The mayor said he was handcuffed for about two hours along with his mother-in-law. No charges were brought against Calvo or his wife, who came home during the raid.
Prince George's County Police Chief Melvin High said Wednesday that Calvo and his family were "most likely . . . innocent victims," but he would not rule out their involvement. He and other officials did not apologize for killing the dogs, saying the officers felt threatened.
FBI looking into pot raid of Maryland mayor's home
Cheye Calvo and his wife appear to be innocent victims of a marijuana smuggling scheme. Their two dogs were shot dead by officers.
From the Associated Press
August 8, 2008
BERWYN HEIGHTS, MD. — Mayor Cheye Calvo got home from work, saw a package addressed to his wife on the front porch and brought it inside.
Suddenly, police with guns drawn kicked in the door and stormed in, shooting to death the couple's two dogs and seizing the unopened package. Inside was 32 pounds of marijuana that evidently didn't belong to the couple.
Police now say the mayor and his wife appear to have been innocent victims of a scheme by two men to smuggle millions of dollars' worth of the drug by having it delivered to about half a dozen unsuspecting recipients.
The men, who are under arrest, include a FedEx deliveryman. Investigators allege that he would drop a package off outside a home and that the other man would come by soon after to pick it up.
Now federal authorities say they're looking into what happened during the July 29 raid. FBI Special Agent Rich Wolf said late Thursday that the bureau had opened a civil rights investigation.
A furious Calvo said earlier Thursday that he and his wife, Trinity Tomsic, were asking the Justice Department to investigate.
"Trinity was an innocent victim and random victim," Calvo said outside his two-story red-brick house in this middle-class Washington suburb of about 3,000. "We were harmed by the very people who took an oath to protect us."
Calvo said that the couple's two black Labradors were gentle and that police killed one of them as it was running away.
"Our dogs were our children," said Calvo, 37. "They were the reason we bought this house, because it had a big yard for them to run in."
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What a ridiculously sad story
What a ridiculously sad story... and I'm not talking about the poor dogs, either. Sad that our "law enforcement" choose to act in such a manner with regards to a box full of weeds, left on the front porch of a small-town mayor, no less. Guns drawn? Kicking in doors? Shooting pets? Sounds like the police were hopped up on drugs themselves...
I loved the part of the
I loved the part of the story where the cops justified their behavior on the grounds that Calvo's mother-in-law saw them approaching the house with drawn guns and screamed. The cops said her screams could have alerted someone in the house to grab a gun.
I was in an apartment once that was raided by the FBI. It turned out to be a complete mistake. Someone (probably a neighborhood snitch) had told them that a wanted federal fugitive was in the apartment. The agents were actually very polite. When one of them suggested that they should look in the apartment upstairs, a more senior agent said that the guy who lived upstairs was a bus driver and had two kids. It dawned on me at that moment that the FBI knew the names and history of everybody in the building. They knew, for example, that I lived next door. They did not hassle us at all.
Yeah. Let's be happy it was
Yeah. Let's be happy it was just the dogs. But, I have to point out, the dogs looked like black labador retrievers. Hmmm?
But it's actually starting to get to me how many innocent black people are killed because someone "screamed" or the police mistook a hair brush for a gun or the cop was just shooting towards the direction of a noise. While guilty white people, with a gun on the cops, shooting at the cops, stay alive. It actually makes me wanna take a baseball bat, a college baseball bat, and swing at someone's head.
There's the pitch, there's the swing, and look at the ball! It's going, going, going . . .
Labrador Retrievers
Labs are, generally speaking, fairly diffident in their behavior. I find it extremely hard to believe that these cops were that wigged out by the presence of these dogs. The cops just wanted to shoot somebody and since there was nobody to shoot they shot the dogs. No drug dealers use Labs for protection. The Prince George's County cops have some more explaining to do.
Yeah, ptc. It's not like
Yeah, ptc. It's not like these were rotweilers.