Michigan:
Mother & Children Left Homeless After Police Destroy Their Home Looking For
Non-Existent Suspect
An
innocent mother and her three children are now homeless just before Christmas
after police destroyed their home looking for a suspect who was not there.
Buena Vista
Twp, MI — If police think there is a bad guy in your home, they can and smash
out windows, kick in doors, and even rip walls completely off. Even when this
alleged bad guy is not in the home, police can and will destroy it anyway.
Crystal Thomas just learned this fact the hard way—and just before Christmas,
she is now homeless.
Last Friday,
police executed a search warrant at Thomas’ home looking for her 16-year-old
son who was suspected of robbing a store. The execution of the search warrant
consisted of smashing in all the windows, tearing off doors, kicking in window units, ripping walls off, and destroying
furniture. Cops even smashed the basketball goal outside the home—just for good
measure.
“They
made sure I could not live in my home,” said Thomas, who is now homeless along
with her three other children.
Thomas said when police notified her
of the search warrant and detained her on her way home, she offered to
cooperate fully, going so far as to offer them a key. She explained to the
officers that she had not seen her son since he became defiant.
“I cooperated with them to the
fullest while I was detained,” she said. “My son called my phone several times
while I was detained and they told me to answer it the last time he called.”
When her son called, Thomas told him
to turn himself in and she offered to let police into her home to show them he
was not there.
“They got the same info from me and
my kids,” she said.
Even though Thomas and all of her
children told the SWAT team that her son was not in the house, officer safety
trumped logic and reason—and, apparently, a roof over a family’s head.
“They
said they can’t do it like this because there are precautions,” she said. “I
didn’t know the precautions would be all of this.”
The
“precautions” consisted of all but tearing the home completely down and then
sending in a robot to find that no one was in the home. It looked like a
tornado had come through.
“They
sent the robot in after they tore up the house,” Thomas said to mLive.com, tearfully. “They could’ve sent the
robot first.”
Now,
as Thomas struggles to find a place to live just before Christmas, police tell
her that it is up to her to try and recover her losses.
“The
owner can file a claim with the insurance company and the insurance company
goes through the state administrator,” MSP Lt. David Kaiser said. “The owner has already been
in contact and is working with the state police and insurance company.”
Kaiser
called the incident unfortunate, “especially with the holidays coming.”
“It’s
not her fault that her son made some bad decisions,” Kaiser said, ignoring the
fact that it was police who destroyed her home, not her son.
Sadly,
police destroying homes looking for non-existent suspects
happens more than people think. As TFTP previously reported, Cherokee County
Sheriff David Groves and his heroic team of militarized storm troopers
descended on the home of a single mom and her five kids in Galena, Kansas just
before Christmas in 2015.
Upon
removing the mother and her five children from the house, police entered into a
20-hour-long standoff — with the empty house.
After
not breaking things or killing anyone for 19 hours, the officers became
restless, said to hell with the Sheriff’s strategy of waiting for him to come
out, and proceeded to storm the home.
A
SWAT truck with a battering ram attached was used to poke holes and tear apart
the house in an attempt to drive the nonexistent suspect out. As deputies
became unable to find him, they began taking their frustration out on couches,
beds, lamps, clothing, toys, and even the family’s Christmas tree was ripped
through a window and smashed to bits.
Just
like Thomas, the entire time, Nita Lane, the homeowner, was trying to tell the
cops that the suspect was not there and does not live there. Just like
Thomas, police did not
listen.
Article
posted with permission from The Free
Thought Project
Norb Leahy, Dunwoody
GA Tea Party Leader
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