America’s Troubled House

Cheye Calvo tried to tell the armed men who were holding him and his mother-in-law hostage, who had just assassinated the family's pets, that he was the mayor. They called him crazy and left him handcuffed in the living room for nearly two hours. "They" were police officers who never bothered to inform the local Berwyn Heights police of their planned operation. Tracking a drug ring, Prince George's County Police intercepted a package addressed to Calvo's wife, Trinity Tomsic, a finance officer for the state of Maryland. That package, that Mayor Calvo unwittingly brought into his home, was full of marijuana, part of an elaborate scheme that used the addresses of unsuspecting victims to help deliver the goods. Several days after the raid, authorities arrested several men, including a FedEx delivery man. And County Police Chief Melvin C. High finally admitted that "Ms. Tomsic and the Calvo family were innocent victims of drug traffickers."

For Trinity Tomsic, who arrived home in the middle of the raid, the episode is a nightmare from which she will probably never completely awaken. "They were my kids," she later said of her pets. "All I could see was the blood and tissue of my dogs" surrounding her handcuffed husband and mother.

While Chief High later expressed regret for the incident, he stopped short of offering an apology. And Sheriff Michael A. Jackson, whose department executed the raid, defended his department's actions.

It's not the first time something like this has happened in Prince George's County. In November, another family was targeted for what was later deemed a mistake. Their dog was shot to death in their front yard. When Calvo called for a U.S. Justice Department investigation last week, he noted "reports of similar misconduct, including service of warrants at the wrong address, excessive use of no-knock entries and other unjustified killings of family pets. This has happened before, and without oversight, it will happen again." Calvo acknowledged that because of his position as mayor, his case has been getting the kind of exposure that the average citizen could never hope for. "What saddens us most is that all too often, these injustices go unnoticed by law-enforcement officials and those who are victimized are forced to suffer in silence," he said.

The incidents aren't isolated to Maryland. A few years ago, a 57-year-old woman in New York's Harlem died of a heart attack after police detonated a flash grenade during a raid on her home. Another case of mistaken identity.

While rare, these cases say something about our culture. A country is not just defined by big sweeping events like wars and treaties and elections. It's defined by what goes on in neighborhoods, towns, homes. In the past eight years, we have seen our privacy invaded in the name of "homeland security." We have all been living in a climate of "shoot (or accuse) first, ask questions later." And that attitude is contagious.