Police seized 2 ounces of marijuana at the home of Anthony Diotaiuto after shooting him 10 times, according to information on the drug raid released Tuesday.
Also Tuesday, while many friends and relatives of the 23-year-old bartender and student mourned him at a Davie funeral home, others appeared at a Sunrise City Commission meeting to demand an explanation for the fatal raid.
“Do 2 ounces of marijuana constitute a death warrant?” asked Sunrise resident William de Larm, a friend of Diotaiuto’s.
We’re all so much safer. Thank God America has its priorities straight.
China isn’t the only place with a fucked-up legal system. Yes, theirs is worse, but this sure makes us look like idiots.
Via Balloon Juice, John Cole’s conservative-leaning blog that’s becoming one of my very favorites.
1
By Steve
I could not agree more. When will common sense put an end to the “Drug War”?
How many stories like this do we *not* read about every week? My guess is many, many…
August 11, 2005 @ 7:25 pm | Comment
2
By Gordon
This is just ridiculous!
Of course, the article doesn’t really give a lot of details as to what led police to search his resdience in the first place.
They generally don’t raid houses unless they are going after a dealer. Then again, has anyone else noticed how our police departments in the States are looking more and more like paramilitary soldiers?
They have their own tanks, their own Armored Personel Carriers, machine guns and whatever else the military supplies them with.
I had a post awhile back that addressed that very issue.
It may seem a bit extreme, but it’s a fact Jack!
August 11, 2005 @ 11:25 pm | Comment
3
By richard
They shot him ten times over 2 ounces of grass. Something really smells. Time to legalize marijuana completley, as it harms no one, certainly nenver even aproaching the evel of tobacco and booze. Priotities — ti’s all about our priorities. Grass should be way down there, like with jaywalking.
August 11, 2005 @ 11:40 pm | Comment
4
By Conrad
A 75-year-old retired minister died of a heart attack after struggling with 13 heavily armed Boston Police officers who stormed the wrong Dorchester apartment in a botched drug raid.
The Rev. Accelyne Williams struggled briefly when the raiding officers – some of them masked and carrying shotguns – subdued and handcuffed him, then he collapsed, police said.
“There is a likelihood or possibility that we did hit the wrong apartment,” said Police Commissioner Paul Evans at a news conference last night. “If that’s the case, then there will be an apology.”
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“Abbotsford is a town outside of Vancouver with its own police force. On Sunday, Jan 3 at 5pm, Abbotsford black-clad SWAT police stormed a house with a search warrant for marijuana.
Despite 2 hours surveillance through open, curtainless windows, the police thought there were only 2 adults in the house. There were actually 11 adults and 15 children, celebrating a child’s birthday party. One police officer shot the family dog three times, killing it in front of the children and splattering blood onto a two-week old baby.
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A family in Ohio is at home singing carols on Christmas Eve when masked men in black wielding machine guns kick down the door and wrestle Dad to the ground: The agents got two digits of the address mixed up.
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Ismael Mena, a 45-year-old father of nine, killed last September in his bedroom by SWAT team members who stormed the wrong house
Police say they found him armed with a .22 revolver, lying on his bed. Officers claim they screamed “Police!” and “Drop the gun!” repeatedly. Mena started to put the gun down, asking, “Policia?” But police say when they then moved to disarm him, he again raised the gun. Officers opened fire. Mena was hit by eight bullets and killed instantly. No drugs were found.
The next day, SWAT team officers learned they had raided the wrong residence-they should have gone next door, to 3742 High St.
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In 1997, John Hirko, a 21-year-old unarmed Pennsylvania man with no prior offenses, was shot to death in his house by a squad of masked police dressed in ninja-style uniforms. They didn’t even knock before tossing a smoke grenade through a window, setting fire to the house. Hirko, suspected of dealing small amounts of marijuana and cocaine, was found face down on his stairway, shot in the back while fleeing the fire.
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When Manuel Medina Ramirez, a 63-year-old retired golf-course groundskeeper, was routed from his slumber at 2 AM by armed men breaking down the door of his modest Stockton, CA. home, he instinctively reached for his bedside pistol. Shooting into the darkness, he brought one of the men down; the others returned fire, and Ramirez was shot dead in front of his son and daughter, who had also been awakened.
The armed men turned out to be a Stockton police antidrug team who had obtained a warrant for the house after a friend of the Ramirez family was found with marijuana in his car and gave the police the Ramirez address as his own. “He died not knowing they were police officers,” said Maria Ramirez, the victim’s 23-year-old daughter.
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A Colorado woman was hospitalized after eight DEA agents forced open her door, cursed her, and beat her to the ground – before realizing they were at the wrong house.
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A police SWAT team in Venice, MO. broke down the back door and crashed through the window of the home of Mayor Tyrone Echols in a fumbled crack raid. Police claimed that the goof resulted from a wrong address on the search warrant.
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Mario Paz was asleep with his wife in their Compton home at 11 p.m. in August 1999 when 20 members of the local SWAT team shot the locks off the front and back doors and stormed inside. Moments later, Mario Paz was dead, shot twice in the back, and his wife was outside, half-naked in handcuffs. The SWAT team had a warrant to search a neighbor’s house for drugs, but Mario Paz was not listed on it. No drugs were found, and no member of the family was charged with any crime.
August 12, 2005 @ 12:55 am | Comment
5
By Other Lisa
Oh, it’s so absurd. And also profitable. There was a famous case in Malibu a number of years back, where a guy was raided, basically so the Feds could seize his land and sell it. That’s how they keep themselves going, seizing peoples’ assets. The reason the Drug War hasn’t ended is that too many people are profiting from it.
I’m going to quote Ronald Reagan’s head of the DEA – I forget his name, but the Reagan administration quickly moved to flush his comments down the Memory Hole. The administration had originally tried to get the guy to state that marijuana was “Reefer Madness” level dangerous, and this was what the results of his research told him: “Marijuana is one of of the safest therapeutically active substances known to man.”
August 12, 2005 @ 2:33 am | Comment
6
By Other Lisa
Sorry, “famous” because of course the land owner was shot dead by some variety of police force (I forget which one) and hadn’t done anything. And they took his extremely valuable property and sold it because they found some nominal amount of marijuana on it.
August 12, 2005 @ 2:36 am | Comment