Washington Post – by Radley Balko
After Georgia’s Mountain Judicial Circuit Narcotics Criminal Investigation and Suppression Team burned a toddler with a flashbang grenade during a drug raid on Wednesday, Habersham County Sheriff Joey Terrell told Access North Georgia:
“The person I blame in this whole thing is the person selling the drugs,” Terrell said. “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.
Of course, Terrell’s task force didn’t even know there was a child in the home. So it’s hard to argue they “cared” much either, at least not enough to let the kid’s safety trump the safety of the officers, or the need to get into the home quickly to prevent any evidence from being destroyed so they can preserve their conviction. It’s also a bit much to call Thonetheva a “terrorist” shortly after his own officers have just burned a baby.
But this same task force has a history. In February, I posted about a settlement in the death of Jonathan Ayers, an innocent pastor that this same drug task force killed in a drug operation in 2009.
In September 2009, the young pastor Ayers was ministering to a young woman whom a Georgia drug task force was investigating on drug charges. (She had allegedly sold an undercover officer $50 worth of cocaine.) When task force members saw Ayers alone in the car with the woman, they switched their focus to him. According to Ayers’s lawsuit, the woman was about to be evicted from the motel at which she was staying. Ayers gave her the $23 in his pocket to help cover her rent.
The task force followed Ayers to a convenience store, where he went in to get money from an ATM. When he returned and got into his car they pounced. They pulled up behind him in an unmarked black SUV. Armed agents dressed in street clothes then rushed Ayers’s car. He put his car in reverse and attempted to escape. In the process, he nicked one agent. Another then opened fire, killing him. Ayers told hospital staff was that he thought he was being robbed. His reported last words were, “Who shot me?”
Ayers had no drugs in his car or in his system, and there was no evidence he was using or distributing anything illegal. Still, local law enforcement officials tried to smear him. They first said he was part of their drug investigation all along, then retracted. The woman the police were following initially said in an interview that Ayers was counseling her and helping her kick her drug habit. Later, while facing criminal charges for a separate incident, she changed her story and claimed that Ayers had been paying her for sex.
In the end, Ayers was innocent, and a federal jury awarded his widow a $2 million settlement.
In the burned toddler raid, Terrell told the paper that District Attorney Brian Rickman had already cleared the task force of any wrongdoing. That’s a remarkably fast investigation given that the raid happened less than two days ago. Rickman also cleared the cops in the Ayers case. So did the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. Rickman would tell a local paper that the investigations went “to extraordinary lengths,” and, “I do not see how anybody could say the process was unfair based on the lengths that they went to.”
Here’s what happened next:
Ayers left behind a wife, Abigail, who at the time of his death was pregnant with her first child. She filed a lawsuit and hired her own investigator to look into the shooting. What he found is astonishing. As it turns out, Officer Billy Shane Harrison, the cop who shot Ayers, hadn’t taken the series of firearms training classes required for his certification as a police officer. It gets worse. It turns out that Harrison also had received zero training in the use of lethal force.
He wasn’t authorized to make arrests or to carry a gun. Yet somehow he had been given a position on a narcotics task force, a position that not only gave him a gun but put him in volatile, high-stakes situations where he might be tempted to use it. Abigail Ayers’s lawsuit also alleged that Harrison and Officer Chance Oxner, who initially bought the drugs from the woman Ayers was counseling, had a history of disciplinary problems, including use of illicit drugs.
So those “fair” investigations that went to “extraordinary lengths” failed to discover that the cop who shot Ayers not only had prior disciplinary problems, but also he wasn’t even legally authorized to be a cop, much less carry a gun. It was later revealed that Rickman had appointed the head of the task force at the time of the Ayers shooting, and was a close personal friend with the officer (who is now deceased).
So maybe we should take Rickman’s quick assessment of this week’s raid with a grain of salt.
In my post on Ayers, I noted how little professional accountability there had been for the death of Jonathan Ayers. The cop who killed him was fired, but only after it was revealed that he lacked the training. One other law enforcement official was fired for lying about the training. No one was disciplined for the actual killing of Ayers. Rickman, Terrell, and the other sheriff who oversees the task force were all reelected.
Perhaps we shouldn’t be all that surprised that a sheriff who sees drug suspects as “terrorists” also oversees a drug task force that has now killed an innocent pastor and burned a two-year-old child.
Publish the names, phone numbers, and addresses of the task force members so the public can “take care” of this problem.
“Publish the names, phone numbers, and addresses of the task force members so the public can “take care” of this problem.”
That has been done a few times(unfortunately) over the past few years, and the “public” has not yet “taken care” of the problem.
It is time for the Patriots of our Republic to step up their game.
Do I really need to drag Shakespeare into this discussion, to strengthen our resolve, or is faith in God and morality enough?
“Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more; Or close the wall up with our English dead.
In peace there’s nothing so becomes a man
As modest stillness and humility:
But when the blast of war blows in our ears,
Then imitate the action of the tiger;
Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood,
Disguise fair nature with hard-favour’d rage.”
“From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remembered-
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother.”
“Publish the names, phone numbers, and addresses of the task force members so the public can “take care” of this problem”. Absolutely. then we can begin to take care of this vermin.
The key players are already known, being that they murdered a Pastor in 2009.
“…Habersham County Sheriff Joey Terrell told Access North Georgia:
“The person I blame in this whole thing is the person selling the drugs,” Terrell said. “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.”
The person selling drugs was NOT the POS who threw that flash grenade, @SSHOLE!!! On top of that, the f%&king so-called ‘government’ is the one supplying MOST of ‘illegal’ drugs in this country, so if you’re going to blame the drug dealers, blame the top suppliers, you worthless POS.
Looking forward to seeing you and your murderous scumbag gang in blue getting your just rewards. As you’ve shown no mercy in your dealings with the public, NONE will be shown you.
Retribution is inevitable.
Life in prison for the SWAT Team…..
They are the killers/terrorists….
A person wanting to put drugs in their body is making a
personal decision regarding his own body.
No one else is affected by that decision…..
Just like walking into the bar for a drink….
or popping pills provided by the pharmaceutical pushers….
The SWAT assholes are murdering people in cold blood…..
they must enjoy it, because they keep on doing it….
These are the killers….
They must have no conscience
No belief in God
No belief in human rights
No respect for life
and the stupidest people on the planet……
They can’t think for themselves to determine right from wrong.
They cannot escape God….
They cannot escape Karma…..
They can’t even get the addresses right half the time,
that’s how much they give a damn about who they will be killing next!
I do wonder how each of them will feel when
the day comes that each are busy killing me and my family….
while some neighboring towns SWAT department is killing THEIR parents, wives, and children….maybe because they go to the wrong address, by accident…
“The person selling drugs was NOT the POS who threw that flash grenade, @SSHOLE!!!”
Even worse than him: “A 19-month-old boy was sleeping in a Georgia home with his parents and three older sisters when police entered, looking for a drug suspect. Officers threw a stun grenade into the boy’s crib, critically injuring the toddler, his parents say. The family, visiting from Wisconsin, was not associated with the crime, and the suspect was arrested at a different house.
BY Meg Wagner/ New York Daily News
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS / Friday, May 30, 2014, 7:33 AM
Hope they’re ALL dead within a week after the SHTF.
These people need to be stopped,either by the courts or the citizens.As I have said before,though happy not more violence and instead lawsuits sooner or later these nazis will F$#k with the wrong family who will not accept a money court ordered bribe as a settlement,then things will get even more interesting.
Someone needs to remind the task force that the CIA is the #1 importer of illegal narcotics and people into the US without which they would have no jobs. The hypocrisy is nauseating.
I hope police are reading these blog commentaries, because this is what is coming for these thugs, and rightly so. It is amazing that these so-called police don’t seem to care that the woman in question is NOT GUILTY of anything until she has had her day in court. What was the child guilty of?
Yeah, I’m speaking to that arrogant and self-righteous sheriff, the puffed-up pissant. I hope the family of that poor kid sue these people for state and federal civil rights violations and that an honest prosecutor will charge these officers with mayhem and felony assault.
I agree that only the people can put a stop to this…and we had better do it soon before the lid blows off of this country in response to us having our children murdered in their beds, old men shot down on the highway, women shot dead in their cars, and veterans beaten to a pulp and killed at VA hospitals and homeless men murdered for sleeping out on a mountain.
Oh, yes. You black robes…you have had a hand in all of this by failing to hold these thugs accountable. Your day will be coming, too. Politicians…take notice of the black clouds forming all over America.
The parents don’t need their day in court.
They are already known to be innocent.
“A 19-month-old boy was sleeping in a Georgia home with his parents and three older sisters when police entered, looking for a drug suspect. Officers threw a stun grenade into the boy’s crib, critically injuring the toddler, his parents say. The family, visiting from Wisconsin, was not associated with the crime, and the suspect was arrested at a different house.
BY Meg Wagner/ New York Daily News
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS / Friday, May 30, 2014, 7:33 AM
Heres the email of Terell
Was on Sipsey
jterrell@habershamga.com