Originally posted by Another Patriot in FLA:

[QB]Posted on Wed, Oct. 09, 2002
SWAT team invades elderly widow's home
By Stu Bykofsky
Daily News Columnist

IT'S 10 a.m. on a quiet Sunday morning in Oxford Circle. The coffee's making, the birds are chirping.

An elderly widow is in her bathroom, toweling off after a shower.

A four-member Philadelphia Police Department SWAT team arrives - clutching a search warrant for guns and drugs - and pounds on her Sylvester Street door.

A neighbor hollers to the cops they've got the wrong house. They tell her to shut up and go back inside.

With the pounding unanswered - the 4-foot-8, 85-year-old grandmother doesn't know the sound is coming from her own door - the SWAT team pulls out a battering ram to break down the front door.

It doesn't yield because, for safety's sake, the widow's son had it reinforced some years back.

Undeterred, the SWAT team places an explosive charge on the door just as the widow, Sandy Cohen, is walking down the stairs from the second floor to the living room.

"They blew off her front door with an explosive device and entered in full gear with lasers pointed toward her chest," said her son, Steve Cohen, who lives on the West Coast but rushed home to Philly after the incident.

Sandy Cohen raised her arms defensively and told the armed cops they were in the wrong house, according to her son.

"That's what everyone says," one officer scoffed, according to the 55-year-old Cohen, a journalist who was general manager of WCAU-TV from 1983 to 1990.

His mother, who has heart problems, was standing in the middle of the smoke-filled room, coughing.

After a quick inspection, the cops lowered their weapons and lifted their visors.

"It looks like we got the wrong house," Cohen quotes one of them as saying.

"The SWAT team acted appropriately, once they realized what they did," said Cohen. "We are not anti-cop here."

But a horrible - and almost tragic - mistake was made and Cohen wants some answers. To get them, he hired attorney Gilbert Scutti, who sent letters to city solicitor Nelson Diaz and Police Commissioner Sylvester Johnson on Oct. 1.

Scutti termed the actions of the police "indefensible; it creates a grotesquerie of police work... it is only through the greatest good fortune that the price she paid was not the ultimate one: the same abject ineptitude that drove this cast of incompetents to make violent entry into her home could have resulted in her being fatally wounded."

Scutti intends to file a civil rights and personal injury lawsuit in federal court in 30 days, he said in the letter, to "plumb the depths of the incompetence of all responsible parties." The letter told both Johnson and Diaz that Scutti was available to discuss the incident prior to filing suit.

As of yesterday, Scutti had not been contacted either by police or the city solicitor.

Johnson was out of town yesterday but had Karen Simmons, his senior legal counsel, speak to me.

"The Police Department is currently looking into the matter to see what happened," she said.

Milton Velez, a special assistant to Diaz, told me he was researching the case and "we are trying to address the situation."

While seemingly livid in his letter, Scutti can't be characterized as anti-cop. From 1972 to 1978, he was the chief of the criminal division of the U.S. attorney's office in Philadelphia.

For my part, I would like to hear about the procedures that resulted in the raid on Sandy Cohen's house. The cops had a warrant based on information from an informer, who was either mistaken or lying.

One question that hangs in the air is whether the cops performed any surveillance or investigation before bursting into a widow's home, guns drawn, scaring her nearly half to death.

Something is wrong here in addition to the address on the search warrant.

[URL=http://www.philly.com/mld/dailynews/news/local/4243257.htm]http://www.philly.com/mld/dailynews/news/local/4243257.htm[/URL]

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Quoted:
Isn't this where the LEO supporters step up and claim [i]"we don't know the whole story.  This women was probably involved in something.  They don't just raid the wrong people"[/i].  Or something like that.

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Would't their mothers be proud!

Death to tyrants!

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Do you have a url for this article? tia

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"Wrong house" imply's they went to the wrong address. These last three paragraphs make it clear they went to the house they were sent to, the one listed on the warrant.

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"Wrong house" imply's they went to the wrong address. These last three paragraphs make it clear they went to the house they were sent to, the one listed on the warrant.

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Did ya actually [i]read[/i] the article?  [;)]

Hint - it's at the bottom - [url]www.philly.com/mld/dailynews/news/local/4243257.htm[/url]

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ok then,

What would happen if the persons house(which was the wrong house) shot at these SWAT members at night not knowing it was Law Enforcement? Ofcourse they would prolly not be alive to tell their side. But would they be in the wrong? If they lived could they be prosecuted for murder?

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i wonder if granny ever peeled her wet tires when a leaving a carwash?

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"Wrong house" imply's they went to the wrong address. These last three paragraphs make it clear they went to the house they were sent to, the one listed on the warrant.

I'd settle for being able to hold them criminally and civilly accountable in the courts.

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What would you guys recommend is the best way to "reinforce" my doors??? hehe (seriously)

Nothing illegal about it....

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IT IS ILLEGAL in some states to reinforce the entry points of your home as to impede entry by police or firefighters.

If you still want to be a criminal, there are instructions in "Patriots: Surviving The Coming Collapse".

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if she had had a heart attack from the scare would they have been charged with felony murder?
afterall, it was the wrong house, so technially they were breaking and entering