Via Radley, comes two incidents where the police (again) raid the wrong houses. I’ll focus on this one:

It was 28 seconds past 7:45 p.m. on Aug.18 when the 911 dispatcher took the call from Sascha Wagner. “There’s someone breaking into the house,” she yelled at the 911 operator, giving the address of the home she shares with David Scheper on the 800 block of West Lombard Street. “Send police now!”

Moments before, Scheper had opened the door to two strangers who then tried to force their way in. Scheper, who is 6-foot-6 and 240 pounds, slammed and locked the door on the would-be intruders, but he was in a panic as they smashed the glass in the 100-year-old door. He grabbed his 12-gauge shotgun and “was racking the slide over and over,” he recalls.

“I didn’t have any ammo for it, I’m racking the shotgun, telling them to get out. I’m not sure they’re in yet.” He ran to his basement in search of a usable weapon to defend himself and his girlfriend. “I was scared for her safety more than mine,” Scheper says.

Without ammo, a gun is a paperweight. More:

In the basement, Scheper grabbed a CZ-52 semiautomatic. “I have this piece-of-junk Czechoslovakian pistol,” he says. “I put a magazine in it, racked the slide back. I was trying to check to see if there was a round in the chamber and I couldn’t rack the slide . . . so I was fighting it. The gun was jammed, and I was trying to get it operable. It accidentally went off into the floor of my basement.”

And with that, police say, Scheper committed the crime for which he was charged in Baltimore City Circuit Court: Discharge of a Firearm in Baltimore City. He faced up to a year in prison and a $1,000 fine.

Prosecutors dropped Scheper’s case Dec. 2.

So, when the police screw up, you’ve committed a crime. Still more:

The intruders? They got in. They took $1,440 in cash Scheper says he withdrew from his bank account in order to buy a used pickup truck. They hit a 70-year-old art-deco-style metal desk with an ax. They took 18 of Scheper’s guns—mostly inoperable antiques, he says—and some gun-shaped props he had built for movies. “They threatened to blow up my safe,” Scheper says, so he opened it for them. They face no criminal charges.

The intruders were William T. Bristol and Antwyne R. Jones, Baltimore Police Department detectives with the Organized Crime Division.

The police were looking for someone who had been evicted from the residence three weeks earlier.

Posted in uncategorized on December 23rd, 2005 by SayUncle | RSS 2.0 |