SWAT flash-bangs toddler in play pen - the "Baby Bou Bou" saga

Bounkham ‘Bou Bou’ Phonesavanh's Family Settle with Cops

Not nearly enough...

The family of a Georgia toddler left mangled after SWAT police tossed a flash-bang grenade into his crib last spring have received a settlement of nearly $1 million.

Bounkham ‘Bou Bou’ Phonesavanh suffered serious burns to his face and had his nipple blown off in the May incident. His family says the medical bills have surpassed $1 million.

While the settlement isn’t enough to cover the continued medical care Bou Bou will require as he gets older, BuzzFeed reports that the family’s settlement does not preclude continued litigation.

The Phonesavanh family came to the settlement with Habersham County, Georgia late last month and announced it this week.

The $964,000 breaks down as follows:

$538,000 to Bou Bou’s parents, Alecia and Bounkham Phonesavanh, for his medical expenses.

$200,000 will be set aside ‘for future periodic payments of damages,’ which will be paid to Bou Bou after he reaches 18.

$137,000 to Bou Bou’s father for his personal injuries.

$62,000 to Bou Bou’s mother for suffering and emotional distress as a result of witnessing the baby’s maiming.

$9,000 to each of Bou Bou’s three siblings, Emma, Malee, and Bounly.

Prior to the boy’s 10th surgery this year, his mother told BuzzFeed surgeons would be trying to ‘scrape away the gunpowder.’

‘His nerve endings are dead around his mouth and chest, so they will not be able to properly develop as they are supposed to, so they will have to go in and do stretching and grafts,’ she said.

The incident occurred while Bou Bou’s mom Alecia Phonesavanh was staying with her husband, their three daughters and their baby son in the living room of her sister-in-law’s home just outside of Atlanta.

...
http://truthvoice.com/2015/04/famil...ed-during-botched-drug-raid-settle-with-cops/
 
No policy changes regarding unnecessary and showy military tactics? So business just goes on as usual then?
 
No policy changes regarding unnecessary and showy military tactics? So business just goes on as usual then?

Bingo. The settlement doesn't preclude continuing litigation but it does limit the assets the family can go after. They may no longer go after the personal assets of the sheriff and his deputies. The county's inssurance plan will protect them. No reason to change policies. The local tax payers will gladly pick up the premium increase in the name of safety.

XNN
 
It's the price they pay to continue their tyranny. :mad: It should be coming out of their salaries and not the public slush fund!!
 
JACKPOT!

and better odds than the lotto!

you could win TODAY!


...and NOW for the "TAXMAN" to take half...
 
We are stolen from to fund these gangsters and when they go a little overboard and maim a child, we are stolen from more to pay for the damages. Sounds rational.
 
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It's the price they pay to continue their tyranny. :mad: It should be coming out of their salaries and not the public slush fund!!
If only. I would love to see a cop quote, "Didn't kill because I feared for my life's savings." But the police union lobby will never let that happen.
 
I sat on a jury where a car accident victim got more than this, disgusting. And free reign for the cops to terrorize again.
 
“Sucks to be you” provision of the “If you’re not a cop, you’re little people” doctrine.

Grigg!



Pity the Poor Stormtroopers: Baby Bou-Bou Ambushed Them

http://freedominourtime.blogspot.com/2015/05/pity-poor-stormtroopers-baby-bou-bou.html



The truth in black and white -- but don't believe it: Sheriff Joey insists that this is the face of a criminal.

Baby%2BBou%2BBou.JPG




It was the baby’s fault that he was nearly burned to death in his own crib.

Bou-Bou Phonesavanh was barely a year and a half old, just learning to walk, and unable to speak, but those limitations didn’t stop him from engaging in “deliberate, criminal conduct” that justified the 2:00 a.m. no-knock SWAT raid in which he was nearly killed.

The act of sleeping in a room about to be breached by a SWAT team constituted “criminal” conduct on the part of the infant. At the very least, the infant was fully liable for the nearly fatal injuries inflicted on him when Habersham County Sheriff’s Deputy Charles Long blindly heaved a flash-bang grenade – a “destructive device,” as described by the ATF, that when detonated burns at 2,000-3,500 degrees Fahrenheit – into the crib.

Merely by being in that room, Bou-Bou had assumed the risk of coming under attack by a SWAT team. By impeding the trajectory of that grenade, rather than fleeing from his crib, Bou-Bou failed to “avoid the consequences” of that attack.

In any case, Bou-Bou, along with his parents and his siblings, are fully and exclusively to blame for the injuries that nearly killed the child and left the family with more than one million dollars in medical bills. The SWAT team that invaded the home in Cornelia, Georgia on the basis of a bogus anonymous tip that a $50 drug transaction had occurred there is legally blameless.

This is the defense presented by Haberham County Sheriff Joey Terrell and his comrades in their reply to a federal lawsuit filed last February on behalf of Bou-Bou Phonesavanh and his family.

A tax-subsidized settlement was reached about a month ago in which the National Fire Insurance Company will pay $964,000 to the family -- a little more than $538,000 for medical expenses, and multiple installments of $200,000 to the infant after he turns 18 in 2033. This arrangement will leave the family facing at least a half-million dollars in current medical expenses, a figure that will be matched or eclipsed by future costs incurred by Bou-Bou's ongoing medical treatment.

In familiar fashion, nobody responsible for this crime will be compelled to make restitution, or be held accountable for the nearly fatal injuries inflicted on the child – and the significant but non-life-threatening injury suffered by his father -- during the 2:00 a.m. home invasion that took place nearly a year ago.

Near every lawsuit begets a “defendant’s reply” disputing all of the factual allegations and legal claims presented by the plaintiffs. Where the defendants are law enforcement officers, the objective is to build a case that the actions of the officers were “reasonable” and in compliance with established “policies and procedures” – and thus protected by “qualified immunity.” From this perspective, the assailants are innocent of all liability even though they did everything wrong – and the victims are fully to blame even though they did nothing wrong. The reply filed on behalf of Sheriff Joey's deranged deputies will serve as a legal clinic for other departments involved in similar Soviet-grade atrocities in the future.

No evidence of any illegal conduct was found at the home as a result of the raid. The front yard and driveway of the residence abounded in evidence that children lived there – evidence so clear and compelling that even a police officer would have recognized it. The search and arrest warrant was issued at about 2:00 in the afternoon on May 27; this offered plenty of time for the vigilant and capable personnel of the Habersham County Sheriff’s Office to conduct surveillance of the targeted residence and even to arrest the suspect in more conventional fashion, assuming that this was necessary and justified.

The subject of the warrant, Wanis Thonetheva, was not at the residence when the stormtroopers arrived. He was arrested on narcotics charges several hours later, in broad daylight and in unremarkable fashion, “at his actual place of residence, without any resistance and without the use of a flashbang stun grenade,” the lawsuit recalls.

At the time that arrest was being made, Bou-Bou’s parents were just absorbing the horror of what had been done to the infant by the assailants who had broken into their temporary home without cause and kidnapped the gravely wounded child.

Bou-Bou’s father -- in agony from a torn rotator cuff that resulted from being assaulted, thrown to the floor, and shackled by one of the invaders -- noticed some blood in the empty crib. The screaming child had been seized by the berserkers and taken away. The frantic parents were not allowed access to the traumatized and bleeding child—“officer safety” uber alles, you know. To cover the abduction, one of the officers on the scene did what comes naturally to highly trained police officers: he hastily improvised a self-serving lie.

“The parents were told by officers on the search team that their son had a tooth dislodged as a result of the search and that the blood that the parents saw in or about the area of the crib was due to the alleged tooth issue,” recounts the lawsuit. The parents “did not know the extent of their son’s injuries (and were not provided truthful information about them by the Defendants) until they were told at the Hospital where their son was taken that he was in a coma.”

Yes, it is possible that one of the infant’s newly-cut teeth had been “dislodged” by the stun grenade. What the people responsible for that act of abhorrent criminal violence did not mention was that the toddler also suffered “severe blast burn injuries to the face and chest; a complex laceration of the nose, upper lip and face, twenty percent of the right upper lip [was] missing; the external nose [was] separated from the underlying bone; and a large avulsion burn into the chest with a resulting left pulmonary contusion and sepsis.”

Sheriff Joey’s underlings told Bou-Bou’s parents that they had knocked out one of the baby’s teeth. They actually blew off his face and gouged a hole in his chest. Exhibit B in the lawsuit is an unbearable hospital photograph of the child in a medically induced coma immediately after the attack. The Defendant’s reply to that piece of evidence is a denial that the photograph “accurately depicts the injuries allegedly sustained” by the infant.

Even if that photograph is a reliable depiction of those injuries, the baby only had himself to blame, according to Sheriff Joey and his band of privileged cretins.

Bounkham “Bou-Bou” Phonesavanh is the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit, with his parents listed as co-plaintiffs. When the defendants claim that the damages caused to the child, “if any,” were “directly and proximately caused by the contributory and comparative negligence of the plaintiffs and their failure to exercise ordinary care,” they are blaming the baby for not foreseeing the possibility that he would be attacked by a SWAT team at 2:00 a.m. and burned alive in his crib.

When the defendants seek to deflect blame by claiming that “the deliberate, criminal conduct of [the] plaintiffs … supersedes any and all negligence or liability, if any, on the part of these defendants,” they are pretending to believe that the 19-month-old child was part of a criminal conspiracy.

In its “eleventh defense,” Sheriff Joey and his Brownshirts let everything fly, invoking the doctrines of “assumption of the risk, failure to avoid consequences, laches, failure to mitigate damages, last clear chance, and sudden emergency.”

Reduced to its putrid essence, this compound defense amounts to a single claim: If you live anywhere within the claimed jurisdiction of a federally subsidized einsatzgruppe like the Mountain Judicial Circuit Narcotics Criminal Investigation and Suppression Team, then you are fair game for an after-midnight military raid, and you have only yourself to blame once it happens.

It doesn’t matter that the raid is the product of a dishonestly obtained search warrant issued on the basis of an anonymous tip from a petty criminal, or that no evidence of illegal activity was ever discovered. If your home is torn apart and your infant is nearly killed, you alone are responsible, and the gallant agents of public order cannot be held liable. This is true even in cases like that of the Phonesavankh family, who sought a temporary home with a relative in Georgia after their house in Wisconsin was claimed by a fire.

This is all covered by the “Sucks to be you” provision of the “If you’re not a cop, you’re little people” doctrine.

Bobbing like feculent flotsam in the puddle of sewage that is the defendants’ “eleventh defense” is the term “laches,” which refers to an impermissible delay by a plaintiff in bringing forward a claim for damages.

This obviously doesn’t apply to the conduct of the Phonesavankh family in this case. They filed a timely notice of tort claim, and then proceeded to file the lawsuit after the Habersham County grand jury refused to hold the Sheriff and his minions accountable – and after the county government broke its promise to pay for Bou-Bou’s medical treatment.

The origins and usage of that obscure and archaic legal term do offer some insight about the way Bou-Bou’s would-be murderers see themselves, and their victim.

“Laches” is a term embodying the ancient legal maxim that “Equity favors the vigilant, and not those who have slumbered on their rights.” Defendants who appeal to this oft-cited and little-applied concept are accusing plaintiffs of subjecting them to a form of “legal ambush.”

What Sheriff Joey and his cornpone chekists are claiming, in effect, is that while he was sleeping, Baby Bou-Bou ambushed them.
 
Thank goodness there's that entire picket line of Cops outraged by the injuries of Baby Bou Bou who are speaking against Sheriff Joey.....


Oh wait.
 
Cops Who Flash Banged Infant’s Crib Are Blaming the Baby

Cops Who Flash Banged Infant’s Crib Are Blaming the Baby

Nearly a year has passed since a Habersham County SWAT team stormed into the Phonesavanh residence, and very nearly killed their 19 month old child

160514cops2.jpg


by Joshua Krause | The Daily Sheeple | May 21, 2015

Nearly a year has passed since a Habersham County SWAT team stormed into the Phonesavanh residence, and very nearly killed their 19 month old child. The no-knock raid was prompted by an anonymous tip which suggested there were drugs in the house. As the officers forced their way into the home, they lobbed a flash grenade which wound up landing in the crib where baby “bou-bou” was sleeping. As it erupted, the infant suffered severe burns and had to be taken to the hospital, and placed in a medically induced coma.

To any sane person, the sheriff’s department would be responsible for the damage inflicted on this child. Not only were there no drugs in the house, but the suspect they were looking for was found elsewhere. And despite their claims that they had the house under surveillance for two days prior to the raid, somehow they had no idea that there were children who lived there.

Still, the family had to fight the county tooth and nail to have their $1 million in medical bills reimbursed. Last month they settled with the county, and received $964,000, half of which will be given to them now, and the rest will be given to baby after he turns 18. While it’s great to hear that the family is getting something out of this, it’s shocking to see how defiant the sheriff’s department was, right to the very end. They never once admitted culpability for their gross negligence, and in a bizarre twist, their defense statement in court basically blamed the infant for his own injuries.

William Norman Grigg from the Pro Libertate blog read through the lengthy document, and sifted through the legalese for our benefit. It’s almost unbelievable how far the sheriff’s department was willing to go to avoid paying the family whose child they burned alive.

The act of sleeping in a room about to be breached by a SWAT team constituted “criminal” conduct on the part of the infant. At the very least, the infant was fully liable for the nearly fatal injuries inflicted on him when Habersham County Sheriff’s Deputy Charles Long blindly heaved a flash-bang grenade – a “destructive device,” as described by the ATF, that when detonated burns at 2,000-3,500 degrees Fahrenheit – into the crib.

Merely by being in that room, Bou-Bou had assumed the risk of coming under attack by a SWAT team. By impeding the trajectory of that grenade, rather than fleeing from his crib, Bou-Bou failed to “avoid the consequences” of that attack.

In any case, Bou-Bou, along with his parents and his siblings, are fully and exclusively to blame for the injuries that nearly killed the child and left the family with more than one million dollars in medical bills. The SWAT team that invaded the home in Cornelia, Georgia on the basis of a bogus anonymous tip that a $50 drug transaction had occurred there is legally blameless.

This is the defense presented by Haberham County Sheriff Joey Terrell and his comrades in their reply to a federal lawsuit filed last February on behalf of Bou-Bou Phonesavanh and his family.

Continued...
 
Pity the Poor Stormtroopers: Baby Bou-Bou Ambushed Them

written by william norman grigg


It was the baby’s fault that he was nearly burned to death in his own crib.

Bou-Bou Phonesavanh was barely a year and a half old, just learning to walk, and unable to speak, but those limitations didn’t stop him from engaging in “deliberate, criminal conduct” that justified the 2:00 a.m. no-knock SWAT raid in which he was nearly killed.

The act of sleeping in a room about to be breached by a SWAT team constituted “criminal” conduct on the part of the infant. At the very least, the infant was fully liable for the nearly fatal injuries inflicted on him when Habersham County Sheriff’s Deputy Charles Long blindly heaved a flash-bang grenade – a “destructive device,” as described by the ATF, that when detonated burns at 2,000-3,500 degrees Fahrenheit – into the crib.

Merely by being in that room, Bou-Bou had assumed the risk of coming under attack by a SWAT team. By impeding the trajectory of that grenade, rather than fleeing from his crib, Bou-Bou failed to “avoid the consequences” of that attack.

In any case, Bou-Bou, along with his parents and his siblings, are fully and exclusively to blame for the injuries that nearly killed the child and left the family with more than one million dollars in medical bills. The SWAT team that invaded the home in Cornelia, Georgia on the basis of a bogus anonymous tip that a $50 drug transaction had occurred there is legally blameless.

This is the defense presented by Haberham County Sheriff Joey Terrell and his comrades in their reply to a federal lawsuit filed last February on behalf of Bou-Bou Phonesavanh and his family. A tax-subsidized settlement was reached about a month ago in which the National Fire Insurance Company will pay $964,000 to the family — a little more than $538,000 for medical expenses, and multiple installments of $200,000 to the infant after he turns 18 in 2033. This arrangement will leave the family facing at least a half-million dollars in current medical expenses, a figure that will be matched or eclipsed by future costs incurred by Bou-Bou’s ongoing medical treatment. In familiar fashion, nobody responsible for this crime will be compelled to make restitution, or be held accountable for the nearly fatal injuries inflicted on the child – and the significant but non-life-threatening injury suffered by his father — during the 2:00 a.m. home invasion that took place nearly a year ago.

...
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2015/05/william-norman-grigg/pity-the-poor-stormtroopers/
 
It takes much to leave me speechless, but...

...the subhuman filth named Joey Terrell, has blamed an infant for having gotten his face mangled by a flash-bang grenade.

Other than hunt him like a rabid dog, I can say nothing more because words fail me.



Habersham County Sheriff, Joey Terrell, has allegedly given the most asinine defense about why a SWAT team blew a babies face off. The defense was allegedly used in a federal lawsuit on behalf of an infant hit with a grenade by SWAT during a botched raid in May of last year.
As previously covered, Bounkham “Baby Bou Bou” Phonesavanh, 19-months-old, was asleep in his crib. At 3:00 am militarized police barged into his family’s home because an informant had purchased $50 worth of meth from someone who once lived there. During the raid, a flash-bang grenade was thrown into the sleeping baby’s crib, exploding in his face.
Beyond the disfiguring wounds on the toddler’s face, the grenade also left a gash in his chest. As a result, Bou lost the ability to breathe on his own and was left in a medically induced coma for days after the incident. Bou was not able to go home from the hospital until July.
No officers were charged for their near-deadly negligence, and the department claimed that they did not know that there were children in the home. They defended their reckless actions by saying that they couldn’t have done a thorough investigation prior to the raid because it “would have risked revealing that the officers were watching the house.”
The family filed a federal lawsuit for damages that ended last month in a settlement (paid for by taxpayers) not only totaling less than the amount of the infant’s medical bills, but split up between family members. Furthermore, the conditions of the settlement included restrictions on further litigation pursued by the family in order to ensure that taxpayers, not the individuals who almost killed an infant, will be responsible for any further payout.
This is just the tip of the iceberg.
Author William Norman Grigg poured over the defense presented in this case by the Sheriff’s Office, and his findings are unbelievable. No officials in their right mind would blame an infant for getting hit with a grenade during a botched raid, right? Wrong, according to Grigg.
The act of sleeping in a room about to be breached by a SWAT team constituted “criminal” conduct on the part of the infant. At the very least, the infant was fully liable for the nearly fatal injuries inflicted on him when Habersham County Sheriff’s Deputy Charles Long blindly heaved a flash-bang grenade – a “destructive device,” as described by the ATF, that when detonated burns at 2,000-3,500 degrees Fahrenheit – into the crib.
Merely by being in that room, Bou-Bou had assumed the risk of coming under attack by a SWAT team. By impeding the trajectory of that grenade, rather than fleeing from his crib, Bou-Bou failed to “avoid the consequences” of that attack.
In any case, Bou-Bou, along with his parents and his siblings, are fully and exclusively to blame for the injuries that nearly killed the child and left the family with more than one million dollars in medical bills. The SWAT team that invaded the home in Cornelia, Georgia on the basis of a bogus anonymous tip that a $50 drug transaction had occurred there is legally blameless.
According to this researcher, the poor family had to listen to those responsible for the mutilation of their child accuse their infant of bringing it upon himself. Apparently it doesn’t matter that the authorities didn’t do a proper investigation, or that they blindly threw explosives into someone’s home “by mistake,” it was the baby’s fault.
In his report, Grigg explains how Baby Bou is the chief plaintiff, and notes the claims made in the Tenth Defense (see page 35) that the injuries and damages “were caused by the deliberate, criminal conduct of plaintiffs.” As the department has failed to specifically denote the parents as the plaintiffs, the defense mounted on behalf of Sheriff Joey and his minions focused squarely on the lead plaintiff, the infant who was nearly murdered in his sleep.
The Free Thought Project reached out to the department in hopes of getting in touch with Habersham County Sheriff’s Office regarding this unbelievable defense. We’re not holding our breath.
Below is a copy of this mind-blowingly asinine response to the original lawsuit.

Read more at http://thefreethoughtproject.com/infant-responsible-grenade-thrown-face/#A0dYWzVd4zE8HQLs.99
 
So, they couldn't investigate to see if the person they were after was still living there, because if they did then the people in the house would know they were coming. Yet an eighteen month old baby should have known they were coming, and gotten out of the way.

Makes sense. Makes sense in a totalitarian tyranny where cops can run over mundanes while chasing a speeder, then charge the speeder (who managed not to hit those same mundanes) with murdering those same mundanes. No, actually, it still doesn't make sense. Even if you think sending swarms of incompetents out to catch someone competent for flaunting his competence in the face of their incompetence makes logical sense, this still makes no sense.

So, essentially moving into a house once occupied by a drug dealer is now a crime. Yet it is no crime for a landlord not to tell prospective tenants who used to live in the residence he's trying to rent out. And ignorance of this unwritten "law" is no excuse--even if you're not potty trained yet.

Just damn.
 

A former Georgia deputy sheriff was indicted Wednesday on federal charges for her role in setting up a "no-knock" drug raid that severely injured a toddler when a flash grenade detonated in his playpen.

Former Habersham County Deputy Nikki Autry, 29, was indicted by a federal grand jury on charges of providing false information in a search warrant affidavit, Acting U.S. Attorney John Horn said. Autry also is charged with providing false information to obtain an arrest warrant.

During the raid on the northeast Georgia home in May 2014, a flash grenade detonated in 19-month-old Bounkham "Bou Bou" Phonesavanh's playpen, blowing his chest and face open and burning him.

:eek: Never expected to see anything come from this.
 
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