Mayor Questions Legality of Home Raid
Last update: August 10, 2008
BERWYN HEIGHTS, Md. ― The mayor of a small Prince George's County community is questioning whether a police raid on his home was even legal in the first place.
It all happened at the mayor's house. Now he's demanding a federal civil rights investigation into what he calls an unauthorized raid, and he believes it may be part of a systemic problem in the county.
The mayor of Berwyn Heights is fighting back after being handcuffed, tied up and interrogated by Prince George's County Police who shot and killed his two beloved labrador retrievers during a raid on his home last week.
"This is not an isolated incident," Calvo said at Thursday's news conference. "There's a lot of information that needs to come out. The exercise of force should be the last thing to be used."
He said it's too early to talk about monetary damages.
The raid stemmed from a 32-pound package of marijuana investigators were tracking that was delivered to Mayor Calvo's front door and addressed to his wife Trinity Tomsic, who's a finance officer with the state working in Baltimore.
"If the police shot your dogs dead and did this to you, how can I trust them? And I don't want people to feel like that," said Tomsic.
"This has happened before, and without oversight, it will happen again," said Mayor Calvo. "If that is the standard of justice that Prince George's County Police Department and the Sheriff's Department want to operate, I think we have a fundamental problem. They're not allowed to rewrite the Constitution of the United States."
Now county police say the package had nothing to do with the mayor. They say it was part of a larger drug scheme, and they've made two arrests, collecting six large packages containing $3.6 million worth of marijuana. That's 417 pounds of pot, but they still believe the raid was justified.
"There was a search warrant involved in that situation that authorized those activities," said Chief Melvin High, Prince George's Co. Police.
Mayor Calvo is demanding a federal civil rights investigation into the no-knock raid, a raid he says a judge never authorized.
"We were astonished that not only did they not apologize, but they refused to clear our names," said Mayor Calvo.
He has the support of several lawmakers who are calling for action.
"When I heard about this, all I could think of was, my goodness, this could have happened to anybody," said Sen. Jennie Forehand.
The two labs, Chase and Payton are gone forever, but Mayor Calvo hopes they didn't die in vain.
"They bound me, put me on the floor, kneeling in the corner. My mother-in-law was bound. And I saw my older black lab, lying there dead," Calvo said.
Hundreds of messages of support were left on a banner outside the mayor's home.
Calvo has been mayor of Berwyn Heights since 2004, and has been actively involved in anti-drug programs.
Police Chief High says Calvo and his family were "most likely ... innocent victims," of a drug smuggling scheme in which packages were shipped to unknowing recipients and intercepted. Authorities have said they killed the dogs because they felt threatened.
