the CI is real, he burned the cops with bad info to get even with somebody, maybe the dead Marine.
Something like that.
“Consider the words of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: “And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt!”
It’s funny that you refer to Solzhenitsyn’s comments against the Gulag and a totalitarian state, but you advocate a Gulag-like imprisonment and or summary execution for drug users.
I think your attitude is way premature as we do not YET live in a police state or an unresponsive tyranny. There are still non-violent solutions to the problem of police breaking into the wrong houses. We should try them before burning down the country.
Please point out just where in the Constitution ANY level of government is given the authority to wage such a war on our own citizens. Bear in mind that the Constitution defines what GOVERNMENT is allowed to do, not the opposite. The war on some drugs has NO BASIS IN THE CONSTITUTION TO EXIST, period. If you believe otherwise, SHOW ME.
I read Laz’ post at 83 and there was nothing in there about gulag style imprisonment of drug users. In fact from what I read, he’s giving them plenty of freedom to come and go as they please.
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