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| Chase and Payton when it was news. |
truthout | Berwyn Heights officer Amir Johnson knew this was his mayor’s house,
but had no idea what the commotion was about because the Prince George’s
County Police Department hadn’t bothered to contact the Berwyn Heights
police chief, as they were required to do under a memorandum of
understanding between the two agencies. Johnson told the Washington Post
that an officer at the scene told him, “The guy in there is crazy. He
says he is the mayor of Berwyn Heights.”
Johnson replied, “That is the mayor of Berwyn Heights.”
Johnson then called Berwyn Heights police chief Patrick Murphy.
Eventually, Murphy was put in touch with the supervising officer, Det.
Sgt. David Martini. Murphy recounted the conversation to the Post:
“Martini tells me that when the SWAT team came to the door, the mayor
met them at the door, opened it partially, saw who it was, and then
tried to slam the door on them,” Murphy recalled. “And that at that
point, Martini claimed, they had to force entry, the dogs took
aggressive stances, and they were shot.”
If that indeed was what Martini told Murphy, he was either lying or
repeating a lie told to him by one of his subordinates. There was never
any further mention of Calvo shutting the door on the SWAT team -
because it never happened. Calvo later had his dogs autopsied - the
trajectories the bullets took through the dogs’ bodies weren’t
consistent with the SWAT team’s story.
But the lies, obfuscations, and stonewalling were only beginning.
The police department would first claim that they had obtained a
no-knock warrant for the raid. They then backtracked and blamed Calvo’s
mother-in-law, arguing that when her scream blew their cover, they were
no longer obligated to knock and announce themselves. (This was an
interesting theory, given that the knock-and-announce requirement, by
definition, would have required them to blow their own cover. That’s the
point of the requirement.) Maj. Mark Magaw, commander of the Prince
George’s County narcotics enforcement division, claimed that the SWAT
team couldn’t have obtained a no-knock warrant if they had wanted to,
because the state of Maryland doesn’t allow them. This too was false.
The state had passed a bill allowing for no-knock warrants in 2005. It’s
the sort of law that one would think would have a day-to-day impact on
the drug unit of a police department that conducts several raids each
week. Yet the head narcotics unit in Prince George’s County was
completely ignorant of it. Three years later, Magaw would be promoted to
Prince George’s County police chief.
The affidavit for the search warrant was prepared by Det. Shawn
Scarlata. It is incredibly thin. In a few paragraphs, Scarlata relates
that he intercepted a FedEx package containing thirty-two pounds of
marijuana at one of the company’s warehouses. The package was addressed
to Trinity Tomsic at her home address. A police officer disguised as a
delivery man then took the package to Calvo’s house, where it was
accepted by Georgia Porter. There was also a one-paragraph description
of Calvo’s home. That’s the only information in the warrant specific to
Calvo and his family. The remainder of the six-page affidavit is a
cut-and-paste recitation of Scarlata’s training, qualifications, and
assumptions he felt he could make based on his experience as a narcotics
officer. As Calvo described the warrant in an online chat, “It talks
about all the stuff a drug trafficker should have in his or her home and
then says something like, ‘Although we know that the police have no
evidence of these things, they can be inferred from the very nature of
the charge.’ It is circular reasoning that says because we are
suspicious of you, there must be evidence of your guilt.”
On August 7, police arrested a FedEx driver and an accomplice and
charged them with various crimes related to drug trafficking. Trinity
Tomsic was never supposed to receive that package of marijuana. A drug
distributor in Arizona had used her address to get the package into the
general Prince George’s County area, at which point an accomplice
working for the delivery company was supposed to intercept it. The
police had found several similar packages. Worse, county police knew the
scheme was going on and knew some packages had been delivered to
residences unbeknownst to the people who lived in them. The Washington
Post reported a couple of months later on cases in which innocent people
had been arrested. “Defense lawyers who practice in the county said
authorities appear to arrest and charge anyone who picks up a package
containing marijuana without conducting a further investigation,” the
Post reported. “The more I think about that, the angrier I get,” Calvo
later told Post columnist Marc Fisher. “They knew this scheme was going
on, yet it never occurred to them from the moment they found out about
that package that we were anything but drug dealers.”
