Issues of concern to people who live in the west: property rights, water rights, endangered species, livestock grazing, energy production, wilderness and western agriculture. Plus a few items on western history, western literature and the sport of rodeo... Frank DuBois served as the NM Secretary of Agriculture from 1988 to 2003. DuBois is a former legislative assistant to a U.S. Senator, a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Interior, and is the founder of the DuBois Rodeo Scholarship.
Sunday, October 14, 2012
Grenade burns sleeping girl as SWAT team raids Billings home
A 12-year-old girl suffered burns to one side of her body when a
flash grenade went off next to her as a police SWAT team raided a West
End home Tuesday morning. "She has first- and second-degree burns down the left side of her
body and on her arms," said the girl's mother, Jackie Fasching. "She's
got severe pain. Every time I think about it, it brings tears to my
eyes." Medical staff at the scene tended to the girl afterward and then her
mother drove her to the hospital, where she was treated and released
later that day. A photo of the girl provided by Fasching to The Gazette shows red and black burns on her side. Police Chief Rich St. John said the 6 a.m. raid at 2128 Custer Ave.,
was to execute a search warrant as part of an ongoing narcotics
investigation by the City-County Special Investigations Unit. The grenade is commonly called a "flash-bang" and is used to
disorient people with a bright flash, a loud bang and a concussive
blast. It went off on the floor where the girl was sleeping. She was in
her sister's bedroom near the window the grenade came through, Fasching
said. A SWAT member attached it to a boomstick, a metal pole that detonates
the grenade, and stuck it through the bedroom window. St. John said the
grenade normally stays on the boomstick so it goes off in a controlled
manner at a higher level. However, the officer didn't realize that there was a delay on the
grenade when he tried to detonate it. He dropped it to move onto a new
device, St. John said. The grenade fell to the floor and went off near
the girl.On Thursday, Fasching took her daughter back to the hospital to have her wounds treated. She questioned why police would take such actions with children in the home and why it needed a SWAT team. "A simple knock on the door and I would've let them in," she said.
"They said their intel told them there was a meth lab at our house. If
they would've checked, they would've known there's not." She and her two daughters and her husband were home at the time of
the raid. She said her husband, who suffers from congenital heart
disease and liver failure, told officers he would open the front door as
the raid began and was opening it as they knocked it down. When the grenade went off in the room, it left a large bowl-shaped
dent in the wall and "blew the nails out of the drywall," Fasching said...more
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