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posted by takyon on Monday December 28 2015, @04:02AM   Printer-friendly
from the we'll-teach-you-to-be-vacant! dept.

TechDirt reports:

The Cherokee County [Kansas] Sheriff's Department engaged in a fruitless 19-hour standoff with a vacant residence. On the 20th hour, the fugitive house was finally taken down.

[...] The write-up at The Free Thought Project contains a decent summation of the ridiculous ordeal, but the real fun comes in reading the play-by-play at the Joplin Globe, which captures the shifting narrative provided by the Sheriff's Department.

It begins on December 15th, with the site declaring "Joplin man in standoff with law enforcement in Galena".[1] Granted, this was several hours before it was discovered that a more accurate headline would have been "Joplin house in standoff with law enforcement."

[...] [The cops] used a thermal imaging camera and thought they detected someone hiding in the attic. So, the standoff began, with the sheriff confidently stating they'd be able to wait out the fugitive member of the local gang concern, "Joplin Honkies", thanks to the department's bench depth.

[...] Five hours later, Sheriff Groves admitted[1] that the man the occupants of the house had already stated wasn't in the house was, in fact, not in the house.

Cherokee County Sheriff David Groves said local, state and federal law enforcement officers late into the day on Tuesday had believed that Doug Alexius, 40, of Joplin, was inside the home and armed, although no shots had been fired.

Groves said a search that ended at 5:30 p.m. concluded that Alexius was not in the home.

Left unmentioned was the damage done to the house in search of the fugitive who wasn't there. Law enforcement officers fired flash bangs into the home and used an armored vehicle-mounted ram to punch holes in the attic. The officers also tore apart the inside of the home in their futile search.

[1] Yet another website that puts styling in their HTML (black text on a black background) then doesn't check that with a text-only browser.


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  • (Score: 2) by sjames on Monday December 28 2015, @06:04PM

    by sjames (2882) on Monday December 28 2015, @06:04PM (#281756) Journal

    Those are potential explanations, but still not excuses for their actions. I'm pretty sure that is I did even a fraction of what they did to a random person's house in response to a verbal altercation, they wouldn't hesitate to haul me off to jail.

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  • (Score: 2) by VLM on Monday December 28 2015, @08:33PM

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Monday December 28 2015, @08:33PM (#281822)

    Agreed but the point is its not just random intimidation of random civilians by random cops, but focused intimidation of a family somehow connected to a white prison gang. In some ways that comforting, in some ways its worse... Definitely there's more to the story than is being reported.

    Could have been a set up, of course. Pay me your protection money or the next dude to get busted with contraband will report to the cops that your old lady mailed the contraband to him, and the cops will make her life a living hell by destroying her house, etc. Or witness intimidation, etc.

    • (Score: 2) by sjames on Tuesday December 29 2015, @08:08AM

      by sjames (2882) on Tuesday December 29 2015, @08:08AM (#281999) Journal

      I see what you're getting at. But I see no evidence that the mother or her kids were involved in any gang. I see nothing to suggest that anything about the mother or her kids made the police especially likely to believe their suspect was hiding there. That is, I see nothing to suggest that this isn't something that could happen to practically anyone at random.

      This would be far from the first time a police department utterly destroyed someone's home based on nothing more than an unreliable tip and then disavowed all responsibility.