SWAT team throws concussion grenade into baby playpen during no-knock raid

(Source: WSBTV)
CORNELIA, GA — A SWAT crashed through a family’s door in the middle of the night and threw a concussion grenade into a baby’s playpen.   A 19-month-old baby was horribly disfigured when it exploded in his face. 
Alecia Phonesavanh and her family were staying at a friend’s house after their home had been lost in a fire.   The makeshift living arrangements left their 19-month-old baby boy sleeping in a playpen in a shared room.  Things were going OK until the local government decided to send paramilitary home invaders to unleash indiscriminate violence upon the home and anyone inside.

(Source: WSBTV)

The raid took place just before 3:00 a.m. on May 28th.  Without warning, members of the Habersham County Special Response Team burst into the home.

“Everyone’s sleeping. There’s a loud bang and a bright light,” said the baby’s mother to WSBTV.  “The cops threw that grenade in the door without looking first and it landed right in the playpen and exploded on his pillow right in his face.”
The sleeping baby received the blast of the concussion grenade directly in the chest and face.  He received serious, disfiguring burns and is now in a coma.  The blast scorched a 2-foot hole in the playpen.

“He’s in the burn unit. We go up to see him and his whole face is ripped open. He has a big cut on his chest,” Phonesavanh said to WSBTV. “He’s only 19 months old. He didn’t do anything.”
The armed berserkers were raiding the home on a suspicion that someone inside had used substances without government permission.  To make sure that all the wannabe-warriors go home safe at night, they attack their prey in the middle of the night and use incendiary devices to “distract” (and sometimes maim) the occupants.

Habersham County Sheriff Joey Terrell says this is exactly how he wants his raiders to perform, and has no qualms about performing identical raids on residents in his county in the future.
(Perhaps Terrell should have a concussion grenade land in HIS bed and see how he fairs!)
“The door that we entered was the door that we bought dope out of – that’s why entered at that door,” Terrell said. “Our team went by the book. Given the same scenario, we’ll do the same thing again. I stand behind what our team did.”

“We keep asking ourselves, ‘how did this happen?’,” Terrell callously continued. “No one can answer that – you can’t answer that. You try and do everything right. Bad things can happen. That’s just the world we live in. Bad things happen to good people.”

The casualties of the War on Drugs are not as unavoidable as Sheriff Terrell wants people to believe.  Had the government not violently intervened, the toddler would be OK.  The prohibition against plants and substances poses a far greater threat to Americans than allowing them to have the freedom to purchase and ingest things without government oversight.  So long as state-sanctioned violence is used to prevent people from getting high, so too will the needless bloodshed of innocents.

But don’t expect Prohibition Part II to end while drug warriors like Sheriff Terrell are in charge.  He went on to say that he believes drug crime tantamount to terrorism.

“The person I blame in this whole thing is the person selling the drugs,”  the sheriff continued.  “They don’t care about what it does to families.  It’s domestic terrorism and I think we should treat them as such.“

“We hate that this happened,” Terrell said. “This tears our soul out, but we cannot stop standing up and being the thin blue line against those who don’t care about, who want to do the domestic terrorism and sell dope and make the money. We’re still going to stand between them and still do our job – we’ve got to.”