Another Police Raid; More Dead Dogs

Just north of D.C., in the small suburb of Berwyn Heights, a county SWAT team raided a house last week after a shipping service delivered a large quantity of illegal drugs to the front door.

Good police work in the war on drugs? Probably not.

The house is home to Berwyn Heights mayor Cheye Calvo and his wife Trinity Tomsic, and their two black Labs (pictured left). Though the package containing more than 30 lbs. of marijuana was addressed to Tomsic, the couple may have had nothing to do with the drugs. In recent months there have been incidents in which large quantities of drugs were shipped to homes in the D.C. area, where they were then supposed to be intercepted by drug dealers — all without the package addressees’ knowledge or involvement. Calvo and Tomsic may have been caught up in just such a scheme.

Click here for the full article.

I am absolutely disgusted by the response of this SWAT team.  Shooting those two dogs was completely uncalled for and was an act of cruelty - in fact, I consider it to be a form of terrorism. The dogs were completely and inherently innocent bystanders, and were probably thought of as family members by Cheye Calvo and Trinity Tomsic, and were shot in cold-blood and left to bleed to death.

I refuse to believe that the SWAT team honestly believed that those obviously domesticated pets were endangering them. Labrador retrievers are not known as vicious dogs, and even if the dogs were barking, growling, nipping, or otherwise threatening the officers, they could have been dealt with in non-lethal ways.

The above article links to another article (“The Drug War Goes to the Dogs”) which lists a number of police raids that involve the brutal death or injury of a dog.

There is simply no excuse for this. This form of police brutality should not ever, ever be tolerated.

-MJ Schindler, aka Kitty Mowmow

Tagged as: Animal Cruelty, Animals, Berwyn Heights, Cheye Calvo, Dogs, Drugs, Labrador Retrievers, Law Enforcement, Marijuana, Pets, Police, SWAT Team, Trinity Tomsic, Washington DC