Habersham
County, Georgia, Sheriff Joey Terrell feels bad that his deputies
horribly burned a toddler by tossing a “distraction device”
(a.k.a. a “flash bang” grenade) into his crib during a drug raid on
Wednesday morning. “The baby didn’t deserve this,” Terrell concedes in
an interview with AccessNorthGa.com. “The family didn’t deserve
this. This family was displaced from another home down here and
apparently just moved in with her.” If his deputies had known there
were children in the home, he says, they would not have used the
grenade. But given what they knew, Terrell insists, they acted
appropriately:
We keep asking ourselves, “How did this happen?” No one can
answer that. You can’t answer that. You try and do everything
right. Bad things can happen. That’s just the world we live in. Bad
things happen to good people.
But it turns out Terrell does have an answer:
The person I blame in this whole thing is the person selling the
drugs. Wanis Thonetheva, that’s the person I blame in all this.
They are no better than a domestic terrorist, because they don’t
care about families—they didn’t care about the family, the children
living in that household—to be selling dope out of it, to be
selling methamphetamine out of it. All they care about is making
money.They don’t care about what it does to families. It’s domestic
terrorism and I think we should treat them as such. I don’t know
where we can go with that, but that’s my feelings on it. It just
makes me so angry! I get so mad that they don’t care about what
they do, they don’t care about the families or the people they’re
selling to.
It makes me angry too, but in a different way. It makes me angry
that Terrell thinks violence is an appropriate response to
consensual transactions in which someone exchanges methamphetamine
for money (provided that person is not a pharmacist and his
customer is not a patient with a prescription). It makes me angry
that Terrell sees nothing wrong with sending a heavily armed SWAT
team into a an alleged meth dealer’s home in the middle of the
night, which inevitably endangers not only the dealer but anyone
else who happens to be there. In Terrell’s mind, that is not an act
of aggression. It was Wanis Thonetheva who attacked first by
agreeing to sell speed to people who wanted it. Hence Thonetheva is
a “domestic terrorist,” harming an innocent child because all he
cares about is making money.
Terrorists, of course, are usually motivated by politics rather
than greed. And it was not Thonetheva who sent Alecia
Phonesavanh’s 19-month-old son, Bounkham, to the hospital
with severe burns. One of Terrell’s deputies did that, in service
of a political ideology that says people may not alter their
consciousness in ways that are not approved by the government. “He
is in a medically induced coma and he is paralyzed,” Phonesavanh
told WSB-TV, the ABC affiliate in Atlanta. “I hope he’s
not going to remember this. I know his sisters, his mommy, and his
daddy will never forget this. Our kids have been through enough
this year. This is just more trauma that they didn’t need, and I
just wish there was something better I could do to make it better
for him. Wrong place, wrong time.”
That place is America, and that time is a period during which
police believe it is their duty to launch military-style assaults
on civilians who sell politically incorrect drugs, knowing full
well that they are bound to inflict “collateral damage” like this
from time to time. After Bounkham recovers from the injuries
inflicted by his government and becomes old enough to ask what
happened that night, is there any explanation that will make sense
to him?
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