This is fucking pathetic

[JE]

Warning: long article


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/23/AR2009012302935.html?hpid=topnews

Payton swung his big, goofy head onto the bed, worked his snout under a pillow and gave a gentle bump. The mayor's wife, nudged awake, opened her eyes and smiled. Payton, the couple's playful No. 1 dog, was letting her know that he and his timid little brother, Chase, needed their morning walk. As the mayor's wife stirred, the two black Labs -- known collectively as "the boys" -- panted and bounded round the bed gleefully. "Get up! Get up! Get up! Get Up!" the boys seemed to be saying. They did this every morning. Inside this sunny red-brick house on a well-tended corner lot in the tiny town of Berwyn Heights in Prince George's County, the family routines were precise from thousands of loving retracings; and they almost all revolved around the boys.

After six years of marriage, Trinity Tomsic and her husband, Berwyn Heights Mayor Cheye (sounds like "Shy") Calvo, still hoped for children. As the couple waited, the boys were more than a balm; they were a shared joy. Cheye, 37, and Trinity, 33, had even bought this quaint little house because it had a fenced yard with an expansive lawn where the boys could romp -- dog heaven. On this morning, Tuesday, July 29, Trinity fed the boys by 5 a.m., then planned to take Chase running before walking Payton. Running was the one activity at which shy Chase bested Payton, who had long ago been slowed by a leg injury. "Chase knew we were going to go running before I even had my tennis shoes on," Trinity later recalled. "I don't know how he knew. He just always did."

Trinity snapped Chase in his running harness, then reconsidered. She was a finance officer for the state of Maryland. She had a stack of crucial reports awaiting her approval. Maybe she should just leave for the office now. "I came very close to telling him that we'd have to run later," she recalled. But Chase looked so ridiculously excited that Trinity couldn't stand to disappoint him. "He was jumping up and down, up and down, like, 'We're going to go running! We're going to go running.' It was the best thing to see him so happy."

And so, they ran out from their tidy house with the pretty mailbox made to match, down familiar streets where they knew neighbors by name and habit, past the home of the sweet old man who always joked when he saw them running: "They went that-a-way." They ran until Trinity tired, and Chase looked back at her with an expression she read as, "Mom, could you speed it up?"

"It's so important to me that we ran," Trinity says now. "I would feel so terrible if, on that last day, the thing he loved most I bailed on because I wanted to get to the office a few minutes early."


***

Cheye was sitting on the edge of his bed in his boxers. He was just about to put on his black dress socks, when he heard Georgia scream something that made absolutely no sense. He looked out a bedroom window to see armed, masked men running. He was still wondering if they were home invaders when he heard his front door shatter.

In the kitchen, Georgia spun to face the sound of the splintering door. Men in black burst through the front door and into the living room.

Georgia stood trembling in front of the kitchen stove. Payton, who had been stretched out in a corner of the living room farthest from the front door, his head resting near the threshold to the kitchen "turned toward the front door when I turned," Georgia recalled. "He didn't have time to do anything else." Almost instantly, men in black ran forward and shot Payton in the face, Georgia said. "They kept shooting," she recalled. "I didn't know how many times they shot Payton because there was so much gunfire."

"Down on the ground!" Georgia recalled someone screaming at her. She was too terrified to move.
Chase, always timid even when there was nothing to fear, did what he did best -- he ran. He ran away from the men in black, zipped past Georgia at the stove, Georgia recalled. The screaming, running men followed Chase, shooting as he tried escaping into the dining room, Georgia said. She watched in horror as men in black rushed the dining room from all directions. "I could hear Chase whimpering," Georgia said. Then she heard someone shoot at Chase again, she said.

Men kept yelling at Georgia to get down, but she couldn't budge. "Somebody pushed me on the ground, and they put a gun to my head," she said. Face down on the kitchen floor, Georgia felt someone yank her hands behind her, rip the spoon away and secure her hands. When she lifted her eyes, she could just see Payton's big head resting near the kitchen threshold. He wasn't moving.

"Where are they?" one of the men screamed at Georgia. "Where are they?"

She had no idea what he was talking about. Georgia says she felt the barrel of an assault rifle against her left ear. "Where are they?" a man demanded.

"In the basement?" Georgia remembers saying. Some of the men thundered down the basement steps.
"It was a question, 'In the basement?' Because, if somebody puts a gun to your head and asks you a question, you better come up with an answer. Then I shut my eyes. Oh, God, I thought they were going to shoot me next."

Upstairs, Cheye fell to the bedroom floor at the sound of gunfire. He heard: bang, bang, bang, bang, undecipherable shouts, bang, bang.

"Downstairs!" Cheye heard men call to each other as they began to search the house. Then, more ominously, they yelled: "Upstairs! Upstairs!"

"I'm up here," Cheye recalled calling out. "Please don't shoot. Please don't shoot."
Somebody ordered Cheye to come down. He stood gingerly and peered down the stairwell. "I remember turning and seeing the barrels of two shotguns pointed at me," he said. "I don't know what kind. I'm not a gun person."

"Turn around and walk down the stairs backwards," someone demanded.

So, he did. Clad only in his boxer shorts, the mayor of Berwyn Heights walked slowly down his staircase backwards, his open hands held high. Ever so slowly, he felt for each tread before lowering his weight. "Somewhere around the bottom half of the stairs, someone came to get me," he recalled. "They led me down, pulled my hands down behind my back, bound me with those plastic cuffs very tightly, then pulled me across the living room."

Cheye turned his head and saw Georgia facedown on the kitchen floor. She must be alive, he reasoned, because there was a man holding a gun to her head.

He saw Payton slumped on the living room floor near the threshold to the kitchen. "I knew he was bleeding," Cheye recalled. "I knew he'd been shot. Nothing was processing. I saw Georgia, Payton, blood. No Chase."

Men spun him around and forced him to kneel facing the shattered front door. Behind him, he could hear people ransacking his house. Drawers were yanked out. Cabinets opened and closed. Dazed and sick with terror, he also felt a dawning, helpless grief. All this, for what? Racking his brain for anything they owned worth stealing, all he could think of was Trinity's dual-chamber, rotating garden composter.

As Cheye knelt, bound and half-naked, on his living room floor, "no one spoke to me about why they were here," Cheye recalled. "No one said, 'Prince George's County police' or 'Prince George's County sheriffs.' They never made that kind of announcement, just simply didn't do it."

Out his ruined front door, Cheye could see that people were gathered on his front lawn. Some wore jackets with official-looking insignias as if they could be police officers in street clothes. "That was my first clue that these men might be law enforcement," he would later recall. "My thought was: If this were a home invasion, people wouldn't just be standing out there on the lawn. They'd be hiding."

It wasn't a home invasion. It was a raid by the Prince George's County Police Department and the county Sheriff's Office. Both agencies declined to discuss specifics of the raid for this story.

***

I kept saying: 'This is a very terrible thing. This is just horrible.' The context in which I told them I was the mayor, I said, 'I'm the mayor of Berwyn heights, and I have to get to a community meeting tonight.' " Finally, one of the deputies, the men in black, nodded to the recently delivered big white box on the living room table and barked accusingly, "Do you know what is in this box?"

"A box," Cheye recalled thinking. "This is about the box?"

Someone shifted Cheye, his hands still bound behind him, into a chair. He could see blood pooling from beneath Payton's head. An officer picked up one of the boys' dog beds and used it to cover Payton's corpse. Cheye asked if they'd killed Chase, too, and someone said that they'd called animal control to remove two dead dogs.

"You shot my dogs," Cheye recalled saying over and over. "You shot my dogs. You shot my dogs. You shot my dogs."

At home in St. Mary's, Murphy dialed the cellphone of his second-in-command, now standing on the mayor's front lawn. Murphy's officer handed the phone to a Prince George's narcotics investigator, Det. Sgt. David Martini.

This is how Murphy later recalled their conversation:
"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."
"I later learned," Murphy said in an interview, "that none of that is true."

Martini said he was not free to comment for this article.

All this about the retarded drug war. Disgusting.

 

[BLAZER PROPHET]

I'll say this. The people who burst in like this and shot up the dogs and planned all this need to be held publically accountable. VERY public. VERY accountable.