Cops Break into Wrong House, Arrest Innocent Children, Kill Their Dog — Taxpayers Held Liable

Las Vegas, NV — Kenya and Henry Brian Rodriguez were playing video games and watching TV with their two friends Jordhy Leal and David Madueno when all of the sudden cops rushed into their home, held them all at gunpoint, killed the family dog, and unlawfully arrested them and their father. After going to the wrong home, murdering the family dog, and kidnapping and terrorizing innocent children, the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department still maintains that they did everything by the book.

Now, because of America’s cruel system of ‘justice,’ the officers responsible were never held accountable and it is the taxpayers who are taking responsibility. On Monday, in spite of saying they did everything by the book, the LVMPD Fiscal Affairs Committee approved a settlement to the family for the abuse.

The incident happened on Oct. 24, 2009, and it has taken nearly 8 years for the family to receive even a drop of justice. According to the lawsuit and the arrest records, the children and family had done nothing wrong when police barged in that fateful day.

Around 4:30 in the afternoon, police received a 911 call from a witness who claimed he saw two white males looking into the windows of homes in his neighborhood. The children and the adults in the home were all Hispanic — not white.

Sgt Jay Roberts and officer Michael Dunn of the LVMPD responded first and were then followed by a slew of their colleagues who swarmed the residence of Jesus Sandoval and Adriana Rodriguez — the parents of the children.

READ MORE:  Mother Claims 6-year-old Beaten By Police at School

According to the lawsuit, what happened next was nothing short of negligent terrorism.

Roberts looked through an open bedroom window and saw “three young males” who were “younger than 18 to 20,” and were “about 14, 15.” Roberts conceded that the boys—Henry, then 18, who lived at the house, and his two friends, David, then 15, and Jordhy, then 16—“did not match” two of the three metrics that Schouten had given him: the number of suspects or the age of the suspects.

In spite of realizing that these young boys were not the suspects police were looking for, Roberts and his fellow officers escalated the situation anyway. According to the lawsuit:

Roberts pointed his gun at the head of one of the boys through the bedroom window, and gave the boys conflicting commands, telling them “don’t move,” “[l]et me see your hands,” and “turn the music down.” Roberts told Jordhy to turn down the music, which Jordhy tried to do, and then told him, “I told you don’t move, I could shoot you” or “I’ll f* * *ing shoot you.”

According to the lawsuit, all the children did their best to comply with the crazed officer’s conflicting commands but admitted they may not have heard them all as the music was playing and he yelled so many of them.

As Roberts was holding innocent children at gunpoint, his partner Dunn entered the room through a sliding glass door — also with his gun drawn. Both officers admitted in the lawsuit that their commands could have created confusion.

READ MORE:  Yearbook Photo Prank Lands Teen in Jail with 70 Criminal Charges -- This is School in a Police State

After the situation briefly calmed down, Roberts ordered the children out of the bedroom. At this point, Henry asked police if he could put away the family dog, Hazel — before letting cops into the rest of the home — he was denied.

What happened next is nothing short of terrifying, especially considering these were children, not some hardened criminals. According to the lawsuit:

As the boys exited the bedroom, Hazel slipped in front of Henry and Jordhy, but continued to walk behind David, according to David’s testimony. Dunn shot Hazel in the face, twelve inches from David, and in the direction of Henry and Jordhy. The officers ordered David and Jordhy to the floor, handcuffed them, and brought them outside. Henry was ordered outside, but was not cuffed until later, as he was carrying Hazel, who was bleeding to death. The boys testified that the handcuffing and other treatment by the officers caused them pain.

Not until they had arrested all the children and killed their dog did the officers even ask if the kids had a right to be in the home.

After Henry called his father, Jesus Sandoval, he came rushing home to find his son covered in blood. He was horrified and thought police had shot his son. However, it was Hazel’s blood.

Cops then attacked Sandoval, who’d just had back surgery and was in severe pain, and put him in handcuffs. After they slammed him into the cruiser, Sandoval was detained in the patrol car for 25 to 30 minutes, still “screaming in pain,” before officers responded to his requests for medication, according to the lawsuit.

READ MORE:  Disturbing Body Cam Footage Shows an Alleged Cop Calling a Dog Over and Then Killing It

According to the court records, none of the family members or the boys were cited or charged with any crime, and Dunn testified that the boys committed no crime. The officers eventually “just left.” Dunn admitted that if he or Roberts had asked basic identifying questions, the entire incident would not have happened.

None of the officers involved in the case were held liable for any of the damage they caused. However, the taxpayers will now be robbed of $200,000 — an insultingly low amount for the family — to pay for these incompetent and abusive officers.

Matt Agorist is an honorably discharged veteran of the USMC and former intelligence operator directly tasked by the NSA. This prior experience gives him unique insight into the world of government corruption and the American police state. Agorist has been an independent journalist for over a decade and has been featured on mainstream networks around the world. Agorist is also the Editor at Large at the Free Thought Project. Follow @MattAgorist on Twitter, Steemit, and now on Facebook.

It Begins: ICE Raids Innocent LEGAL Family and Shoots Their Dad

Belmont Cragin, IL — Answers must be demanded over the inexplicable shooting of a wholly innocent man in the Chicago area home he’s owned for decades, as ICE agents — ostensively searching for the man’s adult son — opened fire on the homeowner despite children just months old sleeping nearby.

And no one knows why U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raided the house in the first place — they’re citizens.

ICE claims the family man had a gun. His daughter begs to differ.

“It’s a lie when they say he was holding a gun. He doesn’t even own a gun,” railed Carmen Torres, who was asleep in the basement with her one-year-old daughter and husband when the immigration police blasted through the door. “They shot my dad. They shot him, and I don’t know why.”

Official explanations beyond rudimentary factual accounts of the shooting have not been forthcoming — even as the man who did nothing illegal recovers in the hospital.

In fact, Torres, like the rest of his family — including the son allegedly targeted by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents — are not in the country illegally.

They’re documented American citizens — and have lived in the same location in Chicago’s Belmont Cragin neighborhood for over 30 years.

“They didn’t say anything,” Carmen Torres asserted for the media, adding that, besides her daughter, a 5-month-old and 9-year-old were in the home during the ICE invasion. “They just came in and pointed pistols in our faces and dragged us out. We didn’t even have time to dress or grab milk for the baby.”

But the discrepancies between the nascent official narrative and eyewitness testimony from family and friends in the home at the time of the botched raid only grow stranger from there.

“A spokesman for ICE said that ICE Homeland Security Investigations agents were attempting to arrest a person when a second person pointed a weapon toward the agents and as a result, an agent fired his gun and wounded the man,” local ABC7 summarized.

According to dna.info, 56-year-old Torres “was hit in his left arm and taken to Stroger Hospital, where he was in serious condition, police said. ICE said the wounded man was not the person they came to arrest.”

Whether or not Torres brandished a gun — or if the father even owned a firearm — will now ostensibly be examined in investigations already launched by ICE’s Office of Professional Responsibility, as well as the Chicago Police Department.

However, one factor central to this single, controvertible example of an ICE immigration raid gone violently awry, and portentous of any to follow, is Chicago’s status as a sanctuary city — a designation prohibiting local law enforcement from cooperating with federal authorities to round up those believed to be in the United States without documentation deemed mandatory by the State.

Despite that and other protections sanctuary cities provide immigrant families, ICE maintains authority to conduct sweeps for undocumented people — whether or not the location takes issue with its presence — leaving little recourse, even in the supposedly safest spots in the nation for those scared of being wrongly deported.

To wit, Chicago Police responded to the shooting, but a spokesperson for the department said officers had not participated in the raid.

Infuriated city aldermen — who just voted unanimously to renew Chicago’s safe haven status, despite potential loss of government funding courtesy of the Trump administration — preliminarily condemned the raid as illustrative of law enforcement brutality and ICE’s dangerously expanding authority.

“ICE’s guns blazing raid on a northwest side home filled with sleeping kids is exactly why the City of Chicago should refuse to collaborate with ICE. ICE routinely violates the American people’s constitutional rights,” inveighed Alderman Carlos Ramirez-Rosa in a statement cited by ABC7. “This guns blazing ICE raid deepens my resolve to organize my community so we can keep each other safe from the threat posed by ICE.”

Others proffered similar concerns.

“We’re going to have to talk to CPD to find out if this was a coordinated effort, because if it was in any way, that raises concerns about us as a sanctuary city,” explained Alderman Gilbert Villegas, who represents the 36th Ward, where police terrorized and fired upon this family of innocent Americans. “Is this our future in Chicago with Donald Trump as president?”

While the ICE agent may have been justified shooting Torres if the as-yet debatable detail of his raising a gun first proves true, Villegas expressed qualms about the overall legitimacy of the raid, given incongruent accounts of what occurred.

“The community’s got to be nervous about this, and rightfully so, because you have a right to be in your own home without being intimidated,” Villegas observed. “I’m conflicted because I haven’t got all the details [of the incident] yet, but from the way this has started to play out, it looks like an overstep by an overzealous ICE agent who’s just trying to follow Trump’s orders.”

Officious immigration agents might indeed be the perversely authoritarian outgrowth of President Trump’s disputatious and exhaustive effort to round up anyone lacking appropriate permissions to be in the country.

One skittish ICE agent proved to be a nightmare for Felix Torres — but the entire agency received a law-and-order pat on the back from the new administration.

Last month, as immigration raids gained momentum, the Department of Homeland Security issued two memos seeming to give teeth to contentious mass deportations and the raids preceding them — enjoining ICE agents to, in twisted essence, take back their power.

Of the dual memoranda, Vanity Fair reported,

“D.H.S. outlined a radical shift in U.S. immigration policies, constituting a wholesale rejection of the approach under President Barack Obama. Among other things, the new Trump policy—which the president described as a ‘military operation’—calls for the hire of 10,000 new Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and broadens the definition of ‘removable alien.’ It allows Border Patrol agents to target undocumented immigrants convicted of any criminal offense—no matter how minor. A New York Times report, based on interviews with 17 I.C.E. agents and officials, suggests that this has emboldened and empowered federal immigration agents across the U.S.”

Nationalists subscribing to Trump’s particular brand of, get out of America if you don’t belong here, consistently praise the same immigration raids striking terror into the hearts of citizens, legal residents, and undocumented workers, as necessary to cleanse the nation of an ostensive unproductive, criminal element.

However, everything about the shooting of Felix Torres instead intimates a phenomenal abuse of concentrated power by federal agents working outside the bounds of local authority.

And that Torres’ family are U.S.citizens residing inside the boundaries of a sanctuary city could evince a transformation of Immigration and Customs into America’s first — if semantically unofficial — experiment with a national police force.

Rumored to be in the planning stages for years, a federal police force remains the substance of conjecture and debate; but, for ICE to assume the chimerical powers of local law enforcement and that of a federal agency belies a categorical blurring of lines — the same lines meant to protect individuals and honor differences in governance by state.

Empowering the already powerful ICE agents could prove to be an horrific error in judgment.

READ MORE:  Entire Domestic Flight Detained, Forced to "Show Papers" as ICE Looked for Non-Existent Immigrant

In fact, although ICE refused multiple media requests to clarify why agents descended on the home, or to confirm the subject of the raid on Torres’ home, were refused — but an unnamed and unverified source told ABC7 there are allegedly weapons charges outstanding against the adult son.

That absolutely should not alleviate concerns or excuse the raid and shooting, even marginally. Once again, this is a family of American citizens living in a sanctuary city — as a weapons charge falls indisputably in the jurisdiction of local police.

“Why was, basically, ICE here? What was the reason ICE was here?” queried Rosa Reyes of Communities United — asking the one question most in need of an answer.

“If it has to do with a police matter, it has to be the actual police from Belmont-Cragin taking care of the matter, not ICE.”

No matter where you fall on the spectrum of opinion concerning immigration, the Wall, border patrol, or anything pertaining to Trump’s terrifying attempt to clean house, that arms of the government have ceased effectively communicating with each other — must sound a chorus of alarm bells.

Villegas and other aldermen attempted to gather information from ICE on the non-fatal shooting of Torres, but were either rebuffed or met with stony silence. An announcement from ICE is slated for release later today.

“They’re treating our office like we’re nobody,” Villegas opined, “so that tells me that I have to talk to the congressmen and the senators to get some answers on this issue, but this is very alarming.”

SWAT Team Destroys Innocent Family’s Home Looking for Unarmed Homeless Man

FRESNO, Calif. (CN) – A married couple claim Fresno sheriff’s officers destroyed their house by using it as a training ground for a teargas-wielding SWAT team, 50 vehicles, two helicopters, a K-9 unit and a fire truck — because an unarmed homeless man had been found in their closet.

David and Gretchen Jessen sued Fresno County and the City of Clovis on March 8 in Fresno County Court. They say the unconstitutional assault on their home was “excessive, unreasonable, violent, destructive … intrusive … unnecessary and unreasonable.”

The Jessens, who are farmers, say in their complaint that the sheriff and police used their house as a military battleground “because the Fresno County Sheriff’s Department and/or Clovis Police Department had found, by accident, the perfect location to conduct a training exercise on a rural home, on a dead-end street, in rural Fresno County, where ‘civilians’ were not present, ‘civilians’ were not going to congregate, ‘civilians’ were not going to observe or interfere with the military training assault on the Jessens’ home and the situation posed no risk of injury to the officers.”

In the lengthy complaint, David Jessen says it all started on June 11, 2016, when sheriff’s officers called him and said his house may have been broken into. He called his wife to tell her, then drove home and found four patrol cars in front of the house and officers scattered around the perimeter. One held a bullhorn and was yelling “come out,” and “hands up.”

An officer told Jessen that a homeless man had broken into his house after construction workers had kicked him out of a vacant house nearby. When asked if there were guns inside, Jessen said he had two unloaded shotguns and a loaded .357 magnum, all of them hidden so well that only he could find them.

READ MORE:  Man"s Best Friend Fights Back. Bulldog Attacks and Destroys a Police Cruiser.

The officer told Jessen the man had threatened to shoot anyone who came inside and asked him and his family, who had just arrived, to wait elsewhere. After taking his family to a friend’s house 10 minutes away, Jessen drove back to unload some farm equipment and found law enforcement cars lining the road to his house for a quarter of a mile, plus two ambulances, a fire truck, and two helicopters circling above.

“Bewildered and baffled” at the show of force, Jessen says, he drove away and was passed by a SWAT vehicle and a crisis negotiation motor home heading toward his house.

Several hours later, deputies told him he could go back home. On the way there, Jessen counted at least 55 law enforcement vehicles. After parking and walking to his house, a SWAT officer told him the “operation” was concluded, and a second officer handed him a card and said “‘we have insurance for this.’”

Jessen says he had no idea what the officers meant until he went inside and found his home destroyed. Officers had ripped out the wrought iron doors to their home office and laundry rooms, pulled the office wall off the foundation, teargased six rooms, flash-bombed two of them, shattered a sliding glass door, broken seven windows and destroyed more than 90 feet of fencing with a SWAT vehicle.

“The magnitude of the damage to the Jessens’ home was unreasonable and unjustified, needlessly implemented to capture a single, surrounded, unarmed, hungry homeless person who posed no danger to anyone,” the complaint states.

In fact, the only things the homeless person stole were an ice cream bar, some milk, and half a tomato, according to the complaint. The Jessens say the cops could have arrested the man with a single K-9 team. But due to the excessive use of teargas, they had to gut the home, remove all the carpet and drywall, and can no longer live there. The costs of damages exceed $150,000.

READ MORE:  Father Calls Police for Help with Troubled Son, Body Cam Shows Cops Kill Him Instead

Tony Botti with the Fresno County Sheriff’s Department said the department declined comment.

The Clovis Police Department did not return calls seeking comment Friday.

The Jessens seek compensatory and special damages, court costs and attorney fees.

They are represented by C. Russell Georgeson, with Georgeson and Belardinelli, in Fresno.