A 12-year-old girl suffered burns to one side of her body
when a flash grenade went off next to her as a police SWAT team raided a
West End home Tuesday morning.
"She has first- and second-degree
burns down the left side of her body and on her arms," said the girl's
mother, Jackie Fasching. "She's got severe pain. Every time I think
about it, it brings tears to my eyes."
Medical staff at the scene
tended to the girl afterward and then her mother drove her to the
hospital, where she was treated and released later that day.
A photo of the girl provided by Fasching to The Gazette shows red and black burns on her side.
Police
Chief Rich St. John said the 6 a.m. raid at 2128 Custer Ave., was to
execute a search warrant as part of an ongoing narcotics investigation
by the City-County Special Investigations Unit.
The grenade is
commonly called a "flash-bang" and is used to disorient people with a
bright flash, a loud bang and a concussive blast. It went off on the
floor where the girl was sleeping. She was in her sister's bedroom near
the window the grenade came through, Fasching said.
A SWAT member
attached it to a boomstick, a metal pole that detonates the grenade, and
stuck it through the bedroom window. St. John said the grenade normally
stays on the boomstick so it goes off in a controlled manner at a
higher level.
However, the officer didn't realize that there was a
delay on the grenade when he tried to detonate it. He dropped it to
move onto a new device, St. John said. The grenade fell to the floor and
went off near the girl.
"It was totally unforeseen, totally
unplanned and extremely regrettable," St. John said. "We certainly did
not want a juvenile, or anyone else for that matter, to get injured."
On Thursday, Fasching took her daughter back to the hospital to have her wounds treated.
She questioned why police would take such actions with children in the home and why it needed a SWAT team.
"A
simple knock on the door and I would've let them in," she said. "They
said their intel told them there was a meth lab at our house. If they
would've checked, they would've known there's not."
She and her
two daughters and her husband were home at the time of the raid. She
said her husband, who suffers from congenital heart disease and liver
failure, told officers he would open the front door as the raid began
and was opening it as they knocked it down.
When the grenade went
off in the room, it left a large bowl-shaped dent in the wall and "blew
the nails out of the drywall," Fasching said.
St. John said
investigators did plenty of homework on the residence before deciding to
launch the raid but didn't know children were inside.
"The
information that we had did not have any juveniles in the house and did
not have any juveniles in the room," he said. "We generally do not
introduce these disorienting devices when they're present."
The decision to use a SWAT team was based on a detailed checklist the department uses when serving warrants.
Investigators consider
dozens of items such as residents' past criminal convictions, other
criminal history, mental illness and previous interactions with law
enforcement.
Each item is assigned a point value and if the total
exceeds a certain threshold, SWAT is requested. Then a commander
approves or rejects the request.
In Tuesday's raid, the points exceeded the threshold and investigators called in SWAT.
"Every
bit of information and intelligence that we have comes together and we
determine what kind of risk is there," St. John said. "The warrant was
based on some hard evidence and everything we knew at the time."
But Fasching said the risk wasn't there and the entry created, for her and her daughters, a sense of fear they can't shake.
"I'm going to have to take them to counseling," she said. "They're never going to get over that."
A
claims process has already been started with the city. St. John said
it's not an overnight process, but it does determine if the Police
Department needs to make restitution.
"If we're wrong or made a
mistake, then we're going to take care of it," he said. "But if it
determines we're not, then we'll go with that. When we do this, we want
to ensure the safety of not only the officers, but the residents
inside."
No arrests were made during the raid and no charges have
been filed, although a police spokesman said afterward that some
evidence was recovered during the search. St. John declined to release
specifics of the drug case, citing the active investigation, but did say
that "activity was significant enough where our drug unit requested a
search warrant."
Fasching said she's considering legal action but, for now, is more concerned about her daughters.
"I
would like to see whoever threw those grenades in my daughter's room be
reprimanded," she said. "If anybody else did that it would be
aggravated assault. I just want to see that the city is held accountable
for what they did to my children."
Ok, first and foremost: Who the BLOODY FUCK thought it would be a good idea to let a CLEARLY untrained asshole operate the distraction devices? He "didn't know" there was a delay on the fucking grenade? So, his plan was to shuck the fucking thing off the end of the pole into the room, and load another?
Hey, how about this? How about, instead of dropping the fucking UNEXPLODED ORDINANCE inside what is SUPPOSED to be a fucking meth lab, how about throwing it out into the street for later disposal?
Another thing, this was supposed to be a raid on a METH LAB. SO WHY THE FUCK WERE THEY USING FLASHBANGS?!?!?!?
This department should be made to pay, both for the damage to the house and the injuries to the little girl.
This bullshit is going too far. Enough already.
