The Mayor and His Dogs

One of my favorite lines from the Eddie Murphy comedy "Coming to America" is delivered not by stars Eddie Murphy or Arsenio Hall, but by "that guy" actor Frankie Faison who plays the role of a slum landlord in the 1988 comedy classic.

It's the scene where Murphy and Hall have just arrived in Queens, NY and are looking to rent basically the shittiest apartment they can find. Faison doesn't disappoint and shows them a run down efficiency that still has chalk outlines on the floor where the previous tenants were murdered. Murphy and Hall see the outlines of two humans and a dog and look to Faison for some sort of explanation, to which Faison only offers, "It's a damn shame what they did to that dog..."

Even though I've seen the movie at least a dozen times I still laugh out loud every time I see that part. In fact, it's been in my vocabulary ever since I first saw the movie so many years ago.

Right now you're probably wondering "okay fine, it was funny, but what's your point?"

My point is that, right now in the DC/MD area, we are experiencing an actual "It's a damn shame what they did to that dog" moment that's being played out in our newspapers and local news as I type this... and I feel the need to share...

Our story begins in a little town in the Maryland suburbs called Berwyn Heights. Its the kind of town you might drive through and not even realize you were there. It's population is only roughly 3,000 people who reside there because of it's convenient location to several quick routes into DC.

I've lived in this area my entire life and I'm only marginally aware of its existence... Before this story I knew basically where it was, but I still had to look it up on the map just to make sure. It's nestled right next to College Park, the home of the University of Maryland... a place I'm obviously quite familiar with, but like I said, I still had to check it out the map.

The mayor of the town is named Cheye Calvo, but being the mayor of Berwyn Heights is only a part time gig. His real job is working for the SEED Foundation, which is a nonprofit group that runs urban public boarding schools. Here's a picture of Cheye and his wife Trinity standing on their porch in Berwyn Heights:

I don't personally know Cheye, or Trinity for that matter, but they look like decent people. They look like the kind of people that if say, the county police knocked on their door to ask them a few questions, they would probably cooperate.

But Prince George's County Police apparently felt otherwise... When they were alerted last week that a package being shipped to the Calvo home had been identified by a police dog as containing marijuana, they decided not to knock on the Calvo door and ask questions, no, instead they decided that the prudent thing to do was obtain a search warrant and call in the SWAT team!

I'll let the Washington Post describe what transpired from there:

Calvo said he came home early from work [last] Tuesday. While walking the dogs he noticed several black sport-utility vehicles and a woman parked in a car down the street.

"I figured someone was having a party," he recalled.

It was the police. They were watching, waiting for someone to bring the package into the house.

As Calvo returned to the house, he said, he spotted the large package that his mother-in-law had told a deliveryman to leave on the porch. He placed it on a buffet table near the front door and went upstairs to change.

"I brought it inside because I figured it was something we'd gotten for the garden," he said.

Moments later, just after he had undressed, Calvo said, he heard his mother-in-law scream that someone was coming toward the house. He looked out his bedroom window and saw officers in SWAT gear running across the lawn.

"I heard a loud crash and then 'bang, bang, bang,' " he said, recalling the sounds of the police shooting his dogs. [emphasis added by me]

"I hit the floor."

As the police came in, Calvo said, they shot his 7-year-old black Labrador retriever, Payton, near the front door and then his 4-year-old dog, Chase, also a black Lab, as the dog ran into a back room. Walking through his house yesterday, Calvo pointed out a bullet hole in the drywall where the younger dog had been shot.

"I understand they have a job to do, but it didn't have to go like that," Calvo said. He said the police could have knocked on his door and asked him about the package. "I've never done drugs in my life. Anyone who knows me knows that I am so adamantly opposed to them."

Police said yesterday that, when they seized the package during the raid, it was unopened.

But perhaps the most horrifying part of the story, worse than the actual act of shooting the dogs IMHO was this:

Calvo described a chaotic scene, in which he -- wearing only underwear and socks -- and his mother-in-law were handcuffed and interrogated for hours. They were surrounded by the dogs' carcasses and pools of the dogs' blood, Calvo said.

You shot his dog and then you interrogated him FOR HOURS in his UNDERWEAR right in front of the dead dogs!
In response to this, the police spokesperson (who claimed the heavily armoured SWAT team felt threatened by the black labs) had this to say:

"We're not in the habit of going to homes and shooting peoples' dogs. If we were, there would be a lot more dead dogs around the county."

Are you serious? That's your REAL response to killing the Mayor's dogs? How the fuck are you the official spokesperson with answers like that?

Oh but the story gets worse from there... As it turns out, the Prince George's County Police forgot to notify the Berwyn Heights police department that they were sending a SWAT team to the mayor's house!

Now call me crazy, but I have to think that if I'm the Berwyn Heights Police Chief, I'd kinda like to be told about something like that before it happens... In fact Berwyn Heights Police Chief Patrick Murphy was pretty peeved about the whole situation... According to him, town police could have conducted the search without a SWAT team.

"You can't tell me the chief of police of a municipality wouldn't have been able to knock on the door of the mayor of that municipality, gain his confidence and enter the residence... It would not have been a necessity to shoot and kill this man's dogs."

But wait there's more!

You know that search warrant the PG County Police obtained to conduct the search?

Well... they kinda... sorta... forgot to provide a copy of it to the Mayor... Now that's a little tricky because a detective at the scene actually signed a sworn statement that he did give the Mayor a copy... but in fact, he didn't actually follow through on that until days after the dogs were shot... Oops...

And oh yeah, they never actually knocked on the door either... They just kicked it open and came in shooting... Of course, immediately following the incident the Police spokesperson assured the press that the warrant they obtained was a special "no knock" warrant that is sometimes issued in cases where police are afraid that the suspect may destroy evidence... but the truth is... that was a lie... they didn't actually have a "no knock warrant"... Oops again!

Oh and one last thing... apparently... the Mayor, his wife, his mother in law, and his dogs were actually umm... innocent... gulp...

As it turns out, what actually happened was that two delivery men had a scheme to smuggle marijuana by shipping packages to unsuspecting recipients and then intercepting them before the homeowners were even aware of the packages... and that's what happened to the Mayor and his wife in this situation.

Police arrested the real criminals last night and actually spent this entire week chasing down similar suspicious packages that in total come out to 417 pounds of weed... No word on whether or not any more dogs were shot in the process of the investigation.

And of course now that the culprits are behind bars and the investigation has concluded, PG County Police were glad to clear the Mayor's name and apologize... right?

No actually! Here is what they had to say in the Post this morning:

Police Chief Melvin C. High would not rule out that Calvo and Tomsic had some involvement in the delivery. Asked whether police had cleared them, he said: "From all the indications at the moment, they had an unlikely involvement, but we don't want to draw that definite conclusion at the moment." He later said, "Most likely, they were innocent victims."

Neither he nor Sheriff Michael A. Jackson apologized for the raid, which they said was conducted responsibly, given what deputies and officers knew at the time.

What? Not even a "my bad" ?

The Chief went on to spew more stupidity:

"In some quarters, this has been viewed as a flawed police operation and an attack on the mayor, which it is not," High said. "This was about an address, this was about a name on a package . . . and, in fact, our people did not know that this was the home of the mayor and his family until after the fact."

So wait a second... you obtain a warrant, get a SWAT team ready, and set up a plan to raid the house of suspected high volume drug trafficker, and you never even figured out that the "suspect" was the fucking MAYOR of the town! They don't have Google on the PG County Police Computers?

I can't wait to see how this case plays out... I'm sure there will be a massive lawsuit soon to be followed by an out of court settlement... and the Mayor and his wife will deserve every penny they get... but of course they'll never get their dogs back. I guess the only thing left to say is:

"It's a damn shame what they did to that dog..."