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How A $50 Meth Deal And A Botched SWAT Raid Left A Baby Maimed
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How A $50 Meth Deal And A Botched SWAT Raid Left A Baby Maimed
When police raided a suburban Georgia home, looking for drugs and weapons, a stun grenade would leave a 19-month-old fighting for his life and his family facing more than $1 million in medical debt. The story of Baby Bou Bou and the commando cops. [Warning: Graphic Images]
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Chris Ritter / BuzzFeed
At 2:30 a.m., Habersham County SWAT busted in the door at 182 Lakeview Heights Circle in Cornelia, Georgia. Seconds later, a flash and a bang rang out inside the house.
The cops and the family of five adults and three kids converged on each other in the front room. The only family member that didn’t run toward the commotion was 19-month-old Bou Bou Phonesavanh, sleeping in a playpen six feet from the front door. The stun grenade that an officer had thrown detonated inside baby Bou Bou’s crib.
Bou Bou’s father, Bounkham Phonesavanh, entered the room and saw the blood on his son’s crib.
He saw blood on an officer standing over his son.
Then Bounkham was tackled to the ground, put in a chokehold, and handcuffed.
The mother, Alecia Phonesavanh, tried to get to her 19-month-old who was crying out.
“Please! He’s scared! He needs me,” Alecia pleaded with police.
A SWAT officer swooped Bou Bou up before Alecia could get to him and brought him outside into the driveway.
Bou Bou’s mother and father were told over and over by SWAT to “shut up and sit down! Shut up and sit down!”
It was early on the morning of May 28, 2014, and the Phonesavanh family was supposed to leave Georgia for good the very next day. They would end up staying another month and a half.
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Chris Ritter / BuzzFeed
Why did cops kick in the door of a house in a quiet Georgia suburb occupied by a family that included four children under the age of 8?
According to Habersham County police intelligence, 182 Lakeview Heights Circle was also the home of Wanis Thonetheva, a low-level drug dealer and Bounkham Phonesavanh’s nephew.
The day before the raid, Thonetheva sold $50 of methamphetamine to an informant in the driveway of 182 Lakeview Heights Circle. Following the successful drug buy, special agent Deputy Nikki Fautry drew up an affidavit for a warrant to raid the house at that address and arrest Thonetheva.
Because of a prior assault weapons charge against Thonetheva — and what would turn out to be bad police intelligence that there were multiple armed men guarding the home — a Habersham County judge signed off on a “no knock warrant” — giving the cops clearance to descend on the house, kick the door in, and use diversionary tactics like a flash-bang grenade without warning. According to the incident report obtained by BuzzFeed News, the police intelligence also said that there were no children at the residence.
Police would find no armed men, no drugs, no guns, and no Thonetheva at 182 Lakeview Heights Circle.
Ten minutes after the raid, the ambulance still hadn’t arrived on the scene to help her son, Alecia Phonesavanh told BuzzFeed News.
She and her husband and their three daughters had been taken out of the house and told to sit at the end of the driveway. Officers shielded Baby Bou Bou from their view.
“I was devastated as a mother because I couldn’t get to him. I couldn’t do anything for him,” Alecia said.
Her husband Bounkham, helpless and handcuffed, begged the officers to tell him what was going on.
“The officer walked toward my husband like he was going to kick him, telling him to shut up and be quiet or he would go to jail,” Alecia said.
Finally, the paramedics arrived to take Bou Bou. His parents were not allowed to go to the hospital with him. As the ambulance drove away, Bounkham and Alecia were taken to the back of the house to be interrogated by the Mountain Judicial Circuit Narcotics Criminal Investigation and Suppression team, the narcotics officers who were looking for Thonetheva.
Alecia was questioned first. The officer asked her if she knew why they were there and started asking her about Thonetheva.
“I told him, no, I don’t understand what’s going on. We didn’t do anything wrong,” Alecia said. “I told him, I don’t know anything about my husband’s nephew. He was never there.”
The NCIS officer brought in her husband. The officer said they had a warrant for his nephew’s arrest. Bounkham told the interrogator that Thonetheva didn’t even live here.
Hours later, Thonetheva was arrested a few doors down the street at the house where he actually stayed. The cops knocked on the front door and arrested Thonetheva peacefully when he came out. There was no kicking in the door, there were no flash-bang grenades. Thonetheva was later charged with distribution of narcotics for the $50 in meth he sold to the confidential informant.
Alecia and Bounkham were held at the scene for almost three hours after Bou Bou was hurt. At around 5:30 a.m., they were given a piece of paper with an address for an Atlanta hospital and told they could go pick up their 19-month-old son. They weren’t given any other information about Bou Bou other than he was “taken for observation.” The parents and their three daughters drove two hours from Cornelia to Atlanta.
They didn’t know if Bou Bou was alive or dead.
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Chris Ritter / BuzzFeed
How did this family end up living in a home that became the target of a middle-of-the-night drug raid with cops believing they might be armed and dangerous?
Prior to coming to coming to Georgia, the Phonesavanh family called Janesville, Wisconsin, home.
Earlier this year, Alecia, who is white, and Bounkham, who is Laotian, celebrated their 10-year wedding anniversary.
In Wisconsin, Alecia worked as a full-time nurse caring for elderly and disabled people. She worked 16-hour days, sometimes seven days a week to support the family.
Bounkham stayed at home and cared for the couple’s three daughters — ages 3, 5, and 7 — baby Bou Bou, and Alecia’s mentally disabled brother.
In March, a fire broke out and their Janesville house accidentally burned to ground, leaving them homeless.
For the past couple of years, Bounkham’s sister in Georgia had been asking the couple to come down and help her refinance her mortgage. She didn’t speak English well and could benefit from their help in negotiating the deal. With nowhere to go after the fire, Bounkham and Alecia decided it would be a good idea — they would have a free place to stay with his sister while they helped her, while also getting themselves back on their feet.
Six weeks went by in Cornelia, Georgia, and then Thonetheva started to come around. He was Bounkham’s sister’s son, but hadn’t lived at her home for over a year according to the family. Bounkham got a bad feeling about Thonetheva right away. And his sister told him that Thonetheva had recently stolen from her.
Bounkham decided that if Thonetheva was going to be hanging around the house, then it was time for his family to go back to Wisconsin.
The day before the raid, Bounkham was at the house at 182 Lakeview Heights Circle when he witnessed Thonetheva hanging out in the driveway. He noticed a bunch of people coming and going. He was nervous — he sensed drug-related activity was going on but says he never saw any drugs.
Luckily, he thought at the time, Bounkham had booked a U-Haul and the family was set to pack up and leave for Wisconsin.
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Chris Ritter / BuzzFeed
Hours after the raid, Alecia and her family finally arrived at the hospital in Atlanta. She was the only one allowed to go in and see Bou Bou.
The 19-month-old was in a medically induced coma and had been intubated. His face was covered because his nose had been blown off by the flash-bang grenade that landed in his playpen. His chest was also blown open. His left nipple was gone. He had burns on most of his body.
“No mother should have to ever see her child that way,” Alecia said.
Bou Bou spent the next month and half in two different hospitals. He spent ample time in and out of the burn unit and underwent multiple reconstructive surgeries on his face and chest.
Initially, no charges were brought against any of the officers involved in the raid. It would not be until the family’s lawyers petitioned the Habersham County district attorney that a grand jury investigation would be opened to investigate what happened during the raid on May 28.
A 23-person grand jury spent six days hearing testimony from the responding officers and Habersham County Sheriff Joey Terrill. They reviewed photo and audio evidence from the scene. They received a statement from Alecia Phonesavanh. Multiple attorneys were assigned to the case, with prosecutor Brian Rickham leading the presentation to grand jury.
Meanwhile, the deputy who secured the warrant for the raid on 182 Lakeview Heights Circle, Nikki Autry, resigned in June.
Then, a week before the grand jury’s decision, the Mountain NCIS team responsible for the bad intelligence on the house was disbanded and the investigation was reassigned to another drug task force. Prior to the Baby Bou Bou tragedy, the now-defunct NCIS team was facing a history of sloppy investigation that caused innocent casualties. The unit was also involved in at least one other botched drug raid that caused the accidental death of a young pastor in 2009.
The 15-page report presented on Monday, Oct. 6, 2014, by the grand jury called the investigation and raid “hurried, sloppy and unfortunately not in accordance with the best practices and procedures.”
At the same time, the report commended the officers (calling them “well intentioned”) and pointed out that the police, along with the family, are ailing from the incident. On the police, the grand jury wrote, “Rather than seeing un-feeling or un-caring robots, what has not been seen before by others and talked or written about, is that these individuals are suffering as well.”
On the Phonesavanh family, the grand jury wrote, “the evidence shows that the children were in danger from the moment they moved into the residence and the parents and extended family had some degree of knowledge concerning family members involved in criminal activity.”
“There is evidence that [the Phonesavanh family] were aware of criminal activity and drug sales on the part of persons at the residence, and specifically Wanis Thonetheva.”
Ultimately, the grand jury decided no criminal charges should be made against any of the cops that raided the house. The grand jury also said that the “no knock warrant” — which prompted the use of the flash-bang grenade that maimed Bou Bou — was justified given Thonetheva’s criminal past.
The Phonesavanh’s lawyer, Mawuli Davis, received the grand jury’s report the night before it was made public — he didn’t know how to explain the contents of it to Bou Bou’s parents, Bounkham and Alecia. “I could not explain to them why the law didn’t apply to them,” Davis told BuzzFeed News.
The next day at a press conference, Davis excoriated the actions of the grand jury, stating that they were protecting the officers who lived in the tight-knit Georgia community. “They’ve decided to stand on the side of their neighbor, their friend, the people they know.”
Representatives for Bounkham and Alecia read statements at the press conference that called the grand jury’s decision “devastating,” “unbelievable.”
For the Phonesavanh family, what is as discouraging as the contents in the grand jury’s report is what was omitted. For one, it makes no mention of the fact that Thonetheva was arrested without incident a few hours later at a different house — begging the question of why the mistakes in police intelligence and the officers’ actions at 182 Lakeview Heights Circle were not considered reckless in the eyes of the grand jury.
“The subject of the warrant was apprehended at his original place of residence. He was apprehended by a knock on the door,” family spokesman Marcus Coleman said at the press conference. “Why wasn’t he considered armed and dangerous at location B?”
The U.S. attorney for Northern Georgia told BuzzFeed News last week that she is taking up the case. Davis said that he will continue to seek charges brought against the deputy who obtained the “no knock warrant” and the officer who threw the flash-bang grenade.
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The Phonesavanh family Bounkham and Alecia Phonesavanh
A month and half after the raid, Bou Bou was released from the hospital and the Phonesavanh family left Georgia.
Their fight is far from over.
In August, the family suffered an additional blow when Habersham County informed the Phonesavanhs that it would be illegal for the county to assist the family in paying Bou Bou’s medical bills — which are in excess of $1 million and climbing.
Habersham County’s attorney said in a statement, “The question before the board was whether it is legally permitted to pay these expenses. After consideration of this question following advice of counsel, the board of commissioners has concluded that it would be in violation of the law for it to do so.”
The family has set up JusticeAndPrayersForBouBou.org to try to offset the cost. Also, last week Alecia was finally able to return to work so that the family has income again.
Alecia says she won’t have enough to throw Bou Bou a birthday party when he turns 2 on Oct. 14.
Baby Bou Bou’s fight for recovery may never be over. After the raid, he was diagnosed with brain shearing. Doctors told the family that it will be a couple years before they know the full extent of his brain damage.
This month, he is going in for another surgery that will scrape gun powder out from under the skin on his chest and arms.
Bou Bou suffered permanent nerve damage from the blast and his skin on his face and chest won’t grow back on it own. He is facing two plastic surgeries every two years until the age of 20.
At night, Bou Bou wakes up screaming and holding his face, Alecia says.
“It’s very tormenting to my husband and I,” Alecia said. “Nobody wants to go to sleep.”
“Every day is a battle for him. We’re trying to make things feel as normal for him as possible,” Alecia said.
Alecia says that when Bou Bou sees himself in the mirror, he stops and looks at himself, touching his face, trying to understand the scars on his face that he will likely have for the rest of his life.
“I know he’s going to ask what happened,” Alecia said. “He’s going to ask why does he have these scars?”
Contact the reporter: [email protected]
Read more: http://www.buzzfeed.com/mikehayes/how-a-meth-deal-and-a-botched-raid-left-a-baby-maimed
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Door-Busting Drug Raids Leave a Trail of Blood
By Kevin Sack, NY Times, March 18, 2017
CORNELIA, Ga.--This town on the edge of the Appalachians has fewer than 5,000 residents, but the SWAT team was outfitted for war.
At 2:15 a.m. on a moonless night in May 2014, 10 officers rolled up a driveway in an armored Humvee, three of them poised to leap off the running boards. They carried Colt submachine guns, light-mounted AR-15 rifles and Glock .40-caliber sidearms. Many wore green body armor and Kevlar helmets. They had a door-breaching shotgun, a battering ram, sledgehammers, Halligan bars for smashing windows, a ballistic shield and a potent flash-bang grenade.
The target was a single-story ranch-style house about 50 yards off Lakeview Heights Circle. Not even four hours earlier, three informants had bought $50 worth of methamphetamine in the front yard. That was enough to persuade the county’s chief magistrate to approve a no-knock search warrant authorizing the SWAT operators to storm the house without warning.
The point man on the entry team found the side door locked, and nodded to Deputy Jason Stribling, who took two swings with the metal battering ram. As the door splintered near the deadbolt, he yelled, “Sheriff’s department, search warrant!” Another deputy, Charles Long, had already pulled the pin on the flash-bang. He placed his left hand on Deputy Stribling’s back for stability, peered quickly into the dark and tossed the armed explosive about three feet inside the door.
It landed in a portable playpen.
As policing has militarized to fight a faltering war on drugs, few tactics have proved as dangerous as the use of forcible-entry raids to serve narcotics search warrants, which regularly introduce staggering levels of violence into missions that might be accomplished through patient stakeouts or simple knocks at the door.
Thousands of times a year, these “dynamic entry” raids exploit the element of surprise to effect seizures and arrests of neighborhood drug dealers. But they have also led time and again to avoidable deaths, gruesome injuries, demolished property, enduring trauma, blackened reputations and multimillion-dollar legal settlements at taxpayer expense, an investigation by The New York Times found.
For the most part, governments at all levels have chosen not to quantify the toll by requiring reporting on SWAT operations. But The Times’s investigation, which relied on dozens of open-record requests and thousands of pages from police and court files, found that at least 81 civilians and 13 law enforcement officers died in such raids from 2010 through 2016. Scores of others were maimed or wounded.
The casualties have occurred in the execution of no-knock warrants, which give the police prior judicial authority to force entry without notice, as well as warrants that require the police to knock and announce themselves before breaking down doors. Often, there is little difference.
Innocents have died in attacks on wrong addresses, including a 7-year-old girl in Detroit, and collaterally as the police pursued other residents, among them a 68-year-old grandfather in Framingham, Mass. Stray bullets have whizzed through neighboring homes, and in dozens of instances the victims of police gunfire have included the family dog.
Search warrant raids account for a small share of the nearly 1,000 fatalities each year in officer-involved shootings. But what distinguishes them from other risky interactions between the police and citizens, like domestic disputes, hostage-takings and confrontations with mentally ill people, is that they are initiated by law enforcement.
In a country where four in 10 adults have guns in their homes, the raids incite predictable collisions between forces that hurtle toward each other like speeding cars in a passing lane--officers with a license to invade private homes and residents convinced of their right to self-defense.
After being awakened by the shattering of doors and the detonation of stun grenades, bleary suspects reach for nearby weapons--at times realizing it is the police, at others mistaking them for intruders--and the shooting begins. In some cases, victims like Todd Blair, a Utah man who grabbed a golf club on the way out of his bedroom, have been slain by officers who perceived a greater threat than existed.
As the police broke down his door in 2010, Todd Blair emerged from his bedroom with a golf club. He was shot to death five seconds after the first ram at his front door.
To be sure, police officers and judges must find probable cause of criminal activity to justify a search warrant. Absent resources for endless stakeouts, police tacticians argue that dynamic entry provides the safest means to clear out heavily fortified drug houses and to catch suspects with the contraband needed for felony prosecutions.
But critics of the forced-entry raids question whether the benefits outweigh the risks. The drug crimes used to justify so many raids, they point out, are not capital offenses. And even if they were, that would not rationalize the killing or wounding of suspects without due process. Nor would it forgive the propensity of the police to err in the planning or execution of raids that are inherently chaotic and place bystanders in harm’s way.
Forcible-entry methods have become common practice over the last quarter century through a confluence of the war on drugs, the rise of special weapons and tactics squads, and Supreme Court rulings that have eroded Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches. Support for their continued use has been bolstered by an epidemic of opioid abuse and the threat of domestic terrorism.
Because many raids occur in low-income neighborhoods, shooting deaths like one in November of a 22-year-old black man in Salisbury, N.C., have exacerbated racial tensions already raw from a spate of high-profile police killings. The American Civil Liberties Union concluded in a recent study of 20 cities that 42 percent of those subjected to SWAT search warrant raids were black and 12 percent Hispanic. Of the 81 civilian deaths tallied by The Times, half were members of minority groups.
The no-knock process often begins with unreliable informants and cursory investigations that produce affidavits signed by unquestioning low-level judges. It is not uncommon for the searches to yield only misdemeanor-level stashes, or to come up empty.
In some instances when officers have been killed, suspects with no history of violence, found with small quantities of drugs, have wound up facing capital murder charges, and possible death sentences.
In December, a jury in Corpus Christi, Tex., acquitted a 48-year-old man who spent 664 days in jail after being charged with attempted capital murder for wounding three SWAT officers during a no-knock raid that targeted his nephew. The jury concluded that the man, Ray Rosas, did not know whom he was firing at through a blinded window.
While the raiders are typically seeking narcotics, there also have been deaths and serious injuries when warrants were served on people suspected of running illegal poker games, brewing moonshine and neglecting pets. In 2011, officers in Marine City, Mich., conducted a dynamic-entry raid to serve a search warrant for “any and all evidence pertaining to graffiti including but not limited to, spray paint containers, markers, notebooks, and photographs.” After forcing residents to the floor at gunpoint, they found nothing, according to depositions by the residents.
The Times found that from 2010 to 2015, an average of least 30 federal civil rights lawsuits were filed a year to protest residential search warrants executed with dynamic entries. Many of the complaints depict terrifying scenes in which children, elderly residents and people with disabilities are manhandled at gunpoint, unclothed adults are rousted from bed and houses are ransacked without recompense or apology. Louise Milan, 68, of Evansville, Ind., alleged in her filing that she and her 18-year-old daughter were handcuffed in front of neighbors during a door-busting 2012 raid prompted by threats against the police made by someone who had pirated her wireless connection.
“There’s a real misimpression by the public that aggressive police actions are only used against hardened criminals,” said Cary J. Hansel, a Baltimore lawyer who has represented plaintiffs in such lawsuits. “But there are dozens and dozens of cases where a no-knock warrant is used against somebody who’s totally innocent.”
At least seven of the federal lawsuits have been settled for more than $1 million in the last five years. They include a $3.75 million payment in 2016 to the family of Eurie Stamps, the unarmed Framingham grandfather who was accidentally shot, while compliant and on his stomach; and $3.4 million in 2013 to the family of Jose Guereña, a 26-year-old former Marine shot more than 20 times as agents broke into his house in Tucson. No drugs were found.
In each of those cases, as in almost all botched raids, prosecutors declined to press charges against the officers involved.
Perhaps no fiasco illustrates the perils of no-knock searches as graphically as the 2014 raid here in Georgia’s northeast corner. On May 22, an eager young Habersham County sheriff’s deputy named Nikki Autry, who was attached to a narcotics task force, turned a small-time methamphetamine user into a confidential informant. Intent on avoiding jail, the informant, James Alton Fry Jr., set about the task of baiting bigger fish.
According to trial testimony and investigative documents, the agents sent Mr. Fry out on the night of May 27 to make drug buys. He scored two Lortab pain pills on his first approach, struck out with a second source and then was connected to a meth dealer named Wanis Thonetheva. At around 10:30 p.m., Mr. Fry, his wife, Devon, and their housemate, Larry Wood--all persistent meth users--drove to the address provided by the dealer.
“It didn’t look like a drug house,” Ms. Fry later testified. “This was a nice house. It’s usually a shack or trailer.” The police did not follow them to provide protection or surveil the property.
Mr. Wood conducted his business out front with Mr. Thonetheva, a 30-year-old American-born son of Laotian immigrants, as the Frys waited in their red pickup. All three appeared shaken when they met up with their handlers in a church parking lot. They had spotted two men at the house whom they took to be guards for the drug operation, and a third who might have been a supplier.
The agents sent the informants home, but about half an hour later Deputy Autry texted Ms. Fry with an afterthought. “Did y’all see any signs of kids at wanis’ house,” she asked.
“Nothing except a mini van,” came the response.
Thinking she was on to a big score, Deputy Autry, who was 28, did not wait for daylight or further investigation. She returned to the Sheriff’s Office, where she pulled Mr. Thonetheva’s criminal history and mug shot. With the approval of the sheriff, Joey Terrell, she alerted the county’s Special Response Team to prepare for a raid. She and her drug unit commander, Murray J. Kogod, began drafting the application for the no-knock warrant.
The affidavit included inaccuracies and hyperbole. It asserted incorrectly that Mr. Fry--the only informant formally certified by the police--had bought the drugs, rather than Mr. Wood. Deputy Autry described Mr. Fry as “a true and reliable informant,” even though he had not made a buy before that night. Despite the lack of surveillance, she wrote that she had “confirmed that there is heavy traffic in and out of the residence.”
Shortly after midnight, Deputy Autry and another agent awakened the county magistrate, James N. Butterworth, with a house call. He read the affidavit and placed her under oath.
She told him that Mr. Thonetheva had been arrested several times for drug possession, that there might be armed lookouts at the house and that an assault involving an AK-47 had been reported there the previous year. The judge, who had never denied Deputy Autry a warrant, found no reason to dispute probable cause and signed at 12:15 a.m.
“If you had drugs and you had weapons, that was constitutional purpose to go on in there, not to knock on the door,” he later testified.
The Special Response Team, formed three years earlier, consisted of a dozen men plucked from the Sheriff’s Office and the Cornelia Police Department. They trained on their own time for four hours each Thursday. The Humvee had been procured through a Pentagon program that made surplus military equipment available to even the most rural departments.
There had been few chances to quell riots and subdue active shooters in the hamlets of Habersham County, population 43,000. Instead, the unit had been used primarily to serve narcotics search warrants, 32 times in all.
During their pre-raid briefing, team members circulated a photograph of Mr. Thonetheva, a Google Earth image of the brick house with dark shutters and a sketch of the three-bedroom interior. Deputy Autry mistakenly told the team’s commander that the drug deal had gone down near a side door to an enclosed garage, so he plotted his entry from there. She told him there were no signs of children or animals, failing to mention the minivan.
When the flash-bang detonated with a concussive boom, a blinding white light filled the room. The entry team rumbled in, screaming for the occupants to get to the ground. Deputy Stribling peered into the playpen with a flashlight and found 19-month-old Bounkham Phonesavanh.
Deputy Stribling waved off Deputy Long, who had lobbed the grenade. “Charlie, go away, you don’t need to see this,” he said.
The child, known affectionately as Bou Bou, had a long laceration and burns across his chest, exposing his ribs, and another gash between his upper lip and nose. His round, cherubic face was bloodied and blistered, spackled with shrapnel and soot. The heat had singed away much of his pillow and dissolved the mesh side of the playpen.
At first the child was silent. But as Deputy Stribling picked him up, rubbed his feet and shook his arms, he began to wail. Even the drug agents stationed outside the other end of the house could hear the screams.
“You don’t think that baby got hurt, do you?” one asked another.
Some mistakes might be laughable were they not so consequential.
In May 2010, the police in Hempstead, N.Y., shot and wounded 22-year-old Iyanna Davis during a no-knock raid at a two-family residence where she lived in an upstairs unit with a separate entrance. The warrant was for downstairs.
Ms. Davis was awakened at about 7 a.m. by the sound of a door’s being smashed and hid in a closet, she recounted in a deposition. A Nassau County police officer, armed with an assault rifle, opened the door, found her crouching and screamed at her to raise her hands.
“That’s when I heard the shot,” she recounted. “The force actually knocked me back on my backside.” The bullet had entered her right breast and exited her abdomen.
In his own deposition, the officer, Michael Capobianco, said that he “tripped and didn’t mean to fire.” He was cleared of any policy violations; Ms. Davis, who spent a week in the hospital and another three months recuperating, won $650,000 in a legal settlement from the county.
Some SWAT veterans find it confounding that many police agencies remain so devoted to dynamic entry. The tactic is far from universally embraced, and a number of departments have retired or restricted its use over the years, often after a bad experience.
The National Tactical Officers Association, which might be expected to mount the most ardent defense, has long called for using dynamic entry sparingly. Robert Chabali, the group’s chairman from 2012 to 2015, goes so far as to recommend that it never be used to serve narcotics warrants.
“It just makes no sense,” said Mr. Chabali, a SWAT veteran who retired as assistant chief of the Dayton, Ohio, Police Department in 2015. “Why would you run into a gunfight? If we are going to risk our lives, we risk them for a hostage, for a citizen, for a fellow officer. You definitely don’t go in and risk your life for drugs.”
Another former chairman of the association, Phil Hansen, said SWAT teams tended to use dynamic entry as “a one-size-fits-all solution to tactical problems.” As commander of the Police Department in Santa Maria, Calif., and before that a longtime SWAT leader for the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, he said it seemed foolhardy to move so aggressively in a state that voted in November to legalize recreational marijuana.
“Why am I risking people’s lives to save an ounce of something that they’re bringing in by the freighter every year?” he asked.
Clearly there are factors that contribute to the tactic’s staying power. Some of it, according to long-term observers, derives from the adrenalized, hypermasculine, militaristic ethos of SWAT.
“It’s culturally intoxicating, a rush,” said Dr. Kraska, the criminologist. “It involves dressing up in body armor and provocative face coverings and enhanced-hearing sets, a cyborg 21st-century kind of appeal. And instead of sitting around and waiting for something to happen twice or three times a year, you can go out and generate it.”
That culture is reinforced by a cottage industry of tactical training contractors, many of them veterans of the Iraq or Afghanistan wars, who are hired by police departments to keep SWAT teams up to date.
“For them, collateral damage is something you try to avoid but it’s not a deal breaker,” Commander Hansen said. “That doesn’t translate well for police work. If you’re in the military and told to clear a block of houses in a half-hour, you’re going to do it quickly by kicking in doors and throwing grenades. It’s a whole different theater of operations.”
Another potential factor is the incentive sometimes provided by asset forfeiture laws when contraband or drug proceeds are found in a residence. Revenue generated by those seizures typically reverts back to law enforcement agencies.
Connor Boyack, president of the Libertas Institute in Utah, said that was one of the rationales behind his state’s recent ban on forcible entry in drug possession cases. In 2015 when the new law passed, search warrant executions accounted for 29 percent of all forfeitures, according to a state report.
“We feel strongly that a lot of this is financial motive, not to keep the community safe,” said Mr. Boyack, whose libertarian-leaning group advocated for the restriction.
Further inducement has come from the Defense Department’s excess property program, which has distributed more than $6 billion in military vehicles, weapons and other equipment to law enforcement agencies since 1997. Until last May, the Pentagon required that any transferred equipment be “placed into use within one year of receipt.”
The Obama administration ended that requirement after a larger review of the so-called 1033 program, which was prompted by the police response to the 2014 civil unrest in Ferguson, Mo. President Trump has yet to act on a campaign pledge to rescind an executive order signed by President Barack Obama in 2015 that limited the kinds of equipment offered by the government. It is unclear whether he would reinstate the one-year rule.
As SWAT officers administered first aid to Bou Bou Phonesavanh, other agents detained his parents--Bounkham and Alecia Phonesavanh--and their three other children, ages 3 to 7.
“You know why we’re here,” an officer barked at Mr. Phonesavanh.
He didn’t. “Why didn’t you knock on the door?” he asked.
Elsewhere in the house, the agents came upon Mr. Phonesavanh’s sister, Amanda Thonetheva, who owned the place, as well as her boyfriend, her grandson and one of her sons. They did not find her other son, 30-year-old Wanis, who no longer lived there but dropped by at times. Nor did they find guns or drugs beyond some meth residue in a glass pipe. Later that night, deputies arrested Wanis at another address.
The Phonesavanhs had already suffered their share of misfortune. Earlier that year, the family’s house in Janesville, Wis., had burned down. They stayed in a motel as long as they could afford it, then lived for two weeks in their 11-year-old Chrysler Town & Country minivan.
They drove to Georgia when Mr. Phonesavanh’s sister offered the room in her garage. Seven weeks later, after struggling to find work, they were preparing to drive back to Wisconsin.
Remarkably, Bou Bou survived the explosion after being sped to a hospital in Atlanta. Now 4, he underwent his 15th surgery late last year, with more to come, his mother said. “The nightmares are still there,” she said, “several times a week. When he wakes up he’s usually sweating and holding his face.” She said all of her children became scared when they saw a police officer or security guard.
The Phonsevanhs, who have returned to Janesville, received $3.6 million in settlements to the federal lawsuit they filed against the traumatized members of the drug and SWAT teams. The payments were made through government insurance policies purchased with taxpayer funds. All but $200,000, Ms. Phonesavanh said, has been spent on medical and legal bills.
“Things are still quite the struggle,” she said. “They didn’t mean to hurt my son, but they could’ve done a lot more to prevent this.”
A Habersham County grand jury issued a stinging report, but found no criminal negligence and declined to indict any of the participants. Federal prosecutors then won an indictment of Deputy Autry for violating Bou Bou’s civil rights, but she was acquitted after a weeklong trial. The jury accepted the defense’s assertion that the mistakes made by the former deputy, who had resigned, were unintentional.
In their closing arguments, opposing lawyers found common ground in their criticism of no-knock searches.
The prosecutor, Assistant United States Attorney William L. McKinnon Jr., called the tactic “probably the most intrusive contact that any citizen could have with the government.” He got no dispute from one of Deputy Autry’s lawyers, Michael J. Trost. “There’s a pattern of excess in the ways search warrants are executed,” he told the jury. “That’s what led to the injuries to this child.”
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