This one’s not quite as cut-and-dry as some of the others. The 18-year-old man was wanted for the theft of two Sony Playstation 3s, which he apparently stole by smacking a fellow student over the head with a pipe.

But the unfortunate result of the raid — the kid’s death — does show how easily and quickly a forced-entry raid can go wrong. The late suspect was unarmed. It seems at this point that the deputy mistook a video game controller for a weapon. And of course, we get the obligatory shooting of a dog — in this case, a German Shepard. That’s the dog’s blood on the stoop in the photo.

So now you have a dead kid, and a sheriff’s deputy with a dark cloud hanging over him. Instead of kicking down doors, wouldn’t have been easier to just wait until this kid was coming or leaving his house?

The reader who sent me this says the local DA is excellent, and will conduct a fair investigation. That’s good to hear.

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 3rd, 2006 at 10:46 am by Radley Balko and is filed under Police Militarization. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.