Last week
Habersham County, Georgia, Sheriff Joey Terrell,
explaining how a SWAT team critically injured 19-month-old
Bounkham Phonesavanh by tossing a flash-bang grenade into the
toddler’s playpen during a 3 a.m. drug raid on Wednesday, said
members of the team, which consisted of his deputies and local
police officers from Cornelia, never would have used such a
“distraction device” if they had realized children were living in
the home they were attacking. “If there’s children involved in a
house, we do not use any kind of distraction devices in those
houses,” Terrell told
AccessNorthGa.com. “We just don’t take the chance on
it….According to the confidential informant, there were no
children. When they made the buy, they didn’t see any children or
any evidence of children there, so we proceeded with our standard
operation.”
But according to a lawyer hired by
Bounkham’s parents, Boun Khan and Alecia
Phonesavanh, even the most rudimentary surveillance would have
revealed the presence of children in the house near Cornelia, which
belongs to the couple’s relatives. The Phonesavanhs moved
there with Bounkham and his three older sisters after their
home in Wisconsin burned down. “They had been in this
home for about two months,” the lawyer, Mawuli Mel Davis,
told WSB-TV, the ABC station in Atlanta. “This is a
stay-at-home dad who was out in front of the home, playing with the
children on a daily basis. Any surveillance that was done would
have revealed there was a father with four children who played in
that driveway.”
By Terrell’s own account, the
SWAT team was relying on the report of a confidential informant who
briefly visited the home on Tuesday night, just a few hours before
the raid, and bought methamphetamine from Wanis Thonetheva, a
nephew of the home’s owners. “There was no clothes, no toys,
nothing to indicate that there was children present in the home,”
Cornelia Police Chief Rick Darby
claimed. “If there had been, then we’d have done something
different.” But Alecia Phonesavanh
says anyone visiting the home should
have noticed signs of children. “They say there were no toys,”
she
told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “There is
plenty of stuff. Their shoes were laying all over.”
Bounkham, who was severely burned when the flash-bang grenade
exploded in his face, is undergoing
surgery today for the second time. His
parents told the Journal-Constitution that
doctors say he has a 50 percent chance of surviving. The
Phonesavanhs, who have no health insurance, are collecting contributions
to cover Bounkham’s medical expenses.
Despite an avowed policy of not using flash-bang grenades
when children are present, it seems that neither Terrell’s office
nor the Cornelia Police Department did anything to investigate that
possibility aside from asking the informant, who obviously was
wrong. Beyond the lack of due diligence on that point, there is the
question of whether tossing an exploding, potentially incendiary
device into a home that may be full of innocent people in the
middle of the night is A-OK as long as you are reasonably sure all
those people are 18 or older. And beyond that question, of course,
is the issue of whether violence is ever a morally acceptable
response to peaceful, consensual transactions between
adults.
Terrell continues to blame those transactions for the
horrible injuries police inflicted on a sleeping baby. “The
information we had from our confidential informant was there was no
children in the home,” he
told WXIA, the NBC station in Atlanta. “We always ask;
that determines how we enter the house and the things we do…. Did
we go by our training, did we go by the intelligence? Given the
same set of circumstances, with the same information dealing with a
subject who has known gun charges on him, who is selling meth, they
would go through the same procedures…Nothing would change….Had
no way of knowing the child was in the house. The little baby [who]
was in there didn’t deserve this. These drug dealers don’t
care.”
Terrell, by contrast, cares so much about the psychoactive
substances his neighbors consume that he is willing to endanger the
lives of innocent bystanders in his vain attempt to stop people
from getting high. If Terrell cared a little less, Bounkham would
be home with his parents instead of clinging to life in a
hospital.
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