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Monday, October 15, 2012

Not the way to build up community relations....




















Gotta see how much is true, but if they thought it was a meth lab, a flash bang was probably not the way to handle it.
Grenade burns sleeping girl as SWAT team raids home Grenade burns sleeping girl as SWAT team raids home

A 12-year-old girl suffered burns to one side of her body when a flash grenade went off next to her as a police SWAT team raided a West End home Tuesday morning. "She has first- and second-degree burns down the left side of her body and on her arms," said the girl's mother, Jackie Fasching. "She's got severe pain. Every time I think about it, it brings tears to my eyes."

Medical staff at the scene tended to the girl afterward and then her mother drove her to the hospital, where she was treated and released later that day. A photo of the girl provided by Fasching to The Gazette shows red and black burns on her side.

Police Chief Rich St. John said the 6 a.m. raid at 2128 Custer Ave., was to execute a search warrant as part of an ongoing narcotics investigation by the City-County Special Investigations Unit. The grenade is commonly called a "flash-bang" and is used to disorient people with a bright flash, a loud bang and a concussive blast. It went off on the floor where the girl was sleeping. She was in her sister's bedroom near the window the grenade came through, Fasching said. A SWAT member attached it to a boomstick, a metal pole that detonates the grenade, and stuck it through the bedroom window.

St. John said the grenade normally stays on the boomstick so it goes off in a controlled manner at a higher level. However, the officer didn't realize that there was a delay on the grenade when he tried to detonate it. He dropped it to move onto a new device, St. John said. The grenade fell to the floor and went off near the girl. "It was totally unforeseen, totally unplanned and extremely regrettable," St. John said. "We certainly did not want a juvenile, or anyone else for that matter, to get injured."

On Thursday, Fasching took her daughter back to the hospital to have her wounds treated. She questioned why police would take such actions with children in the home and why it needed a SWAT team. "A simple knock on the door and I would've let them in," she said. "They said their intel told them there was a meth lab at our house. If they would've checked, they would've known there's not." She and her two daughters and her husband were home at the time of the raid. She said her husband, who suffers from congenital heart disease and liver failure, told officers he would open the front door as the raid began and was opening it as they knocked it down.

When the grenade went off in the room, it left a large bowl-shaped dent in the wall and "blew the nails out of the drywall," Fasching said. St. John said investigators did plenty of homework on the residence before deciding to launch the raid but didn't know children were inside. "The information that we had did not have any juveniles in the house and did not have any juveniles in the room," he said. "We generally do not introduce these disorienting devices when they're present." The decision to use a SWAT team was based on a detailed checklist the department uses when serving warrants. Investigators consider dozens of items such as residents' past criminal convictions, other criminal history, mental illness and previous interactions with law enforcement. Each item is assigned a point value and if the total exceeds a certain threshold, SWAT is requested. Then a commander approves or rejects the request.

OK, screwed intel, I can see that. I see it a lot and saw a lot of it in my Army time. But a meth lab is nothing but a bomb waiting for a detonator. Sorry guys, did you really think it was wise to put the detonator into the place you were just about to enter....

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