Home Destroyed & Dog Killed in Baltimore Police Raid


"They shot through the door in front of screaming children that were begging them to let the dog out and she was cowering in there,” said homeowner Corina Amato, “They shot through the door and she ran upstairs in the bedroom, and they went up there and pumped AK47 shots into her in my bedroom."

"This is the bullet hole where they shot my dog," said Amato’s boyfriend, Rick Johnson, as he pointed to a splintered hole in the bedroom’s wood floor, "There was a pile of guts and blood right up underneath the bed."

Police destroyed the front door, and now the couple must nail up pieces of plywood to secure their home... or what’s left of it.

The living room is unlivable, the bedroom furniture---splintered and the office has been turned upside down, not to mention tearing holes in the walls, shattering the porcelain bathroom and ripping apart the music room.

The search turned up plenty of herbs Amato had growing in her sunroom, but not the one a confidential informant suggested they would find---marijuana.

"I would have thought this would have come from the drug dealers in the neighborhood,” said Amato, “cause we call the police quite a lot."

Baltimore City Police are refusing to comment on the raid except to say they had probable cause for it or a judge never would have signed off on a search warrant.

But when it turns into a search and destroy mission, Rick Johnson says they’ve gone too far.

"If they were looking for something... fine. If they found it... fine, but this didn't take place in two minutes. This was over the course of a couple of hours that they were in here and tearing up my house.

The couple wasn’t home at the time of the raid, and according to the search warrant, police turned up a weight scale and some plastic baggies, but no drugs.

No one has been charged, and the department has neither apologized nor offered any restitution for killing their dog or trashing their home.


Copyright 2009 The E.W. Scripps Co. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

Baltimore City Police are refusing to comment on the raid except to say they had probable cause for it or a judge never would have signed off on a search warrant.

That some person informed police about some drugs (point A) and that was enough for them to decide to to seek a warrant (point B), without any investigation between A and B, and then figure the best way to execute it was a no-knock raid, shows how eager they were just to raid. Raid whoever. We really dig raiding. SWAT actions are expensive.When this shit happens regularly it can't be called a mistake, and no one here seems to think that. But, why is it that the media never says boo about the judges signing these warrants? If I didn't know better, I'd think that they weren't giving the utmost scrutiny to every warrant asked of them...

Any criminal justice professionals here want to speak to that? Is it pretty much business as usual for a judge to sign a warrant rooted solely in hearsay from an unknown informant? If so, is it at least frowned upon?

Nope. Right here in Hennepin, we have judges whose sole reason for wearing robes (no figurative as they don't bother) is to rubber stamp these dealios. That is right, they don't hear cases, you can't meet with them, they sit in a cubby somewhere and stamp stuff that comes across their desk

Baltimore City Police are refusing to comment on the raid except to say they had probable cause for it or a judge never would have signed off on a search warrant.